A Lawless Street
by Joseph H. Lewis
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Angela Lansbury, Jean Parker, Randolph Scott, Wallace Ford, Warner AndersonDirector: Joseph H. Lewis
Brand: Sony
Producer: Randolph Scott
Cinematographer: Ray Rennahan
Editor: Gene Havlick
Producer: Harry Joe Brown
Writer: Brad Ward
Writer: Kenneth Gamet
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Original Language); French (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Japanese (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 78 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-09-06
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Pictures
Movie Reviews of A Lawless Street
Movie Review: A poor script sinks this Randolph Scott western. Even Angela Lansbury can't do much with the lines she's given
Summary: 2 Stars
"This town is like a wild animal in chains, Molly," says Marshal Calem Ware to his landlady while she fries his bacon and eggs for breakfast. "It doesn't fight back right away. It just lies there and snarls, waiting for a chance to pounce on you."
"Be careful, Calem," is Molly's helpful advice.
A Lawless Street is the story of Calem Ware (Randolph Scott) and his determination to bring law and order to Medicine Bend. Unknown to Ware, there is a faction in town determined to run things wide open. Money -- big money -- is involved. This means Ware has to be taken care of. A hired killer with a draw as fast as Calem's might be the answer. Complicating matters for Ware is the arrival of Tally Dickerson (Angela Lansbury), a music hall singer engaged to play with her troupe at the town's new opera house. Nine years ago the two were man and wife, then Tally left him. They're still married. "I didn't know what it was like for a man to make his living with his gun," Tally tells Calem when they meet again, "walking the streets a living target. I died a little more each day and I died more at night." Even Lansbury can't do much with lines like that.
The movie is packed with such poor writing that we don't believe a minute of it. The script is full of characters who tell each who they are and what motivates them, instead of demonstrating this. At frequent intervals an out-of-breath minor character rushes up to Calem to announce another crisis is at hand. Thank goodness we have Scott's steadfastness to believe in and the smiling sleaziness of John Emery, playing one of the bad guys, to enjoy. The writing is so poor it makes even a fine actress like Angela Lansbury sound like someone from a daytime soap opera. We have Lansbury singing and dancing once, but I'd swear her singing was dubbed, a strange decision.
Although I thought the movie might be interesting with the odd duo of a 57-year-old Randolph Scott with the 30-year-old Angela Lansbury, the pairing seemed uncomfortable and unlikely. The film's modest pleasures come from a handful of long-time character actors, such as Wallace Ford, who died a memorable death in a steam room in Blood on the Sun, Ruth Donnelly, always good in many movies as the often irascible but good-hearted motherly type, and, of course, Emery. I always admired the way he tried to put the moves on Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound.
The color DVD looks all right. There are no extras. The movie only lasts 78 minutes.
Summary of A Lawless Street
Randolph Scott stars as Marshal Coleen Wave, a lawman who moves from town to town in the Colorado Territory, ridding each of its outlaws. His dedication to his gob causes his wife, played by Angela Lansbury (TV's "Murder She Wrote"), to leave him. She will not come back to him until he has hung up his guns for good. But he is determined to clean up one last town, run by bandits, who don't want to see the territory become a state.It would be nice to say that hiring Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy, The Big Combo) to direct A Lawless Street led to its becoming a classic Randolph Scott Western. Can't do it. At this point in his career, Randy was cutting corners as star-producer, scoping out his next oil well, and not worrying that a blind grandma could see he was being doubled in the fight scenes. Scott plays a town marshal who's had enough of "taming the beast," just when greedy men are conspiring to destroy him. One of them (Warner Anderson) is also a rival for Scott's onetime music-hall flame (Angela Lansbury). Director Lewis is stuck in a back-lot Western town with a juiceless cast (apart from Jeanette Nolan's frontier widow and Michael Pate's gloved assassin), but his rigorous eye keeps framing scenes as if they had some classical urgency. Every once in a while, through the fierce purity of his style, they do. --Richard T. Jameson
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