Terror in a Texas Town (1958)
(Joseph H. Lewis, US 1958, 80 min., 35mm)
A man walks down the main street of a western town carrying a harpoon. He is opposed by a man in black with a metal hand and two six-guns strapped to his hips. This is how Terror in a Texas Town begins. George Hansen (Sterling Hayden) arrives in Prairie City only to find that the father he hasn’t seen in nineteen years has been murdered. When he discovers that a scheme is in place to drive the farmers off their land, George decides to stand up for the memory of his father. Dalton Trumbo rewrote the script in four days when the producers showed dissatisfaction with the script that the blacklisted Mitchell Lindemann and John Howard Lawson (whom Trumbo had recommended for the job) turned in.