If there is one thing to be learned from John Sturges’ The Walking Hills, it’s that filmmakers—and by extension all storytellers—must be judicious with their use of flashbacks. The set-up is simple: a loss confederation of ne’er-do-wells and cowboys set out into the desert to find a wagon of buried gold. As the environment becomes more and more inhospitable tempers flare, emotions explode, and egos surrender to ids. It brings to mind similar desert-mission movies where the protagonists are placed under extreme psychological duress: John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934), Zoltán Korda’s Sahara (1943), John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). But here’s where The Walking Hills plummets from being a decent film to merely sub-par: about halfway through the film there is an obtrusive flashback concerning a love triangle between three characters. Instead of communicating the flashback via dialogue thereby maintaining the claustrophobic atmosphere of the desert, the film cuts to stock footage of the characters back in civilization. I can’t properly express how jarring this is. It shatters the illusion of watching a handful of people being literally and metaphorically sandblasted by the savage wilderness.
6/10
