From the Rental Vault: Whispering Smith (1948)

By the late 1940s, Westerns were starting to show signs of a maturing movie genre -- eschewing some of the sillier conventions of the genre like the idea a bandana "mask" would prevent a miscreant from being recognized by people he was around every day -- and offer more layered and nuanced characters than the simple assembly-line oaters of earlier years.

The transformation wasn't complete, so movies like 1948's Whispering Smith still have genre tropes like the aforementioned non-disguising masks and horse chases. It mixes them with characters who have to figure out how to come to terms with the moral dilemmas they face.

Alan Ladd is the title character, railroad detective Luke Smith. He earned his nickname for his quiet mannerisms and speech, but he is dogged and deadly when it comes to outlaws who menace the line he works for. While pursuing the last of a bandit trio, he meets up with an old friend, Murray Sinclair (Robert Preston). A gunshot wound puts him up convalescing at the home of Murray and his wife Marian -- a situation that could wind up significantly complicated by old feelings between Smith and Marian Sinclair (Brenda Marshall). Murray's ambition has led him to a foolish partnership with shady rancher Barney Rebstock (Donald Crisp). That and the tighter restrictions the railroad home office place on emergency rescue and salvage crews like his push the friends apart and push Murray towards the shady side of the law himself. Smith does his best to pry Murray away from Rebstock and his gang, but pride and greed prove stronger.

Whispering Smith was the last of five movies Ladd and Preston did together, and was the first major Western for Ladd after his rise to success in This Gun for Hire and The Blue Dahlia. He offers a kind of proto-Shane -- like that later gunman he understands that he can't offer the kind of settled life he would owe to people who loved him. Preston's larger-than-life persona faces some of the same issues, as new policies cramp the kind of free-wheeling anything goes rules by which he and other railroad rescuers and salvagers have always lived. Marshall invests Marian with a deep sense of longing for the man she once loved and of loyalty to the man she loves now. In spite of Murray's descent she offers to abandon their secure ranch life in order to escape the consequences of his actions. Whispering Smith was her second-to-last movie role; she would retire from acting about two years after it was finished.

Whispering Smith was based on a series of stories by Frank Spearman and would later become a TV series with Audie Murphy. The mixed palettes it uses to paint its characters and more ambiguous storyline paved the way for some of the great "thinking Westerns" of the 1950s, including Ladd's own Shane or Preston's The Last Frontier. Though it still wears its Western pulp novel conventions quite openly, it offers a clear example of how a talented storyteller, cast and crew need not be limited by the genre.