The character Stewart portrays in "Night Passage" is the kind Mann intensely dislikes... A railroad worker entrusted with a payroll finds that the bandits, trying to rob it, are led by his own brother, so he assumes the blame for it himself...
With a soft cast including Brandon de Wilde and Herbert Anderson, Stewart felt himself very much in command... Maybe because he had enough of getting thrown under horses hooves, being shot in the hand, and dragged through fire... So he allowed himself to play the accordion, and to sing two Dimitri Tiomkin-Ned Washington songs: "Follow the River," and "You Can't Get Far Without a Railroad."
Dan Duryea gets the role of a railroad raider whose gang includes Stewart's wayward brother Audie Murphy... Gentle Brandon de Wilde is a teenager in whom Stewart takes a filial interest, and there is a climactic shoot-out with Duryea and his force of men...
The differences between Mann's Western concepts and Stewart's are on dramatic display in the film... The screenplay is written much more to Stewart's style, revealing a more kind humane quality... While Neilson is no action director, he does moderately well, providing standard excitement with the gunfights and chase scenes... But the movie lacks the severe sadism that Mann would have injected it...
With a soft cast including Brandon de Wilde and Herbert Anderson, Stewart felt himself very much in command... Maybe because he had enough of getting thrown under horses hooves, being shot in the hand, and dragged through fire... So he allowed himself to play the accordion, and to sing two Dimitri Tiomkin-Ned Washington songs: "Follow the River," and "You Can't Get Far Without a Railroad."
Dan Duryea gets the role of a railroad raider whose gang includes Stewart's wayward brother Audie Murphy... Gentle Brandon de Wilde is a teenager in whom Stewart takes a filial interest, and there is a climactic shoot-out with Duryea and his force of men...
The differences between Mann's Western concepts and Stewart's are on dramatic display in the film... The screenplay is written much more to Stewart's style, revealing a more kind humane quality... While Neilson is no action director, he does moderately well, providing standard excitement with the gunfights and chase scenes... But the movie lacks the severe sadism that Mann would have injected it...