A Time for Killing

Protracted mess that's nearly saved by the high action quota. Confederate POWs escape a Union camp and make for the Mexico border chased by Union troops. This in spite of the fact that the war has just been declared over... Directed by Phil Karlson with Roger Corman on hand for uncredited duties, this stands up as an odd, interesting, but messy Western. The production problems involved do show, for we get a pic that more or less consists of similar scenes strung together as a whole. The pursued can be found squabbling and bickering, in fighting and macho posturing, while the pursuers do the same. No opportunity is wasted for some violence on tap, lots of gunplay, bloodletting and noise, while sexual aggression rears its ugly head. Sadly it just comes off as trying to keep the pic interesting, to stop the viewers from falling asleep as the narrative fails to offer anything of substance. Oh it's trying, the futility of war and its corruption of the soul are bubbling away, but it never bears out, buried under the urgency for an action scene and awful over acting (Max Baer Junior is appalling). In its favour is the cast list, which contains Glenn Ford, George Hamilton, Inger Stevens, Timothy Carey, Kenneth Tobey, Harry Stanton, Harrison "Indiana Jones" Ford and Todd "Jason Of The Argonauts" Armstrong - amongst others. It's a strange roll call befitting the strangeness of the piece, compounded by Mundell Lowe's awfully intrusive musical score - on the evidence of this it's not hard to understand why he had such a short and mundane career as a composer. The Utah and Arizona locations however are a treat, so props to Kenneth Peach, his work deserves a better picture. A Time for Killing (AKA: The Long Ride Home), more a curio piece than a genre pic to avidly seek out. 4/10

After what can only be described as one of the most ludicrous firing squad scenarios I've ever seen, the irritated confederate prisoners under the command of "Bentley" (George Hamilton) decide that they are going to avenge themselves on their blue-shirted counterparts and so they duly kill some guards, trash the fort with the cannon and skedaddle. "Maj. Walcott" (Glenn Ford) is duly dispatched to apprehend them and what ensues now is quite possibly the worst main-stream western I have ever seen. Ford just doesn't look like he cared and no amount of facial hair is going to lend enough gravitas to the perpetually underwhelming Hamilton as the story heads down the same wagon trail as quite literally thousands of it's civil war cinematic forebears. The production is almost as bad as the script, which is back of an envelope stuff - and the contribution from Inger Stevens as the kidnapped, wronged and vengeful "Emily" (the fiancée of "Walcott") is just bizarre. Keep an eye out for a young-ish Harrison Ford if you can be bothered sitting through this, and you may also spot Todd Armstrong - having fallen quite a way since "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963) but it's a long and unfulfilling old slog riddled with banal dialogue to an ending that I could have done with about seventy minutes earlier.

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John Chard

CinemaSerf