Summary
Wyoming’s high-plains silence splits open in 1882 when drifter Jim Logan, gaunt as a winter wolf, rides into a wind-scoured hamlet to exhume the truth behind his sister Alice’s vanishing. He finds her exsanguinated by consumption inside a cedar-plank hovel, her marriage to Wade Curry—a dandified mining shark with a gambler’s grin—exposed as a paper sham. Curry’s polished boots kick down the door; fists fly; a derringer barks; Alice’s ribcage blooms red. With theatrical haste the widower gunslinger swaggers to the saloon, pins the slaughter on Logan, and skips town beneath a jury’s incurious gaze. A decade later the prairie has rebranded Logan as a cattle baron, his pastures as wide as remorse, his heart still tethered to Winnie—orphaned heiress to Curry’s last partner, reared in a Santa Fe convent. Serendipity, that sly puppeteer, hauls Curry back on a westbound train. Recognizing the girl as deed-holder to a mother-lode he never quite extorted, he enlists a silk-tongued attorney to kidnap her estate and indict Logan anew for Alice’s ghost. In a candle-lit courthouse throbbing with homesteaders, ranch-hands, and the perfume of kerosene, Logan unspools a decade of lies. The judge, a man whose gavel has tasted more blood than whiskey, absolves him; Curry, stalked at last by the hound of conscience, lowers his Colt and surrenders to irons, the echo of Alice’s final sigh settling like alkali dust across the plains.
Synopsis
In 1882, Jim Logan arrives in a small town in Wyoming to inquire about his sister Alice, whose husband, Wade Curry, a dishonest mine speculator, has deserted her. Logan finds Alice fatally ill in a cabin and learns that her marriage was fraudulent. When Curry arrives at the cabin, a fight with Logan ensues, and Curry shoots Alice dead. He hurries to the local saloon and blames her murder on Logan. Finding it impossible to convict Curry of his crimes, Logan goes to the Southwest with Winnie, the daughter of Curry's late partner whom Curry had arranged to be killed. Ten years later, Logan is a successful rancher and Winnie has returned home from a convent school. By coincidence, Curry arrives in town, discovers the girl's identity, and conspires with a lawyer to get possession of Winnie and have Logan charged with murder. However, Logan appeals to an assembly of citizens, and after hearing the whole tale, the judge acquits him. Curry, conscience-stricken, is arrested.
Review Excerpt
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The celluloid arrives like a brittle letter from the past, its emulsion cracked yet incandescent. Shadows of Conscience—shot on location in the blistering summer of 1920 near Laramie—feels less like a 102-year-old curiosity and more like a lantern-jawed elegy that prefigures the psychological Westerns of Anthony Mann and Monte Hellman. Director John P. McCarthy, toggling between Poverty Row potboilers and oaters for Universal, here operates on a feverish register: every close-up is a skull-moo..."
