Nevada Smith

Nevada Smith (1966) is an American western directed by Henry Hathaway, starring Steve McQueen — watch online on iFILM. McQueen plays a young half-Indian, half-white man whose parents are murdered by three outlaws hunting for gold. He survives. The rest of the film is the years it takes him to track each one down.

A gunsmith takes the boy in, teaches him to shoot properly, and he's on his way. One target is doing time in a Louisiana swamp prison — so Nevada gets himself arrested to get inside. Another has gone quiet somewhere in the backcountry. Karl Malden and Arthur Kennedy play two of the three men he's after, and neither of them plays cartoon evil; the confrontations feel like actual reckoning. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard shot the Louisiana bayou and Nevada desert locations with an eye for how landscape changes the weight of a scene.

At 139 minutes, Hathaway doesn't rush anything, and the pace rewards it. McQueen's revenge isn't driven by hot anger — it's colder and more deliberate than that, which makes the ending land differently than expected. Stream Nevada Smith online on iFILM.