I love Westerns. I have watched dozens of them and I continue to watch every one that comes on that I haven't seen. (Thanks to the IMDb 'My Movies' I can set them up and get alerted to them coming on, a very nice feature.) This has to be the all-time worst Western I have ever seen.<br /><br />The townspeople in this movie are the direct ancestors of the families in the home security system ads, where they put a night stand up against the bedroom door and are talking to the security guy on the phone. "Is everything all right?" "No, there is a man coming up the stairs who wants to kill us all." "Don't worry, I'm calling the police right away." Whew! Close one! And how preferable it is to have the police arrive in ten minutes, with a killer ten seconds away, than to have any means of actually defending oneself. Right? It is THAT level of self-imposed helplessness that afflicts the people of the town in this movie. They stand by, afraid to do anything for fear that it might be wrong. And you can bet, if they DO do anything, it WILL be wrong, so best not to ever defend yourself or try and stop a bad guy. Just cower and hope he won't make it hurt too much for too long.<br /><br />As another reviewer said, in the old West, any idiot who tried to do what 'the bad man' did in this movie would find himself dead in side of five minutes, because back then, people stood up for and defended their family and property and town. They did not stand by in horror, clutching a copy of Consumer Reports and watching as the women were raped and the town was burned. The person who wrote this trash movie has no clue what this country used to be about. The 'bad man' would have been the 'dead man' in no time, and a person as wimpy as the mayor played here by Fonda would have been disgraced and yanked out of office pronto.<br /><br />This whole movie is written from the viewpoint that bad people will eventually stop being bad if we let them tire themselves out beating us up, so we should not do anything about them. It is not realistic, it is not dramatic, it is not riveting, it is not honest. It is a complete frantic fantasy from the viewpoint of a clueless, modern-day political liberal, plain and simple.<br /><br />I can almost forgive Henry Fonda for appearing in this cow plop of a movie because his role in 'Once Upon A Time In The West' was so powerful. Here, he is nothing but a complete power failure.<br /><br />Someone commented that Fonda's character was much more realistic than the type played by say Clint Eastwood. I totally disagree. Perhaps there is nobody as-such we can point to from history who was exactly what Eastwood portrayed, but look at the famous sheriffs and marshals and gunfights and bad guys who are well-recorded in history. Where are the pacifist hand-wringers? History did not note them, because they were nothing that anyone would want to remember. They died as ineffectual cowards, and their only legacy was the shame of being too afraid to stand up for themselves against the power of bad.<br /><br />The 'bad man', riding through town, doing crazy things and cackling and laughing the whole time, is one of the most bizarre and totally unrealistic characters I have ever seen in a movie, let alone one around whom the story is supposed to revolve. Can this be a serious attempt at a Western movie? It is a sad, pathetic joke of a movie, designed to push a pacifist viewpoint from the perspective of someone who knows more about tofu than about the old West.<br /><br />I hate this movie. Have I made that fact clear? This movie is GARBAGE. Thank you and good night.