The Capture
The Capture
NR | 08 April 1950 (USA)
The Capture Trailers

A badly injured fugitive explains to a priest how he came to be in his present predicament.

Reviews
Blucher One of the worst movies I've ever seen
Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.
Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
GManfred The Capture tries mightily but in the end it suffers from a meandering script which is too full of plot devices and contrivances. The result is shocking as it was directed by the great John Sturges, who directed some of the best action pictures ever made, including "The Magnificent Seven". It is a picaresque type of a story which might be called " the Adventures of a Guilt-Ridden Oilman". Lew Ayres in the lead role bounces from place to place, falling in love with the wife of a man he has killed while searching for the real payroll thief. As he is on the lam in the midst of his guilt trip, he is eventually discovered and must hit the road again. Eventually he ends up in the same straits as the man he has killed, even incurring an identical injury as the dead man.....Sorry. I dozed off trying to recount the drab, preposterous proceedings. At best, it is a curiosity which is about 20 minutes too long and stretches the credulity of the viewer to the breaking point. Lew Ayres was good and Teresa Wright was excellent, but even so a question arises; Did they do drugs while writing scripts in the 40's?
sol1218 **SPOILERS** On the run from the Mexican police hungry exhausted and wounded, after getting his right arm entangled in barbwire during his escape, Lin Vanner, Lew Ayres, finds his way to Father Gomez's, Victor Jory, house in the Mexican desert. After having his arm bandaged Lin tells the man of God his tale of woe a tale that goes back over a year ago when Vanner was involved with a posse tracking down Sam Tevlin, Edwin Rand, a wanted payroll robber and murderer.Forced by his fiancée Luana, Jackie White, to join the chase after the fleeing Tevlin Lin having him cornered ends up shooting the wounded man who, like Lin has now, had a wounded right arm. It was the fact that Tevlin couldn't raise his right arm up in the air that Lin , thinking that he was about to take a shot at him, ended up blasting him. It was later when Tevlin died from his wounds that Lin started to get guilty feeling about what he did and after he refused to pick up the $2,000.00 reward that was awarded to him in getting Tevlin that Luana, disgusted with her future husbands feeling sorry for himself, walked out of on him.The movie "The Capture" then takes a different turn with Lin traveling to Tevlin's, who an American, home in Los Santos Mexico meeting his widow Ellen, Teresa Wright, and ten year old son Mike, Jimmy Hunt. Keeping his true identity from Ellen Lin tells her that he's looking for a job at her ranch as a ranch-hand using the phony name of Lindley Brown. It doesn't take that long for Ellen to find out, checking out Brown's room, that Mr. Brown is actually Lin Vanner her husbands killer. Instead of the outraged Ellen letting Lin have it, about killing her husband Sam, she instead works the guy almost into the ground with him having no idea why she's doing that.Finally realizing why Ellen is so down on him by finding that she broke into his room, and found a newspaper clipping about Lin gunning down her husband, that Lin finally let the cat out of the bag. It turns out that Sam was not only a wife beater and drunk, how did Lin know all this?, but that he spent most of his time away from Ellen and Mike hanging out and drinking the night away with the senoritas at the local bars in town.Incredibly Ellen, within minuets after he told her the truth about himself, falls heads over heels in love with Lin and in what seems like the next day get married to him! You would have thought that the movie "The Capture" would end there and then instead it continued with Lin going back to the states to find the real reason for Sam Tevlin being framed in the payroll robbery and murder of those armed guards who were delivering the cash! Lin feels that he was, without his knowledge, set up as the hit-man to do in Tevlin by the person who was****SPOILER ALERT**** the real robber and killer the VP of the company that was held up Big Earl Mahoney, Barry Kelly.You soon got lost in the film when Lin suddenly decides to become a private eye and then does his gumshoe act that was totally unconvincing as well as making the movie look ridiculous. Lin has the surviving guard of the robbery Juan Valdez, Felipe Turich, end up committing suicide by hanging himself on the church bell-tower. This happened after Lin badgered Valdez almost to death, threatening to have the disabled mans pension taken away from him, in trying to get him to open up about who really shot him and his fellow security guards! Lin who should have felt just as guilty, if not more, for his driving the innocent Veldez to kill himself like he felt guilty in shooting Sam Tevlin didn't as much as shed a tear for the poor man!Acting totally out of character Lin then crashes Big Earl's place and after showing Big Earl that he's got the goods on him, in him not Sam being the one who robbed the payroll truck, gets into a fight with Big Earl, who's twice as big as Lin, killing him by smashing a whiskey bottle over his head! It's then that the film gets back to the present with Lin holed up in Fathet Gomez's home with the Mexican police, together with Ellen trying to talk Lin into giving himself up, giving Lin just minutes to either surrender or they'll blast away. The only thing about the ending of "The Capture" is that besides being totally predictable, just by reading the movies title, is that a miracle happened for the wounded and suicidal Linn who was responsible for the death of three persons in the movie! A miracle that for some strange reason didn't happen for Sam Tevlin who didn't kill anyone! Go figure that out!
classicsoncall The interesting twist to this story is that Lin Vanner (Lew Ayres) becomes the man he pursued and killed at the opening of the film. Not literally of course, but figuratively, in that he became entangled in a set of circumstances that made it look like he was guilty of a crime. It's the kind of irony, as another reviewer pointed out, that would have worked well as an episode of 'The Twilight Zone'. The middle part of the story explains how Vanner discovered the identity of the villain who engineered a payroll holdup and framed Sam Tevlin, the man who Vanner tracked and killed because he 'couldn't' surrender. What's difficult to buy about the story is how Vanner persisted in his effort to win over the widow Tevlin (Teresa Wright) in his quest for the truth about the man he killed.You know, as I think about the picture now, it might have been better served by reversing the roles of Ayres and Victor Jory, but my opinion might be shaped by having seen Jory in more movies. At that, I've probably seen him more times as a villain than a hero, and he would have given the character of Vanner a harder edge. Not that there's anything wrong with being introspective, but Ayres' interpretation made him too submissive to Mrs. Tevlin once she found out the truth about his identity.Once the story is well under way, you have a pretty good sense of what's coming up in the finale, the only question being whether or not Vanner would be able to successfully surrender. The intervention of Father Gomez (Jory) helped decide that outcome. You know, I had to chuckle to myself during the scene when Vanner confronts the Mexican laborer who was the payroll escort that got robbed to set up the story background. His name was Juan Valdez, and after seeing that Colombian coffee commercial dozens of times over the years, it's a name that's become synonymous with coffee breaks, not payroll robberies.
ronvieth I purchased this as part of a 50 Movie pack of DVD's called Action Classics. While that is not the genre I'd call it, The Capture is well worth the time.The first part of the movie deals with a US oilfield worker in 1935 Mexico. He hunts down and kills a payroll robber. The film then settles into the main part of the story. It is an introspective, psychological analysis of the consequences for himself, and those who remember the dead man. Its all about a search for meaning and truth. The Capture left me with the feeling I used to get, watching the the short stories that were the staple of anthology drama series of the 1950's -- Twilight Zone, or Zane Grey Theatre -- but of course, this feature film has better production values than a TV series. I loved the innocent thoughtful stories that don't seem to be made any more, and The Capture is a fine example them.