The Wild West is an unlikely location for staging for a remake of the Jack London novel "The Sea-Wolf", about a shipwrecked writer rescued by a Nietzschean sea captain. This time the writer is a cowboy (Dane Clark, star of several undistinguished B noirs) and his frightening and compelling "rescuer" is the gold mine owner Boss Kruger (Raymond Massey) who forces the injured cowboy to join his crew of enslaved lost men, while enthralling him with philosophical inquiries as to the true nature of power. Massey (who had worked with director Peter Godfrey before in Hotel Berlin (1945), as a Nazi adrift in the final hours of the Third Reich) was regarded in his era as the definitive stage and screen interpretation of Abraham Lincoln. Here, his crooked mouth and prodigious height animate an entirely different kind of character, one whose monstrous, seductive magnetism overshadows the rest of the film. The original story's location change from surf to turf didn't impress critics, but modern eyes can enjoy Massey's performance as one of the more compelling villians in this unusual Western.

By Violet LeVoit