This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Although this widescreen color production avoids few clichés of the 1950s Western, it's still diverting in its small way. The opening credits proclaim the film's historical accuracy. Actually, it's not that accurate -- not according to the entry on Wikipedia anyway -- but it sticks closely enough to real events. You can tell because an entirely fictional movie would have one climax, usually a shoot out. And there IS a shoot out here, after undercover agent Randolph Scott arranges for the gang to be ambushed during a trait robbery, but it's followed by still another climax, five minutes later, in which the surviving gang members are lynched.No doubt the Reno brothers were unkempt miscreants. They don't joke, laugh, or have fun. Their faces are sour masks. They murdered and thieved their way through life beginning in adolescence. But the movie gets a bonus point for giving them at least some allegiance to each other that goes beyond the merely functional. They're like the Clanton gang in John Ford's "My Darling Clementine". They're unquestionably bad but they're rather more than incarnate evil.And they lynching scene gives them some additional dignity. They take it the way Saddam Hussein took it. Scott tries to stop the lynching but fails. In actual fact, there were not three but ten gang members lynched, in three independent groups, at different times. There was a national uproar over the mob violence, as there should have been.I don't mean to suggest that any of this is handled particularly well by the director. Neat photography and nice location shooting -- nowhere near Indiana -- but director Tim Whelan just rolls everything along on its formulaic track. The shoot out, for instance, is confusingly staged and fecklessly done. The characters shoot without aiming -- sometimes without even LOOKING in the direction they're shooting. Laura Reno, a real figure, falls improbably in love with Scott after the exchange of a few pleasantries. But what originality there is, is in the script, which defines the characters in ways that sometimes, very gently, nudges our conscience. Longfellow was wrong but he had a point when he wrote, "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."I wish some thought had gone into the title. "Rage At Dawn." I mean, really, couldn't they do any better than that? It's one of those generic titles. One size fits all. "Guns of Darkness," "Another Dawn," "Trapped." They should have let me have a crack at it. I'd have given them something that would SELL. "Agape and Malevolence in the Western Eidos." God, they'd come from hundreds of miles around to see a 1950 movie with a title like that. And they'd crawl all the way if they had to -- through the snow.

RAGE AT DAWN, directed by Tim Whelan, with a screenplay by Horace McCoy, features Randolph Scott and tells the story of a band of bank robbers, the Reno brothers; bringing them before the law needs a trick to be pulled upon them—a secret agent, played with relative detachment and some good—humor by the phlegmatic Scott, the legendary western lead, will become a gang member.Without being a bad movie, RAGE AT DAWN is representative for the unspectacular, even mediocre outings with which slightly uninspiring though essentially dependable western actors like Scott and Murphy are usually associated. Some notes here would signal to you the rugged, brutish and mean physiognomies of the Reno brothers—fact underlined by them always appearing grouped; some satire aiming at the small—town corruption; the essentially barren, austere, dry landscape. Now daddy Scott was a slightly low—profile actor, rural and average enough to let the movie go as it intends.

We're having a run of Randolph Scott Westerns on British TV at present and I couldn't place this one when I saw it in the listings. But after a few seconds' viewing I remembered I'd seen it not so long ago; but for there being nothing else on TV that day I wouldn't have watched it again.The opening credits showed a strong cast, but it took Scott's entry some time into the film to notch the pace up a bit. Forrest Tucker's role seemed a bit subdued for him, especially given that he was meant to be the chief bad guy.I've always a little irritated when the ageing male lead has a romance with a much younger woman. Scott was around 56 when this film was made, and Mala Powers about 24. OK, at first he was using her to get in with the Renos, but I found his approach to her in the stores very hammy and oily.The scenery and photography were good, but I see from other comments that the former was nothing like the locale in which the story was based.

This is a very-much copied western which belongs technically to the category of Randolph Scott westerns; this large and interesting body of work itself should be divided I suggest into the 1940s B/W series, and the 1950s color series; this is one of the earlier color efforts, an expensive-looking production but with somewhat inconsistent color. In several of his better efforts, Scott's role was that of a law officer or detective infiltrating some group of schemers. The story-line here is a fictionalized biography by veteran Frank Gruber, with screenplay by Horace McCoy, detailing the events of the Reno Brothers' gang and their train robberies performed in rural Indiana c. 1866. Scott's character is Barlow, a veteran Southern spy with impressive credentials. When their agent operating with the gang is murdered (after the gang is set up for capture), the Peterson Detective Agemcy sends for Scott to work with agents Kenneth Tobey and Ralph Moody to infiltrate the gang himself. Their device is a staged train robbery faked by the team, and the promise of a $100,000 payoff in the future. The ruse works; Scott is accepted by the gang, including Frank Reno, its leader, played strongly by Forrest Tucker. But immediately Scott finds he has problems. One of the Reno family, Denver Pyle, has nothing to do with the crimes and Scott falls in love with Mala Powers, his sister, who is bitter and unhappy; of course when he turns out to be just another bank robber, she turns against him, despite their obvious attraction and his courtly manners. From this point on, Scott helps the others pull an unremunerative robbery and becomes Tucker's rival to be the head of the gang. Between runs to town to report to his partners, he also is introduced to the three inside men in the town from which the gang operates--played by fine actor Howard Petrie, Edgar Buchanan and "Bonanza's" TV sheriff talented Ray Teal. Despite setbacks, the entrapment of the gang works. In a long and well-done shootout, several of the gang are killed, along with Scott's partner. He is then free to reveal his the role he has been playing all along. Powers tries to shoot him at night, but she comes nowhere close and ends up in his arms. Then Pyle comes to warn the detectives that a mob has been formed, led by smooth-talking Trevow Bardette and Jimmy Lydon. Scott tries has to ride off to try to save the gang from being lynched. The film's ending is downbeat but historically accurate, bringing to the end a memorable adventure tale that might have been made differently but is very lively and well-made exactly as it is. The other members of the gang are Myron Healey and powerful J. Carroll Naish, plus others, with George Wallace as the sheriff of Seymour and William Phipps, Chubby Johnson and Holly Bane in smaller roles. Director Tim Whelna did a solid if unspectacular job of directing a very difficult film, with day, night, action, dialogue, interior, exterior and battle scenes. The cinematography by Ray Rennahan and the music by Paul Sawtell are very fine, and Walter E. Keller's art direction is above average also. I enjoy this Scott western as a transitional work and for its attempts to make a true-to-life historical fictionalized biography, for the mostly-implied-level idea on which characters interact in this swift-moving adventure, and for the authentic look and feel of the work. A very entertaining film by anyone's standards.