Jethro Compton's Frontier Trilogy: The Clock Strikes Noon

Two desperate men are trapped in a church, relying on their pistols and wits to fight or argue their way out. And we're trapped with them. The second instalment in Jethro Compton's Frontier Trilogy is a one-room thriller that makes full, spine-chilling use of his immersive wooden chapel setting. 

The American Pacific Railroad is making its way to the coast at breakneck pace; and they're laying the tracks almost as fast as they're running the trains. The clearest path runs through Cooper's Ridge, but the mountain farmers who live there won't give up their hard-earned homesteads without a fight. The town's sheriff Felix Jackson (a convincingly silver-tongued Jonathan Mathews) has fought with the best of them, but he's holed up in the church with Ben Walker (Sam Donnelly), a bullish rival for his waning authority.

Lily Davenport is sent in, white handkerchief raised, to negotiate: Bebe Sanders's tightly wound performance is more equal to her transformation from sanctimonius railroad Daddy's girl to gun-toting shyster. What follows is a knife-edge set of double-crossings and triple-crossings, as the farmers bargain for their homesteads and their lives. 

The idiom of Western movies is built on wide open spaces that just can't be replicated in the theatre: rolling prairies, gunman glimpsed on a ridge, covered wagons, tumbleweed towns sleepy and waiting for trouble. Compton's decision to confine this instalment of his trilogy to a single chapel setting, taut under the ticking omnipresence of the clock, gives it a claustrophobic power that makes it the strongest of the three.