Pilgrim's Progress in the Wild West

Although PURGATORY is ostensibly a cowboy movie, it has deeper significances and someone could have transposed the plot (and maybe it has already been done) to a village almost anywhere in the world; imagine Brigadoon converted to the Old West.

A gang of outlaws on the run from a posse blunders into the very inconspicuous town of Refuge. Although they have no money and no manners, and a flimsy story about being the victims of an Indian raid, they are made welcome by the very mild tempered townsfolk. It gradually becomes apparent to the youngest and least villanous member of this gang that this town and each of its residents has some great secret.

Let's face it, the title of the movie gives it away: This town is the waystation of the nearly damned - at least in the western prairies. The dead who teeter between qualifying for heaven or for hell arrive here for ten years of a structured environment; if they avoid violence and other temptations for ten years then they get to go to heaven. If they slip up, there's an elderly Indian at the town gate who will lead them to the edge of a fiery bottomless canyon. The residents of this town have all adopted new names but they remember their lives as notorious troublemakers.

Come to think of it, we have seen glimmers of this in some other movies. There was a Ray Milland TV movie about 30 years ago about a western town, filled with transplanted New Englanders, named San Melas (Salem spelled backward). In one of his theatrical films, Clint Eastwood was a ghost who came back to raise hell at the town that had lynched him. In the Quick and the Dead, Gene Hackman was a preternatural villain named Herod, presiding as absolute dictator of a town that deliberately welcomed murderers. But PURGATORY is remarkably well done, especially considering that it is a TV movie. It ends, as we hope all horse operas do, with something resembling the shoot-out at the OK Corral. If I had to force myself to find a flaw in this story, I think that some of the characters did not die within a decade of each other (and Doc Holliday was a dentist not a surgeon).