Never saw that weird pink poster before. The "psychedelic" angle was, I suppose, an appeal to the youth market. But I've rarely seen anything so completely out of sync with the movie itself. FIRECREEK was actually a melancholic, low-key take on the HIGH NOON theme -- an affecting, if unoriginal, Western that benefited from a fine cast and of course Newman's modest score.
In interviews, Fonda played up the effect of an audience seeing him as a very nasty character in Once Upon a Time in the West, tending to forget that he portrayed an equally vicious baddie in this opus.
"Equally vicious"? I'd say he was a fairly sympathetic "bad guy," as these things go -- a wounded outlaw who merely seeks to recuperate in the sleepy town of Firecreek but who is ultimately undone by the actions of his reckless gang members. Stewart is the humble farmer-sheriff who doesn't want trouble. But as we know, in the end a man's gotta do what he's gotta do. Fonda's plight hardly prepares you for the awful moment in ONCE UPON A TIME when he . . .
