Summary
A rust-scarred locomotive slices through the Badlands at dusk, its four soot-smeared stowaways—each marked on the shoulder with a seared cattle-brand of a snarling wolf—fleeing a crime none can name aloud. Joseph W. Girard’s granite-faced sheriff, once the territory’s most feared hangman, now rides with the very quarry he forged the brand for, chasing a mirage of absolution that keeps receding behind every alkali ridge. Golda Madden, draped in funereal lace, clutches a cracked daguerreotype whose image bleeds off the plate like wet mercury, whispering to it as though it were a living confessor; her eyes, two storm-gutted lanterns, betray the knowledge that the real crime was committed not by but against her, a generations-old betrayal encoded in the brand’s sinuous iron. Ben F. Wilson’s gambler, sleeves embroidered with faded card-pips, carries a derringer loaded with a single blank cartridge—an existential joke he keeps forgetting to play—while Neva Gerber’s runaway bride, veil still hooked to her matted hair, nurses a newborn silence adopted from the cinders of a burned-down mission. Across their trail, Pansy Porter’s railway heiress turned avenging angel drives a Pierce-Arrow automobile across sand flats where no road has ever been, tires spitting rooster-tails of pale dust like the earth itself hemorrhaging time. The narrative fractures into four tintype vignettes, each scored by the locomotive’s diminishing wail, until the travelers converge on a ghost boom-town whose saloon mirrors reflect not their faces but the brand’s wolf, alive and pacing. There, in a candle-ringed reckoning, the sheriff presses the still-hot iron against his own chest, fusing pursuer and pursued into one scarred corpus, while the gambler’s blank round fires into the ceiling, raining plaster like synthetic snow. The film ends with the heiress photographing the branded four against the derelict station wall; the image, overexposed, erases every face but the wolf, which lingers on the negative like a birthmark the desert itself will someday wear.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I saw The Branded Four it was a 16 mm print spliced with surgical tape, smelling of vinegar and desert sage. Ninety-three minutes later I walked out of the archive annex feeling like someone had pressed a red-hot wolf-head insignia straight onto my ribcage. George W. Pyper and Hope Loring’s screenplay, once thought incinerated in the 1937 Fox vault fire, surfaces now like a phoenix carved from obsidian: compact, brutal, luminously self-aware.
The Plot as Palimpsest
Forget th..."
