Joel McCrea is a circuit judge who rides into a small town which is completely owned and controlled by a rich banker. McCrea investigates the death of a man who was shot by the rich rancher's son. The judge takes the rancher's son into custody and a standoff occurs as the rancher and his hired men try to break the son out of jail. The screenplay of this film has a lot in common with the better known Howard Hawks film Rio Bravo which was produced four years later.
The actor Joel McCrea had been working in film since the 1930s. He played a variety of roles in comedies, dramas and of course westerns. McCrea had worked with Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, King Vidor and George Stevens. He was an excellent leading man in two of Preston Sturges's best films,
The Palm Beach Story and
Sullivan's Travels. As McCrea got older he gravitated exclusively to the western genre. McCrea was proud of his image as a western hero and worked hard to uphold it. He appeared in probably Sam Peckinpah's best film
Ride The High Country which was an excellent summation to his western hero career.
Stranger On Horseback is a fairly standard small scale western. It's got good guys and bad guys and a shootout at the end. McCrea has a fairly interesting love interest in this film a Mexican performer Miroslava Stern. She was born in Czechoslovakia but her family emigrated to Mexico when she was 15 years old. She apparently had a rather troubled life and committed suicide when she was 29 years old.
Stranger On Horseback was directed by Jacques Tourneur a good director who had been associated with Val Lewton's classic RKO horror series. Tourneur has a couple of classic films to his name
Out of the Past and
Night of the Demon. Tourneur worked with McCrea in some other films and directed him in what McCrea called his favorite film
, Stars In My Crown a very good film by the way.
The film was written by Herb Meadow and Don Martin, the running time is 66 minutes.
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