Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Marlburian The Moves4Men channel on British TV is providing me with some excellent films that I wouldn't otherwise have seen (as well as some recordings which I delete within ten minutes of starting to view). "Hellgate" is one of the grittiest Westerns I've seen, especially considering that it was released in 1952, when the rigours portrayed on screen were usually somewhat muted.The characters sweat copiously, their clothes are filthy and they show evidence of having no access to razors - in contrast to too many action films where the actors remain remarkably clean and well-shaven.One reviewer here has referred to Ward Bond being "inexpressive", but he certainly looked thuggish to me, and Robert Wilke was as malevolent as ever. Perhaps Joan Leslie was a tad too pretty? The way the film ended was a bit anti-climatic and I would have liked to see a bit more soul-searching going on before the concluding decision was made.I'm very glad to have watched this film.

Robert J. Maxwell Sterling Hayden is a peaceable ex Confederate and family man in 1867 Kansas, during a kind of Jesse James milieu when some former soldiers had formed bandit gangs and become a nuisance. He's a veterinarian and, in his good-natured way, he treats James Anderson, who shows up at his doorstep with a damaged rib. Anderson who, along with Bill McKinney, practically had a lock on the stereotypical chain gang boss and people of that ilk, is actually the leader of one of the roving bandit gangs.Hayden, of course, being a peaceable and polite horse doctor, knows nothing of this. He makes sure that mares foal properly, if that's the word. He's just trying to get along. But the U. S. Army believes otherwise. Due to a set of unfortunate circumstances, Hayden is convicted of being a bandit and an ex guerrilla, the kind of no-goodnik who would burn down the house of a Yankee with the women and children still inside.That, in any case, is what Ward Bond thinks. Bond is the head of the prison to which Hayden is sent. The prison camp is in a broiling hot canyon surrounded by convincingly arid desert. The Army guards at the camp are aided by Pima Indians who are paid to bring in the bodies of prisoners who try to escape. These particular Pima may be as rough as they say, but generally the Pima, like their Papago neighbors, were among the first to be acculturated and settle down to a horticultural life around the Colorado River.I rather like the production design -- the dozen or so tents of the soldiers, the wooden shack that is Bond's headquarters, and the interior of the caves and the mines where the prisoners work. Corridors are carved out of obviously fake rock, reminding a view of a Boris Karloff movie, but they're atmospheric.The movie has all the requisite moments of penal unpleasantness -- the surly guards, the cruel whipping of the prisoner who misbehaves, the chipping of the escape tunnel, the hot box in the sunshine, the shackles and humiliation. We've seen it all before, in prison movies more carefully structured than this one. I will mention "Cool Hand Luke" and "I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang" in passing, but they had bigger budgets and A-list stars. And "the oven" in "The Bridge On The River Kwai" is in a class by itself.The problem -- the thing that makes this less gripping than it has a right to be -- lies in three elements. First, Charles Marquis Warren was a hack director. He makes errors that you and I wouldn't make. Too many pointless close ups of men looking at one another while nothing is happening, just for example. He's dull. Another is that the film seems hastily written. We never see the men at work. The typhus epidemic is handled perfunctorily. The disease is spread by a microorganism found in the feces of human lice (yuk) and has nothing to do with water. And neither Sterling Hayden nor Ward Bond put much effort into their performances. Hayden -- okay, he never cared for acting anyway. But I can't remember a single movie in which Ward Bond was so slow and inexpressive, not from his earliest work nor from his last period, including "Rio Bravo." The result of all this is a Western that's mediocre at best, an inexpensive rerun of "The Prisoner of Shark Island," and a movie that is entirely without poetry.

bkoganbing One of the best films to come out of the Poverty Row Lippert Pictures Studio was this hard nosed and brutal western drama Hellgate. The title is named after a prison on the New Mexico desert where Sterling Hayden is sentenced to some hard time.A number of reviewers have already commented that the plot is taken straight from the story of Dr. Samuel Mudd. Hayden is a former Confederate soldier who has settled in a Union area of the west and just wants to forget the war. Hayden and wife Joan Leslie give some assistance to an injured man, Hayden is a veterinarian and therefore has some medical training. The man turns out to be a former Quantrill guerrilla and the locals are quick to believe Hayden has to be one also. He gets sentenced to Hellgate where he comes under the tender care of commander Ward Bond and Sergeant Major Robert J. Wilkie.Though the plot may come from The Prisoner Of Shark Island, the jail is like the one Sessue Hayakawa ran in The Bridge On The River Kwai. It's set in a desert canyon with no water, it has to be transported in every month. The jails are underground carved right in the rock crevices. Like Hayakawa, Bond has no guards the desert does discourage most escapes. He does however have Pima Indians who can track escapees and get more for bringing them dead than alive.If you know the story of Samuel Mudd from The Prisoner Of Shark Island you know what happens here in Hellgate. Sterling Hayden really dominates this film, especially when he vies for supremacy in his particular cell with James Arness, a pretty hard case himself. This is one of Hayden's best acted roles and ought to command some of the same attention given to The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing.Don't miss this one if it is broadcast, especially for fans of Sterling Hayden.

dinky-4 The early part of this story is the routine innocent-man-sent-to-prison story. Once Sterling Hayden arrives at the prison, however, things improve because of the unusual nature of the prison. It's located in a canyon near the southwestern tip of New Mexico. The canyon walls are more than 200 feet tall and beyond them lies a waterless desert patrolled by Pima Indians anxious to earn a reward for capturing any escapee. Prisoners are kept in underground cells. Punishment consists of being baked in metal coffins half-buried in the sand, or being whipped at a teasingly slow pace which allows the pain of each blow to sink in before the next one is delivered.Seeing how Sterling Hayden reacts to this environment and how he eventually overcomes it makes for a western which rises a bit above its standard materials.