Absolutely Fantastic

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Former oil manager turned rancher Lindley Vanner is holed up in a Mexican priest's home with the Mexican police surrounding it – a fugitive from the law for murder. He tells his story to the priest. Vanner was working on a Mexican oil field in 1937 when he sets out to track down the bandit accused of stealing his company's payroll. He corners the suspect but accidentally shoots him dead due to miscommunication. Overcome with grief, he quits his job & heads to the dead man's town for a change of scenery. Bluffing his way into the widow's home, he tries to make amends by taking on various repair jobs on the ranch. The widow discovers his true identity but falls in love with him anyway. The pair get married. But when Vanner discovers that his victim was in fact innocent & had actually survived the gunshot wound he inflicted, killed instead by a guard who was the real thief during interrogation, Vanner attempts to track the real thief down & get him to confess. He succeeds in finding the culprit but again kills him in self defence. Now he is wanted by the Mexican police.The Capture is a modern-day (for the time) Western made at a time when the genre was getting stuck in the routine of the times & was getting more & more mediocre. It wasn't until the Italians got involved that the genre received a much-needed boost.The film is essentially about the emotional impact that killing someone – particularly by somebody who wasn't a soldier or police officer – inflicts on the person who does the killing. The death is accidental but the person is stuck with an emotional scar of that very act that compels them (well, most of the time) to make amends, well, if the person is honest & has morals, that is (most murderers these days tend to regard themselves in the right or have some severe mental defects that make them immune to grief). It is because of this plot angle that I rank the film as "mediocre" instead of "disappointing" since the rest of the film is almost sunk by poor writing. The idea of making the hero an everyday working stiff is a mediocre idea because the reason people go to the movies to watch is because they want to see larger-than-life characters or interestingly complex & unusual characters, not ordinary people who don't have anything to offer for them. Cinema is at its heart a medium of pure escapism (which is why I prefer science fiction & horror films over mediocre Westerns such as this) & films like The Capture don't do much to add to that medium – instead they detract & waste resources. The actors do a decent job of inhabiting their roles but are wholly unremarkable. Plus, the film tends to get boring in the middle section with Lew Ayres & Teresa Wright interacting – their characters loathe each other but very quickly fall in love in another of those old-fashioned Instant Romances, only to find their marriage threatened by the exposure of the fact that the dead husband was innocent of the crime that ultimately killed him. Ayres' transition from everyday Joe to tough guy is a bit unrealistic, although he acquits himself admirably.

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 tries mightily but in the end it suffers from a meandering script which is too full of plot devices and contrivances. The result is shocking as it was directed by the great John Sturges, who directed some of the best action pictures ever made, including "The Magnificent Seven". It is a picaresque type of a story which might be called " the Adventures of a Guilt-Ridden Oilman". Lew Ayres in the lead role bounces from place to place, falling in love with the wife of a man he has killed while searching for the real payroll thief. As he is on the lam in the midst of his guilt trip, he is eventually discovered and must hit the road again. Eventually he ends up in the same straits as the man he has killed, even incurring an identical injury as the dead man.....Sorry. I dozed off trying to recount the drab, preposterous proceedings. At best, it is a curiosity which is about 20 minutes too long and stretches the credulity of the viewer to the breaking point. Lew Ayres was good and Teresa Wright was excellent, but even so a question arises; Did they do drugs while writing scripts in the 40's?

The interesting twist to this story is that Lin Vanner (Lew Ayres) becomes the man he pursued and killed at the opening of the film. Not literally of course, but figuratively, in that he became entangled in a set of circumstances that made it look like he was guilty of a crime. It's the kind of irony, as another reviewer pointed out, that would have worked well as an episode of 'The Twilight Zone'. The middle part of the story explains how Vanner discovered the identity of the villain who engineered a payroll holdup and framed Sam Tevlin, the man who Vanner tracked and killed because he 'couldn't' surrender. What's difficult to buy about the story is how Vanner persisted in his effort to win over the widow Tevlin (Teresa Wright) in his quest for the truth about the man he killed.You know, as I think about the picture now, it might have been better served by reversing the roles of Ayres and Victor Jory, but my opinion might be shaped by having seen Jory in more movies. At that, I've probably seen him more times as a villain than a hero, and he would have given the character of Vanner a harder edge. Not that there's anything wrong with being introspective, but Ayres' interpretation made him too submissive to Mrs. Tevlin once she found out the truth about his identity.Once the story is well under way, you have a pretty good sense of what's coming up in the finale, the only question being whether or not Vanner would be able to successfully surrender. The intervention of Father Gomez (Jory) helped decide that outcome. You know, I had to chuckle to myself during the scene when Vanner confronts the Mexican laborer who was the payroll escort that got robbed to set up the story background. His name was Juan Valdez, and after seeing that Colombian coffee commercial dozens of times over the years, it's a name that's become synonymous with coffee breaks, not payroll robberies.