CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Peereddi I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

MartinHafer Up until the 1960s, westerns were a HUGE genre for Hollywood-- particularly the 1930s-50s. Thousands of westerns were made...so many that no one could possibly see them all. However, if you've seen a bunch there are certainly some common themes...and the theme in "Star in the Dust" has been seen before...quite a few times. However, there is nothing to set this one apart from the rest...and I would recommend you first see "Rio Bravo"...with a similar theme but simply a better film.Sheriff Jorden is set to hang Sam Hall (Richard Boone) but has a problem....one group of folks wanna string him up and not bother waiting until the court appointed time...and another group wants to rescue him. Jorden (John Agar) and his two deputies (James Gleason and Paul Fix) are deputies on hand to try to carry out his orders.Aside from an insanely vivid and crazy stunt at the end (I still can't believe they did this!) and an appearance by Mamie Van Doren, I can't see much to set this apart from a bazillion other westerns. More a time-passer than anything else.

bkoganbing Star In The Dust is certainly an illusion to where Gary Cooper's sheriff's badge wound up at the end of High Noon. But John Agar's star never wound up there as he walks a fine line between homesteaders and cattlemen in this rather grim Universal western.Hired killer for the cattlemen Richard Boone is scheduled to hang at sundown. But Agar's facing a real problem. The homesteaders just want to lynch him before the appointed hour because the cattlemen are fixing to break him out. Agar would also like to find out who exactly hired Boone to intimidate the homesteaders. He did more than intimidate, he's hanging because he killed three of them.Head of the cattlemen is Leif Erickson and his sister Mamie Van Doren is supposed to marry Agar. Boone has a girlfriend also in Coleen Gray, a plain Jane sort who never got any attention until Boone. Now she's ready to do anything for her man.Terry Gilkyson, country singer and songwriter sings The Ballad of Sam Hall which is Boone's character and serves as a kind of Greek chorus to the events.Though Agar's star never winds up in the dust, the film is a decent enough B western, grim and violent.

Marlburian This wasn't bad at all, apart from the fact that the sheriff must have been naively optimistic in thinking that he, a deputy and an old-timer could prevail against two different factions each consisting of a score or so men; in the event, he leaves it far too late when it comes to asking for outside help. And I thought both factions were somewhat overheated about the situation.There's a touch of "High Noon" about the film, in that the action takes place in a short time-span, with a clock occasionally showing what hour it is. In both films the sheriff doesn't have much support when it comes to conscientiously doing his duty.The suspense mounts through both films, though John Agar doesn't match Gary Cooper when it comes to re-acting to it.I see from other comments that I'm not alone in finding the repetitive ballad-singer an irritation; I almost cheered when he dashed for cover during a shoot-out; what a pity he didn't get in the way of a bullet.The best fight is between two women, one of whom ends up with blood on her, which is more than can be said for the men who get shot; they just clutch at unmarked shirts. And when someone gets knocked on the head it's out of camera shot, which I thought was a convention that had been done away with some years before the film was made.Trivia fans may like to note that this is the second Western in which Delmonico's famous restaurant is mentioned in some Agar dialogue; Harry Carey jnr taunts him about eating there in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon".

alexandre michel liberman (tmwest) When this film was released in Brazil, a famous critic ranked it among the best films of the year (probably 1957). I would no go as far as that, but Star in the Dust is a B western with higher ambitions that partially achieves them. The story is about the sheriff who has to hang a killer Sam Hall (Richard Boone) before sundown. The cattlemen who probably hired the killer want to turn him loose, but the ranchers (the ones that were killed were ranchers), who have the local teacher as their leader want the hanging to go through. All the time there is a man singing a ballad about Sam Hall and it blends well with the film. Mamie Van Doren in an unusual role where she is not meant to be sexy is the sheriff's bride and also the sister of the banker and leader of the cattlemen. There is a constant betting going on where the odds that the hanging is not going to go through are much higher. The tension builds up very well, up to the crucial moment which is very convincing. A very similar story was used in another western "The Young Land"(1959), also with very good results.