Peaceful Joel McRae is riding along minding his own business, stopping to share some water with his horse, when -- BANG -- the horse is killed and -- BANG -- McRae catches a bullet right in the retroperitoneal sac. Stunned, he falls, and sees a blurry image of a man emptying McRae's canteen on the ground. Right away, we know that there are some evildoers around.
What follows is an ordinary but inoffensive Western with some unusual twists. McRae's wound heals overnight after he is picked up by a wagon train of honest, God fearing sons of the soil. Their leader, James Dobson, obviously a sneak because he wears the tumultuous mustache of a sneak and looks sneaky, is taking them to Bishop's Valley, prime cattle land owned by McRae's hot-headed, burly half brother, Barry Kelley. There is an ongoing feud between McRae and Kelley.
It becomes clear that the wagon train's leader plans to start a range war between Kelley and the aspiring farmers. The goal is to have them kill each other off and take over the lot. Dobson is also in cahoots with the men who shot McRae and his horse, although it's not made clear why they did it.
In any case, the plot gets twisted. There are myriad lies and misunderstandings. But a couple of things save the movie from abject mediocrity. Those couple of things include Virginia Mayo's generous bosom, for instance. Her neckline was pretty daring for the period. She was never a bravura actress but she was pretty and was good at tarty roles, as in "The Best Years of Our Lives" and "White Heat." Another redeeming feature is in the casting of traditional "bad guys" as good guys for a change. The brutish Leo Gordon is an island of sanity in the Bishop Ranch's higher echelon. Michael Pate, usually a vile Indian, is a sympathetic ranch hand with some medical talent. Michael Ansara is stuck with the role of the handsome, oily, treacherous Mexican villain, despite his Syrian ancestry. He's fine in the role, as long as he doesn't have to produce any extended utterances.
And although I'm not a gun freak it's nice to see that the property department came up with Henry repeating rifles instead of the later Winchesters, this being the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. A minor thing, true, but it reflects at least a little care on someone's part. The fist fights are brutal and the bruises don't disappear from one scene to the next.
That there is a final shoot out should come as no surprise, but the ending leaves a few loose ends. (Who gets the ranch?)
What follows is an ordinary but inoffensive Western with some unusual twists. McRae's wound heals overnight after he is picked up by a wagon train of honest, God fearing sons of the soil. Their leader, James Dobson, obviously a sneak because he wears the tumultuous mustache of a sneak and looks sneaky, is taking them to Bishop's Valley, prime cattle land owned by McRae's hot-headed, burly half brother, Barry Kelley. There is an ongoing feud between McRae and Kelley.
It becomes clear that the wagon train's leader plans to start a range war between Kelley and the aspiring farmers. The goal is to have them kill each other off and take over the lot. Dobson is also in cahoots with the men who shot McRae and his horse, although it's not made clear why they did it.
In any case, the plot gets twisted. There are myriad lies and misunderstandings. But a couple of things save the movie from abject mediocrity. Those couple of things include Virginia Mayo's generous bosom, for instance. Her neckline was pretty daring for the period. She was never a bravura actress but she was pretty and was good at tarty roles, as in "The Best Years of Our Lives" and "White Heat." Another redeeming feature is in the casting of traditional "bad guys" as good guys for a change. The brutish Leo Gordon is an island of sanity in the Bishop Ranch's higher echelon. Michael Pate, usually a vile Indian, is a sympathetic ranch hand with some medical talent. Michael Ansara is stuck with the role of the handsome, oily, treacherous Mexican villain, despite his Syrian ancestry. He's fine in the role, as long as he doesn't have to produce any extended utterances.
And although I'm not a gun freak it's nice to see that the property department came up with Henry repeating rifles instead of the later Winchesters, this being the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. A minor thing, true, but it reflects at least a little care on someone's part. The fist fights are brutal and the bruises don't disappear from one scene to the next.
That there is a final shoot out should come as no surprise, but the ending leaves a few loose ends. (Who gets the ranch?)