Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Micransix Crappy film

discount1957 For his last western, veteran director Dwan transforms Fisher's crude revenge plot into a gentle comedy. Brady is the son of a government agent out to revenge his father's death, Davis the outlaw leader who inhabits a Mexican-American border town and Bancroft the girl who gets her man. Made on a minuscule budget, the film has an austerity and formality about it that few films achieve. As a delightful touch (and a throwback to the days of silent cinema)Dwan has the characters appear to be perpetually eavesdropping on each other. A marvellous film.The music is by the producer's son, Edward Alperson Jr. Phil Hardy

dsewizzrd-1 Edward L. Alperson turns his clumsy hand to westerns in this very ordinary film.An attorney and a marshal are baffled as to how a marshal was killed in a border town densely populated by bandits. The attorney whose father it was vows revenge.He repays the kindness of a missionary by sexually assaulting his adopted daughter.What looks like Epstein from "Welcome Back Kotter" is the town sneak who peeps through windows but is too cowardly to shoot, but this potentially interesting subplot is not really developed.The attorney wins through a clumsy and obvious subterfuge.

bob the moo When his father is murdered trying to stop the illegal sale of guns across the Mexican border, his son, Mitch Baker, leaves his job and sets out for revenge. He arrives in the small western town to find it lawless and rowdy.He finds lodging with a local reverend and his adopted children and starts to fall for the eldest – the beautiful Angelita, but at the same time his desire for revenge and justice begin to eat him up inside. The reverend and Marshall Steve Evans both try and save him from himself. From the opening cheese of the title song (which is awful!) you know that you are in b-movie land, and you'd be right to believe that for that is just what this film is. The plot is the usual revenge storyline with the usual romance thrown in to stretch it out. It is rather plodding at times and one has to wonder why it moves so very slowly and without action – usually b-movies will fall back on tough talk and tough action to cover the lacking substance. For what it is it just about manages to be passable as a film but it is not great and it is also frustrating because it has elements that could have been used to better effect.The character of Mitch is the main element that the film could have used better. He is a haunted, lonely man who needs saving just as much as the town he has come to does. However, other than referring to this several times during the film, it doesn't actually do anything interesting with it – certainly all we see of this inner pain is that Mitch gets drunk once and staggers round town for 10 minutes like a bear with a sore head. Of course this failing and others all come down to the fact that there really isn't much of a script here and much of it is contrived to try and make it reach a respectable running time. Like I said, it still does what you expect it to (it certainly gets no worse than the title song!) but it could have been a much better movie, albeit still a b-movie.The cast reflects the film's status. Brady is hardly a memorable leading man and he can't mange to make a complex character out of the material he is given. Instead it's like he flicks between normal mode and 'painful' mode, contributing to the feeling that the inner suffering thread is not really a thread so much as an afterthought that doesn't work. Bancroft's involvement is made more interesting by the fact that she is better known now than then.Her character is flat though and she can do nothing with it apart from the usual love interest stuff, sadly she isn't even good enough looking to fill the traditional role of the genre. The rest of the cast are very much b-movie fare – some are OK (Flippen and Davis) but some are poor (Gordon's Cherokee in particular).Overall this is below average for the b-movie genre. It does what you expect it to do and it isn't actually that bad but it doesn't really do anything well at all – from acting, the script, action right through to the delivery. It's just a shame that it didn't manage to do anything of note with the central character of Mitch other than hint at him having a character that is hardly touched on by the script.

rsoonsa Stalwart Scott Brady plays Mitch Baker, an attorney whose father, a Secret Service agent, has been slain in a southern Texas town by the leader of a renegade band of Americans that is selling arms to Emperor Maximilian's army in Mexico, and Mitch treks to the site of his father's death with a design of vengeance in this film set in 1865. The script is weakly composed with markedly inferior dialogue that is responsible for denying the actors an opportunity to interpret their roles, and with a considerable amount of anachronism, such as when the local marshal berates Mitch for behaviour stemming from an overwhelming "ego", a word not introduced into public parlance until Sigmund Freud culturally explicated it in the 20th century. Veteran director Allan Dwan is as effective as his scenarios will allow, accounting for his slack helmsmanship here in a work that begs for more substantive editing, denied instead because of its pronounced musical emphasis including three songs penned by producer Edward Alperson to the pleasing melodies of Raoul Kraushaar, used almost without reprieve to the point of characters whistling the tunes and having a reductive effect during moments of plotted suspense. The acting is uneven with Brady impressive in his scenes, brief but first-rate turns from Myron Healey and James Flavin, while Rhys Williams creates a defined part as a lay preacher; but Anne Bancroft's lines are too trite for her to make believable, Jim Davis is too little used, and fey Scott Marlowe is woefully miscast as a twitchy would-be gunfighter who eavesdrops during most of his scenes, a recurring event in the film since virtually all of the action follows upon someone overhearing private conversations, a tedious ploy following from unimaginative writing. Only a slender budget was available for the production made in southern California's high desert region near Apple Valley where a small set was created with notable contributions from Ernst Fegte for interior design and Howard Bristol for his detailed sets, able John Boyle being responsible for the camerawork in luminous Eastmancolor.