Robert Mitchum stars as a big Texan with a big reputation as a hunter of game of all kinds; as one onlooker warns him at the film's start, "It's gonna be open season on you, so long as you go poaching on the preserves of love." Much of the drama centers around Mitchum's ambiguous relationships with his wife (Eleanor Parker), son (George Hamilton) and illegitimate son (George Peppard) as a result of his sexual profligacy. But in his treatment of the big-game, small-town milieu surrounding the central characters, Vincente Minnelli provides the quintessential "wide-screen" experience:
"While many other directors of the fifties complained about the framing problems Cinemascope had created, Minnelli's painterly eye seemed to relish the challenge. Indeed, his love of the visual surface flourished in the new medium even more than it had in the square-screen format. Minnelli was a master of the tableau vivant who quickened his wholly artificial world with an almost strange animation. The result is a magic combination of highly charged performances, liquid camera movement and a visual sensuousity akin to the full-color magazine advertisements of the fifties. His most unusual feature is his selection of actors who, more often than not, distract the spectator's eye from the main characters and infer the neighboring presence of many other stories and alluring personalities. One suspects Minnelli himself of having a 'roving eye.'" J.H.