In its review of E. L. Doctorow’s debut novel, Welcome to Hard Times, the basis for this 1960s revisionist Western, the New York Times said, “Perhaps the primary theme of the novel is that evil can only be resisted psychically: when the rational controls that order man’s existence slacken, destruction comes.” Its view of pure wickedness—personified by a terrifying Aldo Ray as an unrelenting sadist who rides into a small town and proceeds to terrorize the inhabitants—has been compared to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A dramatic, symbolic, and unusual Western.