The weirdness of Coroner Creek (1948) lies in the fact that although it is a noirish revenge Western with brutal fighting, including a somewhat famous hand-stomping sequence, it was shot in Cinecolor and scored with chipper-cheerful music, creating a kind of low-rent Brechtian alienation effect.

So watching the movie is a tonally odd experience. The story is pretty decent, though. And I have to give props to a 90-minute film with a dozen key characters who are easy to sort out - this is due to both the strong conceptions from Luke Short’s source novel, and an acting ensemble (Edgar Buchanan, Wallace Ford, George Macready, Sally Eilers, Forrest Tucker, etc) that knows what it’s doing.