Robert Aldrich's psychological western, already a rich text in 1961, seems even richer in retrospect. Just as producer Kirk Douglas had hired Dalton Trumbo to provide the script for Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, he rehired the formerly blacklisted writer for this loose adaptation of Howard Rigsby's 1957 novel Sundown at Crazy Horse.
Douglas plays Brendan O'Malley, a black-clad fugitive with a poetic soul, and Rock Hudson (All That Heaven Allows) plays Dana Stribling, the sheriff dedicated to bringing in "the man with a hole in his chin," not just because it's the right thing to do, but because O'Malley killed a family member. There's just one problem: Stribling has no jurisdiction in Mexico, so he sets out to coax the outlaw back to the States.
As the film begins, O’Malley whistles a happy tune as he rides towards the homestead of former flame Belle Breckenridge (Dorothy Malone, an Oscar winner for Written on the Wind), now the mother of 15-year-old Melissa (19-year-old Carol Lynley, Return to Peyton Place). Though Belle isn't exactly footloose and fancy-free, O'Malley hardly considers her bourbon-soaked husband John (Joseph Cotten, Shadow of a Doubt), an injured Civil War veteran, any kind of a threat. When the rancher offers him a gig driving a herd of cattle to Texas, he jumps at the chance to rekindle his romance with Belle.
After Stribling catches up with him, O'Malley persuades Mr. B to hire his foe as the trail boss. Both men see the drive as a way to keep an eye on the other, but bandits, vaqueros, and the vagaries of the human heart will complicate their plans. Though O'Malley has every confidence he can win over the standoffish Belle, he's startled to find himself the object of her daughter's affections instead (a Trumbo invention, since she's only eight in Rigsby's book). It starts off innocently enough with a dance before blooming into a full-blown obsession.
"I'm a woman, but you don't see it, because you don't want to," Melissa insists. Meanwhile, Stribling finds himself gravitating toward Belle—to O'Malley's chagrin. The men, women, and cattle eventually make it across the border where Belle encourages Stribling to go easy on O'Malley, while Melissa, now modeling herself after her mother in her younger days, encourages him to run away with her. It wouldn't be a psychological western if everybody got what they wanted, and they don't, but the title proves especially apt for one character.
In his commentary track, which leans heavily on James Ursini and Alain Silver's 1995 Aldrich biography, film critic Nick Pinkerton notes that the director singled out Hudson for praise, but otherwise dismissed the film, complaining that Douglas's control-freak tendencies—"Kirk was impossible"—proved a significant hurdle. Directorial misgivings aside, The Last Sunset offers all the thrills and chills of an Aldrich action film, like The Dirty Dozen, much of the Technicolor romance Hudson and Malone brought to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and a touch of the subversion driving Aldrich's Bette Davis pictures. Recommended.