Rancho Notorious

A man pursues the robbers who killed his fiancée, a store clerk shot during a holdup. He tracks one of them to a hidden ranch in rough country, the Chuck-a-luck, where the mysterious Altar Keane offers shelter to wanted outlaws in exchange for payment. To get close to the men he is after, the avenger has to work his way inside her operation.

Fritz Lang directed the film, the nineteenth in the sequence of twenty-four features he made, between House by the River and Clash by Night. Marlene Dietrich plays Altar Keane, with Arthur Kennedy as the grieving Vern Haskell and Mel Ferrer as Frenchy Fairmont. Daniel Taradash wrote the screenplay and Howard Welsch produced for Fidelity Pictures. The large credited cast numbers seventy-six. It runs eighty-six minutes, a short, tightly paced western with a revenge story at its center.

Reaction has been respectable without being enthusiastic. On IMDb it holds a 6.8 average from roughly six thousand votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.5 from a much smaller sample of about a hundred and thirty. A critics' score of 7.4 from twelve reviews places it somewhat higher than the audience figures. Its following has stayed modest over the decades, and its draw today rests mainly on its director and its star.