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All the men belly up to the bar, leering in exaggerated, Fellini-esque poses at Emmy as she lethargically moves down the table pouring whiskey into each glass. Daves' camera tracks right along with her and the spare, haunting theme music by George Duning underscores the scene with an almost hallucinatory feel.

Sending the gang on, Wade begins to methodically woo Emmy and they discover a shared past: He's seen her before, she was once a singer at his favorite watering hole, the Dirty Irishman in Dodge City. Wade begins to recall risque nights there, and how he once spent $300 on a girl named Velvet (I love the vivid specifics of the screenplay). When he talks longingly of the women wearing "real Paris dresses and real Paris perfume, " a smile cracks his face and Wade becomes more human. For a brief moment, the romantic trapped inside the hard veneer of an outlaw can come out and dream of a finer life.

And then it happens: Wade walks around the back of the bar and approaches Emmy. He tells her she looks skinny. She says she feels skinny. He says that's OK as long as a skinny girl has blue eyes. She says her eyes are brown. "That's alright," he says, his voice going deep and lustfully desirous, "they don't have to be blue."

And then he pulls her in for an extrordinarily passionate, guns-a-blazin', five-alarm fireball of a kiss, filmed in tight closeup. It's Bogart and Bergman, it's Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. The coiled sexual tension and misdirected dialogue is so reminiscent of the classic scene in CHINATOWN, when Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes notices a flaw in the iris of Faye Dunaway's Evelyn Mulwray. In short: it's hot.

What comes next is even hotter, and all the more surprising for how seemingly chaste it is. After cutting away to a scene of the marshal's posse, we return to the bar, where Emmy parts a beaded curtain and slowly walks back into the room, followed by Wade. We sense a change in the air. Emmy loosely touches her hair, Wade slightly rearranges his coat. And all of a sudden, you know what's happened. The way they walk, so languidly, the way they huddle close at the bar and look into each other's eyes — they have been making love like fiends in the back room of that bar and the tight closeups, the insistent romantic theme, make you feel like you've witnessed an orgy when you haven't seen a thing.

The scene ends, the fever breaks and a few minutes later a handcuffed Wade is heading for the train to Yuma. Emmy sees him off and is never seen or spoken of again. But she lingers over Wade's actions later in the film: she has changed him irrevocably, even though he may not even know it. She has helped him find his true self.

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As it turned out, he wasn't so bad after all, was he? Redeemed by a good man and his wife....."Besides, I've broken out of Yuma before."

I thought it was one of Ford's best performances - understated, internal, dangerous, and memorable after all these years.

It goes without saying that I loved the whole original - the cinematography, the character actors, the setting, the music - and I can't wait for Russell's version.