User Reviews

Charles Starrett consistently made the Top Ten Cowboy list every year for a decade or so. Part of that was the fact that movies like his were Columbia's bread and butter and they knew how to turn out a smart-looking programmer on the cheap, even with a good singing act (here, the Sons of the Pioneers) and comic relief (Pat Buttram).

Mostly, though, it was because Starrett played a smart guy who led the story into complications that most B movies didn't explore. In this one, Ann Doran's brother has been killed, and Starrett has shown up just too late, so he conspires to help her save the ranch, using a spy and a song-and-dance to fool chief villain Dick Curtis. Is the plot too complicated to succeed? That's the sort of question most B movies didn't ask.

Fans of B Westerns will be happy to see Hank Bell with his unlikely mustache in a substantial role. Hank was in more than four hundred westerns in a career that stretched from 1920 through his death in 1950. No western would look complete without him.

You can sit back and relax with this one. Your mind will never be prompted to ask about who or what is good or bad. Any inquisitive spirit you have will be smothered as a flame sprayed with carbon tetrachloride. Foom! Out.

We have Starrett as the good guy. You can tell he's the hero even without hearing him speak or act. He wears a monumental broad-brimmed white hat the size of the now-defunct Brown Derby. The rest of his outfit is black except for a very long and very decorative white neckerchief, and maybe a couple of silver accents on his boots and spurs. He rides the only white horse in the movie. He's also the only handsome actor in the movie. The bad guy, Baker, is dressed in undistinguished shades of gray except for his black hat. And what a peculiar face -- dwindling down from his brow into a weak pointed chin above which there is a tiny mouth like a limpet's crowned by an evil-looking dark mustache.

Ann Doran is there because the movie needs a woman, in this case a put-upon rancher whom the heavies are trying to put out of business. (The rest of the plot isn't worth going into.) The Sons of the Pioneers (sans Ken Curtis) are there to provide some comic relief and to sing two songs in their distinctive harmony. There's another guy, the stud duck for Doran's ranch, who has a handlebar mustache like James Finlayson's in the Laurel and Hardy movies and he provides some jokes too. There are some other actors. I forget who they are or what they did. Some of them get shot. All the ones that get shot are heavies.

It's the kind of Western that Mel Brooks sent up in "Blazing Saddles." What kept Brooks' movie from being more amusing was that this kind of Western was already out of date. Low-budget B Westerns had disappeared long ago, about the time the public was OD'ing on cheap TV Western series that have now themselves been forgotten, with names like, "Wanted: Dead or Alive," and "Have Gun, Will Travel," and "High Chapparal."

But the thing is that movies like this filled up a lot of Saturday afternoon matinees for kids as the second (or sometimes third) feature, or should I say "feature"? (It's only an hour long.) The kids ate up the gunplay along with the jujubees and Good 'n Plenties. Watching this monstrous thing is like being Twilight Zoned back into a pre-World War II period when, I guess, kids wore beanies and knickers and sneaks. At least that's how I imagined them. The contemporary audience for this movie, although existing only in fantasy, was more interesting than the movie itself.

But see it if you need reassurance. Watch a digital world in which good is unquestionably good and evil is devoutly evil. It's an historical period piece, a chronicle of the times.