Rawhide

A competent Western, not improved by a redundant voice-over and a corny score, very similar in plot to the later The Desperate Hours (actually, it's based on a 1935 gangster movie, Show Them No Mercy). Power is a young Easterner, sent by his father to learn the Overland Mail business, who finds himself fighting for survival - along with a woman (Hayward) and her dead sister's little daughter - when four escaped convicts, led by the well-bred but ruthless Marlowe, take over his way station to wait for the stage carrying a shipment of gold. The action follows pretty predictable lines, but Marlowe's three henchmen are nicely characterised and played: Tobias, bovine and stolidly obedient; Jagger, grizzled and amiable, forever muttering crazily into his beard; Elam, leering, lecherously sadistic, gleefully potting off shots at the child (he misses, of course). By contrast, the three leads tend to declaim Dudley Nichols' stiff dialogue as though it were holy writ.