Summary
On a dust-laden dusk that smears blood-orange across the sky, Sundown Slim—guitar slung like a bruised lark, verses scrawled on rail-tickets—ambles into a half-dead border cantina where Billy Corliss, skeletal from a locomotive disaster that fused bone with memory, nurses a beer that tastes of morphine regret. Their handshake is a rusted promise; Billy, once a whirlwind, now half skeleton, co-owns the Concho range with iron-willed Jack, a man who brands his own pulse. Slim signs on as wrangler, only to be swallowed by a feud as old as barbed wire: Corliss longhorns versus Fernando’s merino clouds. When Jack’s rider Loring, a rattlesnake in denim, assaults Anita—dove-eyed heiress to the sheep clan—Jack’s dismissal fans rather than douses the embers; Fernando’s vengeance ricochets, drilling Billy instead. Loring, scenting opportunity, murders Fernando beneath a moon like a spent shell, framing the Concho crew. Slim, saddle-worn conscience quivering, tracks the Judas through arroyos and whisky ghosts, delivering frontier justice with a single, sorrowful bullet. Meanwhile Anita, torn linen bathed in candlelight, sings lullabies to Billy’s fever, stitching his lungs with her breath. Slim, who could claim the woman and the horizon, tips his hat toward the pallet where friendship and mortality lie intertwined, and walks into saffron anonymity, guitar murmuring elegies to a love he bartered for honor.
Synopsis
Hobo poet Sundown Slim meets his old friend Billy Corliss in a Western saloon. Billy, in poor health as a result of injuries sustained in a train wreck, now owns the Concho cattle ranch with his brother Jack who runs the ranch. Sundown obtains a job at the Concho and becomes embroiled in the Corliss' battle with their sheep rancher neighbors, the Fernandos. When Loring, one of Jack's employees, attacks Fernando's daughter Anita, Jack fires him but Fernando, not satisfied, vows revenge on Jack, then shoots Billy by mistake. Loring, in an attempt to get rid of the sheep rancher, kills Fernando but Slim tracks down the crooked cattleman and settles accounts with him. Meanwhile, Anita nurses Billy back to health and, although Sundown also loves the sheep rancher's daughter, he gives her up in the name of friendship.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I saw Sundown Slim I was chasing celluloid ghosts—an unsubtitled 16 mm print flecked like desert snow. Ninety-three years after its release, Harry Carey’s lanky silhouette still cuts through the emulsion like a Bowie knife through silk, and Henry H. Knibbs’s intertitles read like haikus soaked in mescal.
The Poet as Outlaw Mythographer
Sundown Slim isn’t merely a tramp with a guitar; he is the wandering scribe America forgot it needed. Every campfire stanza he utters is a sutu..."
