Fascinating cast

James "Maverick" Garner as a hard-boiled character, (he would play another in "Hour of the Gun", the next year).

Sidney Poitier in a secondary role when he was one of the biggest stars in movies at the time- much bigger than Garner.

Dennis "Chester" Weaver playing a mean-spirted bigot.

Bibi Andersson, giving American films a try after all those years with Ingmar Bergman, (this film came out the same year as the rather different "Persona").

Bill Travers from "Born Free", which also came out that year.

All directed by Ralph Nelson, who would do another not very similar film, "Charly", a couple of years later.

Then there's the jazzy score by Neal Hefti, who did the music for "Batman"

But somehow, it all works.

Poitier is the most interesting case. I think everybody wanted to be in a western those days because they'd grown up with them. He may have wanted to be in a western for reasons beyond that. The old west was full of blacks, (that's where people went to start over again in the 19th century and all of the ex-slaves had a need for that: I've heard that 40% of cowboys were black and there was an entire regiment of cavalry that was black), but there were virtually absent from the Hollywood West. I think he took this role- and later did Buck and the Preacher to put an end to that. He also may have liked it specifically because he's not playing a "black man". He's playing an ex-Army sergeant who breaks horses for the Army. As he said the next year in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" to his father: "You think of yourself as a black man. I think of myself as a man." That's a breakthrough, too.