It is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 Japanese film Rashomon, based on stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, adapted to an American setting. Like Kurosawa's film, four people give contradictory accounts of a rape and murder. Ritt utilizes flashbacks to provide these contradictory accounts.[4]
Plot
Three disparate travelers — a disillusioned preacher, an unsuccessful prospector, and a larcenous, cynical con man — meet at a decrepit railroad station in the 1870s Southwest United States. The prospector and the preacher were witnesses at the rape and murder trial of the notorious bandit Juan Carrasco. The bandit duped an aristocratic Southerner, Colonel Wakefield, into believing he knew the location of a lost Aztec treasure. While the greedy "gentleman" was bound to a tree and gagged, Carrasco assaulted his wife Nina. These events lead to the stabbing of the husband. Carrasco was tried, convicted, and condemned for the crimes.
Everyone's account on the witness stand differed dramatically. Carrasco claimed that Wakefield was tied up with ropes while Nina was assaulted, after which he killed the colonel in a duel. The newlywed wife contends that she was the one who killed her husband because he accused her of leading on Carrasco and causing the rape. The dead man "testifies" through a third witness, an old Indian shaman, who said that neither of those accounts was true. The shaman insists that the colonel used a jeweled dagger to commit suicide after the incident.
There was a fourth witness, the prospector, one with a completely new view of what actually took place. But can his version be trusted?.
