THE TALL STRANGER (1957)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Thomas Carr

SCREENWRITER: Christopher Knopf

FILM STARS: Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, Michael Pate, Michael Ansara, Leo Gordon, Whit Bissell

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK 

AUTHOR: Louis L’Amour

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Gold Medal Book

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1963

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1957

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Western

WORDS: This novel comes across as a short story extended, which would be right. Early on author L’Amour had a habit of writing novellas for magazines, then later fleshing them out a bit, giving them new titles, and re-selling them as stand-alone paperbacks or as potential film treatments. That seems to be the case here (though I’m not sure what story it’s based on, if any). This approach had paid off before with his classic novel, Hondo (hence the referencing to it on the cover art), which, was a book adaptation by L’Amour  of a movie  written by a screenwriter  based on a short story by L’Amour. Still, I’ve read a lot of Louis L’Amour, he is one of my “read, clear the head, and be entertained” writers. This isn’t up there with his best but ….

Likewise, the film isn’t one of McCrea’s best westerns but it has a great cast and it is very watchable … a bit like comfort food for me.