Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

I got this film from the Dark Crimes 50-pack collection: It is not what I would call a "Dark Crime" film... this is a western. If this film is a "dark crime" then so are all other westerns.The film is just okay. Nothing special to see here. It's told in flashback from our oil man cowboy to the priest. It's about a guy that runs an oil field, someone took some money that they were suppose to pay the workers with and one man is blamed for doing it. So our oil man who dubs as a cowboy goes after the guy, shoots the guy to quickly and the guy slowly bleeds to death internally. Next our oil cowboy sees a woman, falls for her the moment he sees her, finds out it's the dead man's wife and he goes after her. She is running a ranch and runs an ad in the paper for help since her husband is dead - and she hires the oil man cowboy to help her. Long story short, they marry - then he is on the run again for the murder of her dead husband, blah blah blah, more stuff happens and he ends up with a priest and the law after him and ends up a in a shoot out at the priest's place.Really not a all that bad of a film but it's not all that great either.3/10

Disappointing western-tinged noir (or noir-tinged western) from John Sturges about a man driven by guilt over killing a robbery suspect. The movie plods and plods, especially during the tedious second act, and doesn't pick up until the end. I would say Lew Ayres that seems wrong for the role, but it's hard to pin down what the role is. Noir is often about making the wrong choices, but this guy just seems to make one bone-headed or misguided decision after another. Teresa Wright's character is equally puzzling. The whole thing just doesn't work. Some potentially interesting psychological angles arise, but they're handled poorly. The score is also a dud and the cinematography isn't that special either. A few good moments aside, nothing much to see here.

"The Capture" is the most frustrating story to watch, as it is a pretty good film....through the first 3/4 of the movie. Then, when you are invested in the darn thing, it ends oh so stupidly....very stupidly. As a result, I am doing something I rarely do--telling you not to bother with this one! The film begins with Lew Ayers on the run somewhere in rural Mexico. When he meets up with a priest (Victor Jory), he begins telling him the story of how he got to be on the lam from the law. It seems that some time ago, Lew was reluctantly goaded into helping look for a man accused of stealing the company's payroll. On his own, he catches up to the guy and accidentally kills the suspect. While he's considered a hero, he can't live with himself and quits his job--even refusing the reward money. So far, so good--I liked the story and the idea that he felt so torn apart by this. While it strained disbelief A LOT, I even got into the film when Ayers tracked down the dead guy's widow (Teresa Wright) and young son and moved in as a hired hand.Late in the film Ayers gets the idea that the man he killed was not really guilty and investigates. This is a great idea--and a great way to throw the plot up on its end. HOWEVER, when he has a big confrontation with his ex-boss, the plot goes straight down the toilet. The last 20 minutes of the film make no sense at all--especially when he kills the man in self-defense yet runs away and makes himself look 100% guilty! Why do this--he seemed to have a good case to prove that his ex-boss was a crook and the gun the ex-boss tried to use on him was ample evidence he was defending himself. And from there, it only gets worse...much, much worse. You simply cannot believe the story at all and it made me mad by the time the stupid final showdown occurred.Okay acting and it was apparently written by lemurs! There just isn't enough in the first half to make it possible to ignore the last!

This is an interesting drama that features a good leading performance by Lew Ayres and a story that combines action and a little psychology. The pace is uneven, particularly in the middle of the movie, and this keeps it from being better. But both the early sequences and the climactic chain of events work pretty well.Ayres plays a former oil man who once captured a suspected criminal, and then felt responsible when the man died in custody. He starts to get involved with the dead man's widow, even as he is haunted by uncertainty over whether he had done the right thing. It sets up a number of possibilities, and it is given an added air of fateful inevitability by the technique of having Ayres's character tell most of the story, in flashback style, to a priest.After a solid start, things bog down for a while in the middle, although Ayres and Teresa Wright do their best to keep it watchable. Eventually, though, it gets back on track, and the last few scenes tie things together and bring the story to a tense conclusion.