Warlock (1959 film)

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Warlock is a 1959 film, released by Twentieth Century Fox, shot in color and CinemaScope. It is a Western adapted from the novel by Oakley Hall (screenplay written by Robert Alan Aurthur). It is not often mentioned as a classic of the genre, perhaps because the dark psychological moorings in the plot uncomfortably recall the witch-hunt hysteria of the Cold War era that had left a bitter imprint on Hollywood. Another reason for its neglect may well be the fact that its director, Edward Dmytryk, one of the original 'Hollywood Ten' (he had served time in prison and gone into exile in Europe), was regarded as a heavily compromised figure ever since he had named names to HUAC. Despite such misgivings, Warlock remains Dmytryk's masterpiece and one of the great Westerns.

Richard Widmark heads a starry cast that included Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn (in the supporting cast were Dorothy Malone, Dolores Michaels, Tom Drake, DeForest Kelley, Wallace Ford, Whit Bissell, Regis Toomey, and Frank Gorshin). Widmark plays a reformed thug who has done his share of causing havoc in the town of Warlock, while Fonda and Quinn respectively play a gunman and his club-footed business associate (no slouch with a gun himself) who are hired by the good people of Warlock to restore law and order. Widmark then becomes the town's sheriff, representing its new conscience and regrowth, setting himself against Fonda and Quinn, who try to control the town. Meanwhile, the relationship between Fonda and Quinn (described in the Aurum Film Encyclopedia of The Western as 'perhaps the most open depiction of homosexual love in the classic Western') is strained beyond repair when Fonda falls in love with a respectable townswoman (Dolores Michaels), and another woman (Dorothy Malone) turns up in the town to exact revenge on Quinn.

The film is almost forgotten today, but it has had some high-powered admirers, being one of the films 'quoted' by Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West.