If you can overlook its ending, 3:10 to Yuma is a tough and resonant Western and an elegiac noir, based on an early Elmore Leonard story. Drawing elements from High Noon (one man's courage in a weak-willed town) and Shane (Van Heflin as a family rancher), it's less ponderously mythic than either. With ill-defined self-loathing, Heflin is desperate for dollars to keep his ranch solvent. He agrees to transport a murderer (Glenn Ford, in convincing reverse casting) to the train depot-hence the film's title-for the lazy sheriff (“If it's a killing, I'm supposed to wake him,” explains the bar girl. “It's only for robberies I don't wake him”). The cold black-and-white images are subjected to flamboyant camera work typical of Delmer Daves, director of several other compelling late-fifties Westerns (especially Jubal and The Hanging Tree), who had lived with Navajos as a child. In 3:10 to Yuma, he has everyone underplay the arch dialogue: “Safe? Who knows what's safe? I know a man dropped dead from looking at his wife. My own grandmother fought Indians for sixty years and choked to death on a lemon pie.”