"He'll see things we don't," Darryl Zanuck reportedly said when asked how he could assign a western to a European, especially Lang. Curiously, the first of Lang's revenge westerns (see Rancho Notorious) is rather a redemption western, and a gentle, laconic one at that, a follow-up to Henry King's Jesse James in theory only. Henry Fonda's Frank James is hiding out in the alias of his better nature, plowing a field in the Ozarks, when he hears of his brother Jesse's murder in Denver. His reluctant revenge is sidelined by mob violence (a return to Fury) and the arrest of his innocent black sidekick, with newspaper reporter Gene Tierney playing the role of his conscience. Lang understood the mythical dimension of the western, noting "it is what the Saga of the Nibelungen is for the European." The extraordinary feel for the outdoors in lush fields and in the Rockies is a departure for Lang in his first color film.