Alvarez Kelly

Set during the American Civil War, this Western follows Alvarez Kelly, a Mexican cattleman who profits from the conflict by driving herds north to sell to the Union army. His business arrangement is upended when Confederate officers, short on supplies for their besieged troops, seize him and demand that he help them take the cattle for the South. The scheme is led by the determined Colonel Tom Rossiter, whose methods include pressure and outright coercion, leaving Kelly caught between the two sides and the woman he has come to know.

Edward Dmytryk directed the film, the sixteenth of the eighteen features he made, arriving between Mirage and Anzio. William Holden plays the title role, with Richard Widmark as Rossiter; Janice Rule, Patrick O'Neal, Victoria Shaw and Roger C. Carmel round out the cast. Franklin Coen, Daniel Taradash and Elliott Arnold wrote the screenplay, and Columbia Pictures released the film, produced by Sol C. Siegel with Ray David. It runs 106 minutes.

Audience response has been modest. On IMDb it holds a 6.3 rating from around three thousand votes, and on TMDB a 6.2 from a much smaller pool of about sixty users. Those figures suggest a Western that draws a steady if limited interest from viewers, without the wide following of the era's best-remembered entries in the genre.