Unusual story from the fertile imagination of writer John Meston. Nonethrless, the opening scene is poorly staged, the gunplay clumsily done-- good thing for Matt and Chester that gunmen were such lousy shots. The plot picks up as soon as Paul Richards arrives. Few actors of the time were better able to convey unhinged menace or nervous weakness than Richards. He had that natural air of unpredictability that made his roles especially interesting to watch. Too bad he succumbed to an early death. Morey Amsterdam, later of the Dick Van Dyke Show, is almost unrecognizable as Cicero, the barfly. Still, he plays the grizzled part well. There's some suspense as we try to figure out the phony marshal and what he's up to. Except for the opening and closing scenes, this is a pretty good entry. (In passing-- note the rather dismal view the screenplay adopts toward self-regulation. It makes clear that without a strong central figure to enforce the law, anarchy is the inevitable result. Left to their own devices, men, at least, are inherently destructive. This amounts to a premise behind many Western screenplays and is more in evidence here than usual.)