Director Edwin Marin is a complete unknown to me and, after watching this mediocre B Western, I certainly hope not to see much more from him.
I like supporting actor Ed Buchanan very much but in this film his part is just too small and he keeps saying the same cowardly things, so by the end he had me successfully annoyed and wishing that a stray bullet killed his part.
Randy Scott doesn't do badly at all - in fact, he made me jealous for French-kissing the delectable Ann Dvorak (lovely legs!) Ann steals the show with more than her sparkling beauty - the scene where she breaks everything in her dressing room is spectacular and presages the saloons getting torn asunder toward the end.
As much as I tried to ignore it, I just didn't like Scott's kinda biblical quotation about the tame always winning. His tame sheriff just kills the baddie and flees the bullets. How tame is that?
The screenplay would have you believe that a town of businessmen would link up with commoners and poor people to stand up to a rowdy bunch of stampeders who thought nothing of killing a few innocents. The whole plot is resolved in such a preposterous manner that naif Llloyd Bridges even finds his match in beautiful Rhonda Fleming, who equally naively sells him 400 spools of barbed wire (no doubt Abilene beat the world to the Industrial Revolution and churned out barbed wire like there was no tomorrow, that's how the West was won!)
Laughably incredible script, lazy photography not helped by archive shots of cattle on the run. Unfortunately, some of the footage looks fake, especially the segment where the elderly homesteader and his wife are trampled inside the wooden house they were building.
Middling B pic.
I like supporting actor Ed Buchanan very much but in this film his part is just too small and he keeps saying the same cowardly things, so by the end he had me successfully annoyed and wishing that a stray bullet killed his part.
Randy Scott doesn't do badly at all - in fact, he made me jealous for French-kissing the delectable Ann Dvorak (lovely legs!) Ann steals the show with more than her sparkling beauty - the scene where she breaks everything in her dressing room is spectacular and presages the saloons getting torn asunder toward the end.
As much as I tried to ignore it, I just didn't like Scott's kinda biblical quotation about the tame always winning. His tame sheriff just kills the baddie and flees the bullets. How tame is that?
The screenplay would have you believe that a town of businessmen would link up with commoners and poor people to stand up to a rowdy bunch of stampeders who thought nothing of killing a few innocents. The whole plot is resolved in such a preposterous manner that naif Llloyd Bridges even finds his match in beautiful Rhonda Fleming, who equally naively sells him 400 spools of barbed wire (no doubt Abilene beat the world to the Industrial Revolution and churned out barbed wire like there was no tomorrow, that's how the West was won!)
Laughably incredible script, lazy photography not helped by archive shots of cattle on the run. Unfortunately, some of the footage looks fake, especially the segment where the elderly homesteader and his wife are trampled inside the wooden house they were building.
Middling B pic.