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Terror in a Texas Town | 
 enlarge | Director: Joseph H. Lewis
Actors: Sterling Hayden, Sebastian Cabot, Carol Kelly, Eugene Martin, Nedrick Young
Studio: United Artists
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy New: $3.78
You Save: $11.20 (75%)
New (47) Used (13) from $3.78
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 69816
Format: Anamorphic, Black White, Closed-captioned, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Dubbed)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 81 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: MGMD1004534D
ISBN: 0792855663
UPC: 027616885852
EAN: 9780792855668
ASIN: B00008PX7G
Theatrical Release Date: September 1958
Release Date: May 20, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Factory Sealed, Thousands of Titles Listed, Fast Processing
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Product Description
A swedish whaler is out for revenge when he finds out that a greedy oil man murdered his father for their land. Studio: Tcfhe/mgm Release Date: 05/13/2008 Starring: Sterling Hayden Carol Kelly Run time: 81 minutes Rating: Nr Director: Joseph H Lewis
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Old School Western with a Twist January 27, 2008
John Mozuke (Parts Unknown, WV United States)
This was a classic old school western but it had a very smart story and a differnt kind of twist to the characters. What drew me to the movie was that one of my all time favorites, Sterling Hayden, was in it. Then I read that the heavy was literally the heavy Mr. French himself Sebastian Cabot. Then I read that even though it was a western Hayden played a Swedish sea captain. It is almost a noir western. Cabots top henchman is not just one dimensional either. br / br /Check out this odd but good movie. I recommend it.
 Some sort of masterpiece December 10, 2007
Mr. T. J. Denman (London, UK)
Is this the first spaghetti western? Not literally, of course. The film was made in the USA, with an American cast and director. But this rococo masterpiece, a triumph of quirkiness over a hackneyed story, looks forward in many ways to the excesses and mannerisms of Leone and Corbucci. We have the bizarre weaponry: a whaling harpoon is flourished in the final showdown. There is the cartoon like bad man, self-consciously acting out a role that the code of the west demands he plays. We have the unusual music: instead of the lush, sub-symphonic orchestral scoring that dominates so many westerns, there is a jaunty, expressive folk theme that could have come from Morricone on a off-day. Hayden's strange 'Swedish' accent (actually more like the chef from the Muppet show) makes it sometimes seem like the film has been badly dubbed in true spaghetti fashion. And the streets of the town (Prairie City, Texas) are as empty and alienating as the border towns where Eastwood's 'man with no name' struts his stuff in the 1960s. A scene between a fat cat businessman and the hired gun is almost identical to one in Once Upon a Time in the West. The film also has, like many Italian westerns, a clear, although understated in this case, political edge. br / br /Lewis was a fascinating director. An expert at turning out silk purse films from pig's ear budgets, he directed two of the greatest film noirs (Gun Crazy and The Big Combo), and a handful of westerns that always stand at a crazy angle to the genre (notably, The Halliday Brand). This was his last film before he turned to TV directing. I don't blame him. Even Lewis must have been shocked at what he got away with in this film. br / br /The story is simple. George (Hayden, looking ever so slightly bemused at his part) is a Swedish sailor who comes to America to look for Sven, his farmer father. But Sven's dead, shot by hired gun Johnny Crale (Ned Young). Young's been paid by corpulent, corrupt businessman Ed McNeil (Sebastian Cabot doing a marvellous Sydney Greenstreet meets Orson Welles impersonation) who wants to force out stubborn homesteaders because he knows their land sits on oil. Sven's neighbour, Mexican Jose Mirada (Victor Millan), witnesses Sven's murder, and also knows why McNeil wants the land. So Young, after a little racial abuse of course, shoots Millan as well. And in front of Millan's young son. br / br /Young is the thinking man's psychopath. With the face of a dyspeptic accountant, and a slight beer paunch, he's a vision in black from head to foot throughout the film. He never even takes off his black gloves. This is perhaps wise, because the right glove disguises a steel prosthetic hand that replaces one he's lost in a tragic work-related accident. He's just as accurate with his left hand, but not quite so fast. Not that this matters, because he doesn't fight fair. He shoots unarmed rivals or, in the case of Hayden's father, old men armed only with the family harpoon. Young doesn't seem to get the job satisfaction he should, and clearly senses that his time is coming to an end. Confronted by a victim (Millan) who doesn't beg for mercy and who is not afraid to die, Young has an existential crisis worthy of a character from a Camus novel and looks ever more haunted. His relationship with faithful moll Carol Kelly begins to suffer, especially when she tells him that she only stays with him so that she can look up and see someone lower than herself. You sense marriage counselling won't work here, and Young does what any self-respecting psycho would do to assuage his feelings of inadequacy: he murders Cabot. He then hits main street, looking, you suspect, for death to end it all. It does so in the shape of Hayden advancing on him clutching a harpoon like a demented Captain Ahab. He skewers Young expertly, but refrains, sadly, from screaming 'Moby Dick!' at the same time. The townspeople look on incredulously, as well they might. br / br /Is the film a bizarre political allegory? The scriptwriter, for many years listed as Ben L. Perry, was later revealed as Dalton Trumbo, who fell foul of the McCarthyite witch hunt in a big way in the 1950s, and couldn't work under his own name for many years. The film is clearly on the side of the immigrants, racial minorities and ordinary people who are confronting the evils of nascent capitalism in the frontier west. Hayden wasn't blacklisted, but went before the committee and owned up to his communist affiliations, and, to his later regret, named names. Lewis was a close friend of Young, who was blacklisted. It was Young, also a writer, who asked Lewis to direct the film. Victor Millan appears in Force of Evil, directed by blacklisted director Abraham Polonsky. However, perhaps we shouldn't take our Marxian analysis of this unique offering too far, or we'll end up in lecturing in Film Studies. br / br /Rennahan was a legendary cinematographer, and the film's crisp black and white photography just adds to the edgy strangeness of the film. The visual style of the film is fascinating. Lewis often goes for a one-shot approach with long takes and with the camera coming in at odd angles, and he eschews standard reaction shots and smooth editing. It would be easy to 'blame the budget' for this. But Lewis was always a visually inventive director (the one-shot robbery scene in Gun Crazy is renowned). Characters are sometimes filmed with their backs to the camera even when talking. At other times the camera moves in jerky movements (one scene sees Hayden move steadily along a bar with the camera accompanying him in three short bursts). In the scenes set in the town's hotel, where Cabot holds forth, Lewis creates some intriguing depth staging. br / br /For all its eccentricities, the film holds you to the end, and it generates a complex mixture of excitement and bafflement. It's a genuine B movie masterpiece. It toys with the western genre, satirises it, exploits it and softens it up for the radical refashioning of the 1960s. A cult movie if there is one. br /
 One Star September 2, 2006
Marilyn Jones (Mason, Texas)
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
My friend Judy gets to review this movie for me because I suggested she watch it and this is a condition of forgiveness: br / br /Since I have to give this one star, let the star be a collapsing black dwarf. br / br /Sterling Hayden gives the worst performance in any actor's life. He might as well be a talking roast beef. My friend said "lutefisk?" but his Swedish accent does not bear up under the comparison. br / br /It isn't just the movie that's bad--the score (guitar, trumpet, ?, etc.?) was obviously written by an escapee from the Insane Musicians' Mexican Rest Home. br / br /Nuff said. br / br /P.S. I have a friend who says "blame it on the director." OK. Blame it on the director.
They all came here to see blood June 4, 2005
Steven Hellerstedt
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Dressed in a squared-off bowler, a wool jacket that doesn't cover his wrists, a stubby tie and sporting a painfully off-key Swedish accent, Sterling Hayden is an unlikely western hero. That ten-foot steel tipped harpoon he carries around doesn't help to buff the image much, either. Then again TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN is an unlikely western. Scripted by blacklisted Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo (Ben Perry received credit), it's ostensibly about a land robber (Sebastian Cabot as Ed McNeil) using means fair and foul (Ned Young as hired-gun Johnny Crale) to buy out the homesteaders in the small community of Prairie City, Texas. It's also about standing united against injustice, and not letting fear conquer integrity. br / Hayden's George Hansen comes to the Prairie City after twenty years at sea to reunite with his father and help him on the farm the elder Hansen built in his absence. It was a farm coveted by McNeil as well, and hired goon Crale saw to the "Or else" part when McNeil's offer to buy it from the elder Hansen was rebuffed. The cowed community is too intimidated by McNeil to stand up to him, strength in unity or not. It's up to the foreign outsider to discover who murdered his father - the McNeil owned sheriff isn't going to tell, and the otherwise good folks don't want to get involved. br / I'm not usually a great fan of the message westerns of the fifties. However noble it was to fight McCarthyism, it doesn't usually make for an interesting story - too many cowardly and townspeople for my tastes, too self-righteous a tone. Half the time I find myself rooting for the bad guy. TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN is all that, to be sure, but the acting is generally strong, the musical score is interesting, and the pace doesn't relax too much. If the movie has to preach at me, at least this one offers an interestingly illustrated sermon. br / If Hayden is a little stony and robotic in the lead, Cabot is wonderfully malicious as the velvet gloved big money bad guy and the relatively unknown Ned Young (looks a little like Humphrey Bogart) is beautifully understated as the steel-fisted thug. The movie also contains one of the oddest curtain closing shootout in western movie history. Strong recommendation for this little gem. br /
 Camp? Yaaa, you betche'. June 1, 2003
Ghenghis (Monvolia)
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
These are the kind of movies you discover in your quest to own every western ever made. Man oh man, where to begin?pOk, hang on...I have to stop giggling first. I dont think I've ever seen the Shrimp and Lobster Platter being served up in a saloon before but I suppose that's supposed to be a metaphor for something. Sebastian Cabot makes for a decent fancyman villain but it's hard to look classy when you're scarfing down the seafood feast. And he's got a black threaded gunman that is doing a pretty good Dr.No imitation complete with a steel right hand and long black leather toxic chemical disposal gloves. Somebody discovered oil, you see, so Sebastian has got Dr.No running around killing everybody and stealing their land. Makes sense right? Probably weren't enough U-Haul trailers to go around back then so most people just opted for a bullet.pThe master plan was cranking right along until Dr.No went to visit this old Swedish guy that confronted Dr.No with a harpoon. You can see where this is headed. I guess this must have reminded Dr.No how he lost his hand to a big mouth bass or something cause he got real mad and pumped about 14 rounds into the old fella while he was laying face down in the dirt. We never learned how proficient he may have been in his younger days looking for Moby Dicks and stuff. Enter funeral durge.pSterling Heyden finally gets to town wearing a suit that is about 2 sizes too small so he has to keep pulling his vest down over his belt. Another metaphor....Hmmmnn? The accent is hilarious and would be like Bela Lugosi playing an Apache or something. Anyway, he wants some details but the sheriff tells him it's all a mystery and he can't go to his father's ranch onacounta all that yellow tape and the Patriot Act and all. This makes Sterling pretty angry, especially when he calls room service and finds out the saloon is out of shrimp so Fred Ziffel brings him the harpoon and he goes looking for Dr. No who he figures him out of a decent meal. pOnly Gregory Peck's "Shoot Out" can compare for pure silliness. 2 stars for the movie, 5 for the unintentional humor.
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