overview
A stranger in town becomes the target of a lynch mob in Allan Dwan's feverish Western noir, made at the height of the nation's "Red Scare" witch hunts and now acclaimed as one of the most concise anti-McCarthy parables ever made by Hollywood. About to marry the lovely Rose (Lizabeth Scott) on the 4th of July, straight-ahead Dan Ballard (John Payne) finds his nuptials interrupted by "marshal" Ned McCarty (a sneering Dan Duryea) who claims he’s wanted for murder. Innuendo and suspicion soon turn the townsfolk from caring neighbors to a braying mob and it is up to Rose and one of Dan's ex-lovers to keep our hero from the gallows. Famed noir cinematographer John Alton shrinks the West's expansive plains into a claustrophobic nightmare of disorienting camera angles and harsh high-contrast lighting, the better to match the film's rapidly escalating sense of utter paranoia. With SILVER LODE, Dwan turns the American frontier into an American prison, with a madman named "McCarty" ready to destroy anyone who stands against him. - Jason Sanders