The Fighting Trail

A nickelodeon cyclone whipped from the pen of Brady and Montagne, The Fighting Trail hurtles across a frontier where telegraph wires hum like harpsichords and dust devils pirouette around half-built missions. Joe Ryan’s laconic marshal, scarred by a Civil War bayonet still lodged in myth, tracks a phantom stagecoach whose strongbox allegedly contains not gold but incriminating treaties that could redraw the border between Gadsden and perdition. Fred Burns’ cattle baron, equal parts Lear and robber-baron, deploys nitroglycerin diplomacy to keep the railroad sinews from twitching toward his acreage, while Carol Holloway’s schoolmarm smuggles abolitionist hymns inside piano scores, her petticoats stitched from wanted posters. The trail itself—shot in serrated silhouette against the Yucca palms—becomes a shifting palimpsest: one reel it is a wagon-rutted spine, the next a mirage of celluloid peeling at the perforations. S.E. Jennings’ camera gulps horizon like a famished daguerreotype, then tilts skyward so that buzzards scrawl cursive across the emulsion. Tote Du Crow’s mute scout communicates via mirror-flash haiku; William Duncan’s turncoat deputy speaks only in Morse gunshots. The climax detonates inside a half-submerged Spanish bell tower where every ricochet carves Gregorian counterpoint into the adobe. When the smoke settles, the only treasure left is a bullet-pierced locket containing a photograph of the audience itself—an ontological ambush that turns the theater into the next frontier.