I don't like modern Westerns. Even as meticulously accurate a history as 1993's Tombstone, with all the contributing artists turning in splendid job performances, left me cold because at the end of the movie all that stayed with me was the mind-numbing brutality of ceaseless violence.

Spoiler warning.

Crossfire Trail has its share of violence, including a climactic firefight, but there is a gentleness and intelligence to Charles Robert Carner's screenwriting that overcame the cliches of Louis Lamour's original story. Come on. Is there a more hoary melodrama than the one about the evil banker using a mortgage to blackmail a beautiful widow? All that's missing from this choice of villain is mustache twirling and maniacal laughing. But given that genre prescription, Carner instead gives us an epistemological mystery: the widow has to use her powers of deductive reasoning to figure out whether the handsome banker is trying to protect her from a con man trying to take advantage of her grief, or whether the handsome stranger claiming to be fulfilling a promise to her dead husband is there to protect her interests from the banker.

The cast, led off by Tom Selleck and Virginia Madsen, is ably assisted by Wilford Brimley and Mark Harmon, among others. The directing is good, the photography suitably expansive. But this production deserves special kudos for getting the details of the old West dead-on accurate, with every firearm being portrayed historically accurately, and even details of costuming showing loving care. Moreover, I haven't seen that many westerns with dialogue discussing Beethoven, and poetry quoted from Milton. It's nice to see, for once, that just because a cowboy could get physical he wasn't necessarily an ignorant moron.

This is a Western that could have been made in the golden age of Westerns. It overcame my skepticism and I give it a rating of 8 out of 10.