Recommended. This is another movie that needs TCM Reframing. The story is sympathetic and accurate about an injustice done in Banning, California against a Chemehuevi cowboy named Willie Boy. In 1909, he killed his girlfriend’s father and ran with her to Twentynine Palms. A San Bernardino County posse led by Sheriff Chris Cooper (Robert Redford, The Natural) hunted them. Blacklisted auteur, Abraham Polonsky (Force of Evil), adapted Harry Lawton’s book with flair but the casting of Katherine Ross (The Graduate) and Robert Blake (In Cold Blood) as the Chemehuevi couple was politically and artistically unfortunate. Both actors try bravely, but incredulity tracks them across the Morongo Valley. Nevertheless, the Mojave Desert is well shot by cinematographer Connie Hall (The Professionals) and this is a good, well-paced movie, a great forerunner of 70’s Westerns. Sadly, the movie was trampled under the hooves of a subsequent Redford/Ross Western, co-starring Paul Newman (Harper).