The Last Sunset (Brynaprod, Universal-International, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 9) my husband Charles and I watched The Last Sunset, an entertaining if far from “classic” 1961 Western made by Kirk Douglas’s production company, Brynaprod, in association with Universal-International and co-starring Douglas and Rock Hudson (who, probably at Universal’s insistence, got top billing) in a grim tale directed by Robert Aldrich from a script by Dalton Trumbo (who the year before had started getting credits under his own name again on Douglas’s production of Spartacus and Otto Preminger’s Exodus after having been blacklisted as one of the original “Hollywood 10” in 1947) based on a 1957 novel called Sunset at Crazy Horse by Howard Rigsby. The film opens, as so many Westerns do, with a mysterious figure riding on horseback against a broad expanse of desert, and it’s only when Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo get close enough to his face that we realize it’s Brendan “Bren” O’Malley (Kirk Douglas). Though the film takes place in Mexico (and was actually shot there; the exteriors were done in the desert town of Aguascalientes and the interiors were shot at the previously abandoned Azteca Studios in Mexico City), O’Malley is wanted for murder in Texas and a sheriff with the rather awkward character name “Dana Stribling” (Rock Hudson) is chasing him to serve him a warrant and arrest him for the murder of Stribling’s late brother-in-law. I was watching this on assignment for Fanfare magazine, which just sent me Intrada Records’ release of the original 1961 soundtrack, composed by Ernest Gold (coming right off the sensational success of his score for Exodus, whose main-title theme had actually become a hit single) and one of the better parts of the film as long as you ignore the cheesy pentatonic scales Gold wrote for the Native Americans and the equally hackneyed sombrero music he composed for the Mexicans. The Last Sunset has a doozy of a plot with more reversals than any script this side of Tony Gilroy. O’Malley seeks food and shelter from his long ride across the Mexican desert at the home of Belle Breckenridge (Dorothy Malone, excellent as usual in a pretty nothing role), who used to be his girlfriend but is now married to Confederate Civil War veteran John Breckenridge (Joseph Cotten, a welcome sight even though he’s killed off way too soon, and his rather grizzled appearance couldn’t help but remind me of Cotten’s quote from the early 1940’s that he was playing so much of his roles in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in makeups designed to make him look middle-aged or older that when he actually became middle-aged, audiences would look at him and think, “My, how well Cotten is aging. He hasn’t changed a bit!”) and is raising a daughter, Melissa, nicknamed “Missy” (Carol Lynley).

Missy is 15 and about to turn 16, and she’s at the age when she insists that everyone around her call her a “woman” instead of a “girl.” John Breckinridge asks O’Malley to help lead his herd of cattle across the U.S. border to the town of Crazy Horse, Texas (it’s a bit jarring to hear the name “Crazy Horse” as a place instead of a person), where he can sell them. O’Malley agrees in exchange for one-fifth of Breckinridge’s herd and Belle agreeing to leave Breckinridge and reunite with him. O’Malley intends to enlist Dana Stribling as trail boss even though the two are bitter enemies, and when Stribling shows up the principals, including Belle and Missy, set off together on the cattle drive. They decide they need more men, and so they stop off at a town called “Tres Santos” (“Three Saints”) to recruit them – only John Breckinridge gets killed when he’s challenged in a bar by men who, like him, fought in the U.S. Civil War on the Confederate side as members of Stonewall Jackson’s army at Fredericksburg. (Stribling, by contrast, fought under Ulysses S. Grant on the Union side.) The men accuse him of being a coward who deserted at Fredericksburg, and despite O’Malley’s and Stribling’s attempts to protect him, John gets shot dead from behind by one of the barmen, thereby showing cowardice of his own. Also, the three men Stribling and O’Malley bring on board the cattle drive, brothers Frank (Neville Brand) and Ed (Jack Elam) Hobbs and a young outlaw identified only as “The Julesburg Kid” (played by actor James Westmoreland but billed as “Rad Fulton”) decide they can make more money kidnapping and trafficking Belle and Missy and selling them to a Dutchman in Vera Cruz than they can make on the cattle drive, though when they try it Belle herself shoots Frank Hobbs and O’Malley humbles the Julesburg Kid by engaging him in a weird contest which involves them tying their horses together and riding around each other. Along the way, Missy develops a May-December crush on O’Malley and plans to run off with him while Stribling is forcefully demanding that the newly widowed Belle marry him. At one point three Yaqui braves ride up and seem ready to attack the cattle herd, and O’Malley callously shoots and kills one of them with a rifle before a huge band of Yaqui accost them – only it turns out they just want to buy some of the cattle for their own food supplies, and Stribling gives them the one-fifth of the herd O’Malley had demanded as part of his pay for going on the drive. (This scene led Charles to call this a pro-Native Western, which it really isn’t; it’s certainly not at the level of the stunning 1932 End of the Trail, reviewed at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/by-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2012.html!) It turns out that O’Malley dated Belle when she was just a teenager herself, and the reason he’s attracted to Missy is she reminds him of Belle at that age – something Belle even accuses him of when she says he wants the 15-year-old Belle he remembers instead of the adult she is now.

The Proustian complications get even worse when Missy shows up wearing a torn yellow dress; earlier O’Malley had recalled dating Belle when she was wearing that dress, and Belle said she’d burned it. Well, anyone aware of how difficult it was to get decent clothes in the Old West would look askance at that one, and it turned out Belle didn’t burn the dress at all. Instead she put it amongst her old clothes, and Missy found it and put it on, tear and all (the tear was from when O’Malley ripped off the corsage originally on the dress that another man had given Belle). Later Belle tells O’Malley that [spoiler alert!] he can’t marry Missy because Missy is O’Malley’s daughter, not the late John Breckinridge’s. O’Malley reacts so violently to the news he slaps Belle, but she insists that it’s the truth. Just then the cattle drive (ya remember the cattle drive?) reaches the Rio Grande and crosses the Mexico-U.S. border, and rather than attempt to arrest O’Malley, Stribling challenges O’Malley to a gun duel at sunset (though Charles caught a continuity gaffe: there’s an establishing shot of a sunset but the duel itself takes place at high noon). The duel takes place, though just before it happens O’Malley carefully and deliberately takes the bullets out of his gun, so Stribling shoots and kills him and then notices that O’Malley’s gun was empty all the time. (Today it would be called “suicide by cop.”) Belle ends up with Stribling and O’Malley’s death spares Missy the embarrassment of having to deal with the fact that she fell in love with a man who was not only old enough to be her father but actually was her father. In Frank DeWald’s liner notes for the Intrada Records CD reissue of the soundtrack music for The Last Sunset, he ties it in with the so-called “psychological Westerns” that became the rage in the early 1950’s, like Winchester .73, High Noon and a previous Aldrich film, Vera Cruz (1954), which like The Last Sunset casts two big-name male stars (there Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster) playing characters who can’t stand each other but are forced to work together in a journey across Mexico. Actually the earliest “psychological Western,” or at least the first one I’ve seen, was John Ford’s remarkable 1926 silent film Three Bad Men, in which a law enforcement officer is the principal villain, three outlaws are the effective heroes, and Ford and his writer, John Stone, created a far more complex set of conflicts between ostensible heroes, ostensible villains, and would-be settlers than anything that occurred to Howard Rigsby, Dalton Trumbo, or Robert Aldrich on The Last Sunset. The Last Sunset was shot entirely in Mexico, though Charles was jarred by the contrast between the highly effective daylight exteriors (shot on a Western street set in Aguascalientes, whose city government pleaded with the filmmakers to leave standing after they finished in hopes it would become a tourist attraction) and the phony nighttime scenes, obviously shot on a soundstage with a crudely painted dark blue backdrop representing the night sky. It’s a quite accomplished film, but nothing special despite the efforts of all and sundry to make it so with a lot of curious plot reversals – and just one night after seeing the 1959 Imitation of Life, Charles and I were watching yet another Universal-International movie in which a teenage girl falls for her mother’s boyfriend!