The first things I have to say about this film are that it features one of the earliest credits for Tony Curtis, and that Rock Hudson is buried in the cast, and he plays an Indian. Right, now that's out of the way, let's talk about the film.
I like this kind of film. Now, that statement's not much good to you without knowing what kind of film it is, but regardless of that I like it anyway. It's the kind of film where several smaller stories are all tied together through coincidence, or an object being passed from one to another, as is the case here. There are some exceptions - I wasn't wild about Au Hasard Balthazar or Babel - but these types of collective narratives, like Magnolia, Short Cuts, Crash and Traffic, usually appeal to me, and having a great ensemble cast never hurts either. Here, the element that ties the stories together is a rifle.
You ever have one of those mornings when you're on holiday, you've woken up a few hours before your other half is likely to surface from the depths of slumber and you can't go anywhere? Well, this happened to me recently, but fortunately I had my laptop and a copy of Silver Lode, yet I knew absolutely nothing of the film (save for it's 81-minute runtime) so I settled down to watch it. I like watching films with o prior knowledge, and it happens less and less these days, so this was a nice surprise. In the opening credits though, I second-guessed the film completely incorrectly. You see, I could tell from the title that it was likely to be a western, and it stars a man called John Payne, who I'd previously never heard of, so I assumed it was a western spoof, and they'd tried to be funny by subbing the lead actor's name with one comically similar to John Wayne. Nope, it turns out there's an actor called John Payne who, according to IMDb, has 73 acting credits to his name, including this definitely-not-a-parody-or-even-a-comedy film.
