A Time For Killing (1967)

Towards the end of the Civil War, Confederate prisoners escape from a Union fort, and on the way to the Mexican border, they attack a wagon with passenger Emily Biddle (Inger Stevens), the bride-to-be of Union Major Tom Wolcott (Glenn Ford), who is also pursuing the escaped inmates. George Hamilton is quite good as Captain Dorrit Bentley, the leader of the gang, whose devotion to the confederacy is so obsessive that he doesn't bother telling anyone when the war ends! In Halsted Welles' screenplay (adapted from the novel, The Southern Blade by Nelson and Shirley Wolford), the soldiers on either side of the Civil War are well aware of the futility of battle, and both blue and grey just simply wants to go home.

Its anti-war sensibility would no doubt have attracted young ticket-buyers who were opposed to the Vietnam draft, but still A Time For Killing is curiously old-fashioned with its classical Hollywood look (everything in the old west is bright and beautiful). But still, Phil Karlson attempts to inject some edgy realism into the film with awkwardly-framed sweaty closeups, and handheld camera during fight scenes (which just end up looking more sloppy than savage). Inger Stevens is really given little more to do than look frightened and scream. In fact, her underused performance enforces the ill-treatment of women in the old frontier. Much later in the film, once she and Wolcott are re-united after she is manhandled by Bentley, her fiancé bluntly mentions that not even a woman's honour is reason enough to pursue the prisoners! In fact, most of the characters are morally ambigious-- soldiers on either side of the war are depicted as psychotic cads.

A Time For Killing is perhaps more interesting on paper, since there are interesting gender and war politics that don't get fully realized. Still, it's not a bad flick for a double-bill at the drive-in. It's more interesting to watch for its cameos by Harry Dean Stanton as one of Hamilton's men, Dick Miller in an actually substantial role as a cowardly Union soldier, psychotic Timothy Carey as a bluebelly who likes shooting... anything, and look quick for Harrison Ford in the firing squad scene near the beginning.

RATING: 2.5 mosquito coils out of five.