On the massive farming fiefdom called the Golden Empire, two ranch hands stalk prey amidst the shadows and light patterns spread on the ground by the grand homestead. They strut into the shed where the estate’s populace of Mexican farm labourers, called braceros, live, in search of handsome young Juan Martin (Joe Schneider). In a single, electrifying framing, Arnold depicts Martin’s would-be lothario pretences as he’s glimpsed combing his Elvis-age hair into a sleek mass in the bathroom window, only for the prosecutors of white, moneyed, sexually repressed authority to barge in and take hold of him by that precious hair. He’s dragged out of the bathroom and into a shed, and beaten. When Juan fights back, he’s clubbed to death with a pick handle. Martin’s friend and fellow worker Jesus Cisneros (Martin Garralaga) witnesses his murder and travels into the nearby town at the heart of Bingham County to make an appeal for justice. New-minted sheriff Ben Sadler (Jeff Chandler) begins an ordinary day’s morning, dropped off at work by his wife Helen (Barbara Lawrence), only to find the trust and understandings that underpin his community and his job are about to unravel when Cisneros makes his statement. This is because the ranch Martin’s murder occurred on belongs to Virgil Renchler (Orson Welles), a power unto himself in the locale because of imperial breadth of his property and the wealth generated by his custom sustains the town. Cisneros fingers Renchler’s top hands Ed Yates (John Larch) and Chet Huneker (Leo Gordon) as the killers, but it soon emerges that Renchler ordered Martin to be beaten for his friendship with Renchler’s daughter Skippy (Colleen Miller). Renchler’s men try to pass off Martin’s death as a road accident, but when Cisneros refuses to retract his statement, Sadler begins investigating, however reluctantly and against the increasingly frantic and hysterical warnings of his fellow lawmen and city elders, scared that with provocation Renchler might start doing business with another town.
Directed by Jack Arnold, Man in the Shadow blends modern-dress western with noir-soaked attitudes, but also follows Arnold’s string of sci-fi epics with telling overlaps. The location photography of desolate settings recalls It Came From Outer Space (1953) and Tarantula (1955). The monstrosity grows out of the remote ranch house’s clandestine isolation, as with Leo G. Carroll’s experiments in the latter. The sense of paranoia and social exclusion is pervasive in Arnold’s oeuvre, whilst the emasculation of the everyman hero is crucially similar to The Incredible Shrinking Man (1956): Chandler’s Sadler, a dude everyone likes and respects at first, becomes the incredible shrinking lawman in their eyes, to the point where he’s rendered just as powerless and victimised as the suburbanite who flees his own hungry house cat. Where those films were metaphorical, Man in the Shadow is explicit in contemplating the dark side of Atom-age America with its shiny chrome-wreathed cars and post-war assurances coexisting uneasily with lingering realities of an age of conquest and settlement that helped spread imperial domain. Arnold clearly indicts the racist disinterest in the fate of small men expressed by many of his townsfolk as a by-product of their anxiety over facing down the same source of power, whilst comprehending how their status, colour, and citizenship accords them better treatment, but still leaves them in the same position as the lowly braceros as dependents on the teat of the big boss. Renchler’s shadow hangs as vast and pendulously menacing as a massive arachnid, whilst the landscape is just as prone as Arnold’s scifi films to mysterious disappearances, changed personalities in friends, attacks of devolved beast-men, and eruptions of primal instinct in once-peaceable heroes.
Arnold follows in Anthony Mann’s footsteps in cross-breeding noir and western, recalling Mann’s Border Incident (1949) in particular, which also dealt with the mistreatment of braceros. The influence of High Noon (1952) in contemplating the lawman’s abandonment by his citizenry in the face of threat is obvious, whilst also taking some courage from the Elia Kazan-Richard Brooks school of social justice melodrama. But Arnold, who got to make Man in the Shadow after his string of fantastical successes, is more outright in the post-McCarthy, early Civil Rights-era, in contemplating a fascistic presence in American life, a notion the town’s Italian immigrant barber Tony Santoro (Mario Siletti), makes explicit when he refuses to blackball Sadler like the other townsfolk and recalls the onset of Mussolini in the ‘20s. Arnold’s eye scans the stark surrounds and rolling hills of Renchler’s estate in daylight as antiseptically blasted and drab, following his desert-set monster movies in inverting the expanses into traps of space and menace, as if documenting the same fascination for the half-hidden blood libel written in the landscape as compels Cormac McCarthy. Come night and drenching shadows rule, as when Sadler, hoping against hope that a call to a remote locale might not be a trap, ventures into an abandoned house in out in the eerie boondocks, turning mere abandoned house into a trap of decayed ambitions and waiting fate in a manner that recalls the way John Ford rendered the usually romanticised American agrarian belt as Gothic land of blight and darkness in the early scenes of The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
Man in the Shadow was produced by that strangest of ‘50s cinematic entrepreneurs, Albert Zugsmith, and his and Welles’ collaboration here led to Touch of Evil (1958), which deals with very similar matters, albeit it with Wellesian baroque substituting for Arnold’s aerodynamics. Welles is relatively restrained, even distracted, as Renchler, one of those neo-pharaohic characters that actor loved playing or depicting, presenting a superficially charming and equitable figure who is crippled by a suggestive weakness in the face of his daughter, and whose power has ironically left him perplexed by even the slightest shadow of conflict, quick to protect his own interests and swat at irritations like a bear stung by bees. Skippy is a flighty, nervy Ariel at the mercy of Welles’ puffy Prospero and Larch’s drooling Caliban, but has enough emerging pith to escape her gilded cage with a blend of guile and skill to alert Sadler to the probable fate of her would-be lover, and may be evolving into one of Arnold’s more usually competent, self-directing female heroes. The figuration of the titan with a perturbing soft spot for a daughter or sister was fascinatingly common in American cinema of the era, and Welles would play a more blustery and potent version of the same character in The Long Hot Summer a year later. Larch and Gordon give effectively bullish performances as the asshole agents whose psychopathic aggression shows up Renchler’s pretences and propel him towards distasteful ends.
But Arnold seems more interested in the social conflict, presenting an almost Ibsenish battle of community versus existential threat with a lone hero as victimised scapegoat-prophet. That overtone of existential threat motivated Arnold’s early sci-fi films in a manner for the most part more clear-cut and obvious: where the giant tarantula and gill-man presented threats to be combated, fear here infects his small-towners in the same way the mysterious fog of Shrinking Man starts its hero’s diminution, and they in turn try to cut down their appointed hero when he inconveniences them. Sadler’s status as the hero who tries to awaken his fellow man’s consciousness recalls Putnam in It Came From Outer Space, but the drama, as with that movie, casts a pernicious eye on humankind’s capacity for aggression, xenophobia, and wilful ignorance. Cisneros is gunned down by masked goons before the eyes of his salt-of-the-earth white friend Aiken Clay (Royal Dano). Chandler’s effective performance emphasises Sadler’s growing resolve even as he’s faced with increasingly intense pressure and hysteria-tinged resentment from his peers: his eyes evasive and downcast, his body language hunkered and oppressed, when first confronted with Cisneros’ testimony, he gains stature and clarity of diction the more he’s faced with threats and the bloom of out-and-out hostility. Humiliation and abuse do finally defeat him, in the sense that he is reduced from upright civic leader to bristling, fury-stoked avenger who tosses away his badge and goes on the warpath.
It does take a lot to get him to that point, including Cisneros’ murder, and Huneker dragging him tied and helpless around behind his pick-up truck, a Hector luckless enough to be paraded as battle trophy while still alive. Man in the Shadows doesn’t achieve the stature its many parts promise, chiefly because Gene L. Coon’s screenplay fails to investigate its characters with much depth or specificity, and the shape of the plot develops in a manner already too familiar by that time, down to the people-power finale. The realisation of the themes remain a little too boldface in handling to quite achieve the sort of festering mood John Sturges achieved in the similar Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and Arnold achieved greater power and intensity with his metaphors, where his feel for the brutal extremes of the human place in the universe and eccentricity of behaviour vibrated with more originality. But the film remains exciting and, whilst vindicating Sadler’s struggle in a violent climax, leaves off with a striking final image of Skippy left alone on the ranch, a sliver of white in the gloom, at once a figure out of fairy tales and a new world citizen who, infantilised by her father, can now claim the mantle of power as his corrupted regime is deposed. As critic C. Jerry Kutner once persuasively argued, Arnold was the first truly modern post-war American filmmaker with an understanding of the new era’s psychic fabric. Man in the Shadow, although ultimately merely sturdy as a study of that fabric, feels fascinatingly prognosticative in a way that again accords and perhaps excels his actual science fiction. As well as looking forward to such septic-heartland dramas as Hud (1963) and The Chase (1966), the compulsion here to deal with conspiracy, racism, sex, murder, law, and power, the forces working to warp the American centrifuge, all look forward to an era oncoming with a swiftness no-one imagined.
