Ryan excelled at troubled, worried characters, and Cass Silver, his Proud Ones hero, is no exception. Cass is marshal of the fledgling town of Flat Rock, which is booming with the arrival of the railroad and cattle herds being sold there. But the boom is bringing in the vice with which Cass tangled in the town he recently left. Literally. Honest John Barrett (Robert Middleton), his nemesis there, has just bought the saloon in Flat Rock, and this shady entrepreneur brings rigged gambling and hired gunmen to the town. Barrett isn't just a professional nuisance, he's also a character assassin to Cass. He not only spread the tale that Cass was trigger-happy, by claiming that the hired gunslingers Cass shot during their last face-off were unarmed, but Barrett also claimed he ran Cass out of town, and that the lawman fled rather than stay and fight. In truth, it was Cass' girlfriend Sally (Virginia Mayo), a one-time saloon girl and now a Flat Rock innkeeper, who dragged him to Flat Rock.
But the trigger-happy reputation continues, and one of the trail hands who comes in to town with the first herd of cattle, is Thad (Jeffrey Hunter), who's long been told Cass gunned down his dad in cold blood and doesn't know his father was one of Barrett's hired gunslingers. After Thad helps Cass out during a scrape in Barrett's bar, the marshal explains to Tad the circumstances of shooting his father, and the younger man even becomes a deputy. But there's obviously still doubt in Thad's trust of Cass, and the movie hopes to squeeze tension out of a possible showdown between the two, and a probable showdown between Cass and Barrett.
Yet The Proud Ones doesn't generate all that much tension, for a number of reasons. For one thing, despite the widescreen capabilities of the CinemaScope process and the participation of cinematographer Lucien Ballard (Buchanan Rides Alone, The Wild Bunch), as creative a western cinematographer as anyone, it's not a very visually accomplished movie. You don't really feel the setting on a gut level as you do in the best westerns. The Proud Ones takes place mostly in the saloon and the jailhouse, as well as a few other interior locations, all of which have been lit very brightly and flatly. There's no mood here, no sense that literal and figurative darkness is lurking. Nighttime exterior scenes are more evocative of danger, but there aren't enough of them to add the needed texture to the story. There are also too many "Central Casting" touches to the tale: Walter Brennan as a codger (the sort of crotchety jailer role he'd do again in Rio Bravo), Rodolfo Acosta as a stereotypical Mexican bandito type, Whit Bissell as a high-strung shopkeeper and so on. The major characters also lack much distinction: the script gives Cass a convenient affliction (being grazed in the head by a bullet in the first altercation gives him dizzy spells that come at predictably inconvenient times) and it's a clumsy manifestation of Cass' vulnerability that cuts into Ryan's performance, while Thad is bland and Sally drops out of sight for a whole half-hour.
In other words, The Proud Ones comes off like just a souped-up version of serviceable TV-western action. The presentation might be deluxe, but presentation isn't everything. It's one of the many now-obscure movies by director Robert D. Webb, who was to make his most famous movie, Love Me Tender, just after this. As with that movie, the most remarkable thing about The Proud Ones is its star, not its story.
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by Paul Sherman
