Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

James Stewart is Will Lockhart, the man from Laramie, in this 1955 Western,  He arrives in a town called Coronado with supplies he is delivering, and so  as to avoid returning home empty-handed he and his men are loading salt from some salt flats when they are interrupted by a local hothead and a load of cowhands.   The hothead, Dave, summarily has Lockhart's wagons burned and his mules shot dead. So OK this is now going to be a film about how Lockhart gets revenge, right?  Well, not exactly.   It is indeed a film about revenge but not in the way it first appears.  The real reason why Lockhart has come to Coronado is to find the person who sold rifles to the local Apaches, because those rifles were used to massacre a cavalry troupe, including Lockhart's brother. This does rather beg the question of why Lockhart needed to come to the town with supplies, and then seemed to be planning to go straight back to Laramie, but best not to worry, the plot i...

What an entertaining but odd Western this is, directed by the German  émigr é Fritz Lang, and starring Marlene Dietrich. The eponymous ranch is named Chuck-a-Luck, which was the original title of the film until the studio boss Howard Hughes objected - one of his better decisions.  Apparently Chuck-a-Luck is a real thing, a game using dice and a form of roulette wheel.  With the help of Frenchie (Mel Ferrer), Altar Crane (Dietrich) wins enough money at the game to set up the ranch as a refuge for outlaws, who in return give her 10% of their ill-gotten gains. Into this happy setup comes Vern (played by Arthur Kennedy) seeking revenge on the guy, Kinch, who raped and murdered his fiancée at the beginning of the film, the only problem being he doesn't know what his quarry looks like, or indeed anything about him.  Things rapidly escalate what with Vern romancing Altar in order to extract information (who responds enough to make Frenchie jealous), a bank robbery, and Kin...