Critics reviews

Kicking off with a raging-inferno montage of violence, vice, and debauchery, the movie thoroughly enjoys what it purports to condemn, countering the hero’s sermonizing with Doll’s insolent toast: “Here’s to sin!”

The landscape bakes in brown and umber; the azure eyes of Marie Windsor glitter as her character stalks and shoots the man who done her wrong. Carefully restored by Paramount Pictures and The Film Foundation, Republic’s two-strip Trucolor offers a different dreamlike vision of pre-1960 Hollywood.

Hellfire’s rare take on the classic manhunt story (or womanhunt, I should say) is a real Buffalo Gal Western, through and through—a film that pays sensational homage to the kind independent, take-no-bullshit women you’d find manning a rickety business in the Oklahoma Territory.

The fragile nature of the Trucolor takes things even further, with the light subtly shifting from red to blue over single shots, creating a hallucinatory otherworldly effect that deepens every Bill Elliott plea, Bible in hand. The movie often looks more like a watercolor painting than a film, especially as characters move in and out of the moonlight or the fog.