Cinema: Firecreek

Grade B westerns have to look to their clichês, grade A’s to their archetypes. Firecreek has archetype trouble. In an anomaly of casting, Henry Fonda—strained, sensitive and introverted as ever beneath a bad-guy black hat and a stubble beard—is called upon to play the leader of a menacing band of desperadoes. This troubled outlaw seems to be in need of a shrink more than a sheriff.

Fleeing from some unnamed shoot-’em-up. five badmen ride into the tiny frontier town of Firecreek, where they settle down while Fonda recuperates from a bullet wound in his side. The sheriff turns out to be earnest, mild-mannered James Stewart—a simple sodbuster who carries no gun and wears a badge emblazoned SHERAF that his kids made for him. Fonda has the wound.in his side, and later his wounded psyche, nursed by a local spinster (Inger Stevens), while his boys raise hell with an itinerant preacher (Ed Begley), smash up a saloon, and try to gang-rape the town half-breed (Barbara Luna). This results in one of them being killed by the town half-wit (J. Robert Porter).

While Sheraf Stewart is off tending to his wife, who seems to be in the throes of a breech delivery, the Fonda gang revenge themselves by hanging the half-wit from a rafter. Gentle James the lawman then takes them all on, High Noon style, in the now classic sneak-shoot through the silent town while frightened eyes peer from behind shuttered windows.

Not terribly original, but not bad of its kind. Still, Firecreek would have unquestionably been a better movie if that nice Mr. Fonda hadn’t got in with the wrong crowd.