Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

zardoz-13 "Prisoners of the Casbah" director Richard L. Bare's "Shoot Out at Medicine Bend" qualifies as an entertaining, lightweight, black & white western with Randolph Scott and James Garner. This fish-out-of-water oater looks like it might have been inspired by the Gary Cooper's Quaker Civil War movie "Friendly Persuasion." Our rough-riding heroes impersonate Quakers after the dastardly villains rob them of everything. This western has the flavor of a vintage Warner Brothers' with Errol Flynn.This western gets off to an exciting start with Captain Buck Devlin (Randolph Scott), Sergeant John Maitland (James Garner), and Pvt. Wilbur 'Will' Clegg (Gordon Jones), freshly mustered out of the cavalry, showing up at Buck's brother's house as Indians are shooting the place up. It seems that Buck's brother Dan Devlin (Ed Hinton) has been sold defective cartridges for his repeating rifle. The Indians kill Dan because he cannot get his long gun to fire. Buck and company run the Indians off. Dan's neighbors explain how they came to get the faulty ammunition. Buck and his friends decide to ride to Medicine Bend to clear up the skulduggery. Before our heroes reach town, they bathe in a pond, and several stealthy owl hoots steal not only their horses but also their guns, uniforms, and the money that they had taken up from the community. Left with little to wear, the destitute threesome wander into a congregation of Quakers camped out on the prairie. The Brethren explain that they, too, have been robbed by three ruffians in cavalry uniforms. They furnish our heroes with Quaker garments and horses, and Buck and company head off to Medicine Bend. No sooner do they ride into Medicine Bend than they discover the chief culprit is shady entrepreneur Ep Clark (James Craig of "Drums in the Deep South"). Clark stole Buck's horse, and he owns a crooked mercantile store where he sells shoddy goods. He has the town sheriff, the mayor, and most of the townspeople under his thumb, and he acts like a gangster when anybody threatens his business. Our heroes masquerade as Quakers after they enter Medicine Bend. Buck watches as Clark's henchmen, Rafe Sanders (Myron Healey of "African Manhunt") and Clyde Walters (John Alderson of "Cleopatra"), vandalize King's General Store. They smash eggs, sabotage a canister, and smear black grease on white muslin. Intervening on behalf of the storekeeper, Buck makes his interference appear like a blundering buffoon who gets in the way of Rafe and Clyde, while he picks Rafe's pocket and steals the amount sufficient to replace the damaged goods. Meantime, Buck persuades Maitland and Clegg to go undercover and work at Clark's Pioneer Emporium. Buck approaches Mr. Elam King (Harry Harvey) about helping him contend with Clark and his hooligans. Buck, Maitland, and Clegg undermine Clark's business, and Buck becomes romantically involved with King's pretty daughter Priscilla King (Angie Dickinson of "Rio Bravo") after she catches him trying to clean up his wounds. Rafe tried to set a trap to catch Maitland and Clegg, but Buck warned them off. He falls into the trap, but he manages to escape before Clark and company can catch him red-handed in the act. Instead, Clyde winds up plunging into the deep well hidden beneath the floor of Clark's office. Later, the pioneers that were robbed are privately reimbursed.Clark discovers the masquerade after saloon songbird Nell Garrison (Dani Janssen of "Written on the Wind") exposes Clegg as an impostor. Sheriff Bob Massey (Trevor Bardette) arrests Maitland and Clegg, but Buck gets away. Clark has Massey stage a kangaroo trial that sentences the sergeant and the private to swing on the gallows. When Nell convinces Massey to release them, Rafe surprises the lawman and kills him. Meanwhile, Clark and his henchmen ambush the wagon train bound for King's General Store. Although Clark waylays the wagon train, Buck manages to save his companions from swinging. Inevitably, Clark and Buck shoot it out in Clark's general store and then swap blows in a rugged fistfight. Clark has Buck subdued and is poised to shoot him down in cold blood when he gets a taste of his own medicine. The cartridges in the rifle don't work, and Buck kills him with a scythe. This tongue-in-cheek western features a solid cast headed by the ever dependable Randolph Scott. James Garner plays second banana and former Green Hornet star Gordon Jones provides the comic relief. Craig makes a stern villain in city slicker's regalia. Harry Lauter and Myron Healey are well cast as Clark's accomplices. Warner Brothers' stock players proliferate in this amusing dust raiser.

Robert J. Maxwell If you're interested in a 1957 Randolph Scott Western, this may be what you're looking for. It's reassuringly routine. There are virtually no surprises. This is a fixed point in a changing and disappointing universe.Scott and two friends (Garner and Jones) are just mustered out of the US Army and are jumped and robbed outside of the town of Medicine Bend. They adopt the dun clothing of the members of a local religious cult and pose as members of the sect while they investigate the town and try to find the thieves.They discover that the town is run by one corrupt gang and its leader, Craig, who have stolen everything from migrants passing through on their way to greener pastures. Scott steals it all back, routs the gang, restores the town to a state of probity, and continues on his way West, with Angie Dickinson at his side.It's interesting to see Scott in masquerade, wearing his "Quaker" hat and saying "thee" and "thou", though never without a slight smirk. There are a couple of incidents of interest too. At the climax, in a mano a mano fist fight with the mastermind -- the kind of fight Scott always wins -- he gets knocked unconscious. That's curious in itself. But then the director explicitly shows us a ripped-open bean sack on the balcony spilling its seeds onto the metal tops of a couple of empty cans and the sound is that of a small hailstorm. It has nothing to do with the plot. The director, Richard Bare, probably indulged his whim to film what looked like a cinematically interesting flow of beans onto metal -- and it nicely breaks up the series of easily predicted actions. Good for him.In the same fight, the ritual always requires the bad guy to pick up a piece of furniture or something to use as a weapon and play dirty pool. Craig picks up a rifle but it misfires. Then he pulls from the wall a gigantic SCYTHE suitable for use by the Grim Reaper, Father Time, or Chronus himself, and takes a roundhouse swing at Scott's head. Alas, he misses and perishes by the scythe.

classicsoncall Here's something I never thought about before - Randolph Scott and James Garner appearing in the same picture. Appropriately it was a Western, with the pair, along with Gordon Jones, comprising a trio of cavalry men resigning their posts to investigate the killing of Captain Buck Devlin's (Scott) brother due to faulty ammunition he purchased via a trading post in Medicine Bend. Along the way, the boys are hijacked of their clothes and horses while taking a swim, and manage to reinvent themselves due to a chance encounter with a band of Quakers who have been similarly robbed by the same bunch. Interestingly, by the time the story was over, it was never established who those robbers were, but all signs point to Ep Clark (James Craig) and his bunch at Medicine Bend.If I hadn't seen Angie Dickinson's name in the opening credits, I wouldn't have been on the lookout for her, and probably would have missed her presence as Priscilla King, niece of a shopkeeper in competition with the entire Clark enterprise. She manages to figure out Buck Devlin's connection to recovered stolen money and goods suffered by local homesteaders, becoming a willing ally and nominal romantic interest for Scott's character. Garner and Jones have to tough it out under wraps as Quakers for the entire picture, swigging buttermilk at the local saloon instead of whiskey. Except for that unfortunate incident when Private Klegg (Jones) spills his guts to Ep Clark's saloon singer Nell (Dani Crayne) when he drops his guard and starts knocking 'em down. It all worked out OK though; about that time Nell had a change of heart and opted out of the murder racket.Whenever I see Randolph Scott pop up in a picture, I'm always on the lookout for a fair share of outfit changes, and in this one, they were built into the story. His character is in and out of the Quaker duds more than once, exchanging them for an all black outfit in which he lays waste to Clark's henchmen while recovering money and jewelry for the homesteaders. As I think about it now, Devlin shouldn't have been able to get out of that scrape of falling through the trap door in the floor of Clark's business office, but then the story would have ended right there. After all, the good guys have to come out on top.Here's the thing I couldn't figure out - in the early going, Devlin managed to filch a couple hundred bucks from Clark and his goon Walters without their knowledge. Clark got so incensed that he had Mayor Sam (Don Beddoe) set a reward of a thousand dollars for the capture of the perpetrator. You don't need a whole lot of math experience to know that that was a bad deal.

wombatdc 'Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend was entertaining, but not a great Scott western. I enjoyed the 'Quaker' touch though; for a western, it was different. Simply, Scott is out for revenge for his brother who was killed, along with his men, using defective ammunition. James Craig had substituted gunpowder with coal dust to make a larger profit on ammunition sold to Scott's brother and friends. He also cheats his customers and competitors in other ways; he is the original 'shoddy retailer of the west.' Along the way to revenge, he mixes with 'Quakers' and learns to respect their ways. In the end, there is a comedic brawl with the James Craig faction in which Scott exacts his revenge. Scott is ably helped by James Garner and Gordon Jones; with Angie Dickinson and Dani Crayne as love interests. This is a definite below average, though very entertaining, western for Scott. I give it a C-.