Peckinpah's first feature film is an understated, yet solid, Western. The film stars Brian Keith (who had worked with Peckinpah on The Westerner television series) as "Yellowleg", a gunman who escorts a dancehall girl (O'Hara) across the desert in order to bury her recently deceased son alongside the boy's father. Their journey is complicated by unfriendly Indians as well as Yellowleg's treacherous partners (played by Chill Wills and Steve Cochran).

The film suffers from a lackluster script, this being Peckinpah's only film on which he was allowed little or no freedom to brush up the dialogue or make further revisions of the screenplay. Chill Wills comes across well as "Turkey" who constantly rambles on about forming his own Confederate army and carrying on the Civil War. Brian Keith's character is the first of many Peckinpah protagonists driven by revenge (which he seeks against the man who had tried to scalp him years earlier), as well as regret (he is responsible for the boy's accidental shooting).

As a foreshadowing of what was to come in Peckinpah's career, the studio imposed a drastic cut in the film without his consent. In a scene near the climax of the film, Keith's character was supposed to shoot Cochran's character point-blank in a cold-blooded fashion. Perhaps viewing this as too ruthless, the studio edited the scene to make it appear that Cochran has been shot by Chill Wills' character from a distant rooftop. The results are very disorienting.