Cinema: The New Pictures, Feb. 16, 1959

The Hanging Tree (Baroda; Warner), another "psychological western," is based on the rather odd premise that the American West was won on the consulting couches of Vienna.

The hero (Gary Cooper) is a sort of frontier Freud who can discharge a complex almost as fast as he can trigger a six gun. He sets up as a sawbones in a gold-mining camp, and pretty soon a pretty Swiss girl (Maria Schell), survivor of a stagecoach stickup, is brought in for treatment. He has no trouble healing her body—she is suffering from exposure, concussion, sun blindness. So then he sets out to heal...

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