User Reviews

THREE HOURS TO KILL 1954

This 1954 western film is a Columbia Pictures production and stars Dana Andrews, Donna Reed, Stephen Elliot, Diane Foster and Richard Coogan.

Andrews and Miss Reed are an item, which annoys Reed's brother, Richard Webb. One evening, when a little too much whiskey has flowed, Webb ends up dead in an alley and Andrews is found standing over him with gun in hand. Andrews swears he did not do the killing. The town's folk quickly decide on some quick justice and a rope is soon produced. A lynching is going to be the highlight of the night. Andrews manages to escape into the dark though he does collect a rather severe rope burn on the neck.

Several years later, Andrews comes riding back into town looking for a bit of payback. Most of the locals feel bad about the attempted hanging but are still convinced Andrews killed Webb. Andrews though has a reputation as handy with a gun and no one tries to arrest him. Andrews looks up his old friend, Stephen Elliot. Elliot is now the town Sheriff. The two calmly discuss the matter of Andrews being a wanted man. Neither man wants gun-play between them.

Andrews asks for the three hours till sundown to find the real killer. Stephen gives him the time. The next few hours are spent "talking" with several of the people who tried to hang him. He figures that one of them had set him up. This solves nothing. Now Andrews wants to talk with Miss Reed who turns out to married and has a child. (The kid is actually Andrews' child)

Anyways, there is a string knockdown drag out fistfights and threats of killing before Andrews can eliminate most of the suspects. Needless to say it turns out that the real murderer is Sheriff Elliot. Elliot had owed a large amount in gambling debts and the dead man held the paper.

The look of the film is good with veteran director Albert Werker and cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr pushing all the right buttons.

The screen play by Richard Alan Simmons and Roy Huggins is based upon a story by Alex Gottlieb. The film is sort of a western mixed in with a bit of crime mystery. There are several female characters, Carolyn Jones and Charlotte Fletcher whose presence is not needed. They are simply red herrings and there are already enough fish of this variety in the film already. (And I am a fan of Miss Jones)

All in all, a watchable western that gets the job done for the genre fan.

Dana Andrews has an interesting distinction in that he's been the recipient of a lynch mob's justice in two films--"The Ox-Bow Incident" and "Three Hours to Kill". However, he survived the ordeal in this film and has returned three years later to find out the real murderer, clear his name and exact revenge.

Soon after returning to town after this long absence, Andrews recalls the incidents that led to his hanging through the use of a flashback. He and another man got into a fist fight and Andrews got beaten (an oddity that a hero loses a fight in a western). While Andrews was unconscious, the man who beat him was shot with Andrews' gun. Not surprisingly, the town automatically assumed Andrews did it. However, they took justice into their own hands and tried to hang him. He escaped only because his fiancé (Donna Reed) stood up to the crowd and forced them at gunpoint to let him go. So who did the killing and why? And, what is the secret that Reed hides that comes as a huge surprise to her ex-fiancé? Tune in and see.

This film is highly reminiscent of a non-western, "Fury". Both concern a man unjustly attacked by a mob that returns to even the score--and both are well worth seeing. Well written, acted and directed--a very good western.

I'm always amused when the theme of a movie has to do with an accused man returning to the scene of a crime with the intent of finding the real killer. It always makes me think of O.J. Simpson and how, if he had been as persistent as Dana Andrews, might have been totally in the clear by now. Maybe he's still trying, I kind of lost track.

Say, that was a pretty realistic looking fight between Jim Guthrie (Andrews) and Niles Hendricks (Richard Coogan) in the first half of the picture. I don't think I've ever seen two guys get so banged up rolling down hill into bushes and trees the way they did. That lent an authenticity to their quarrel that you usually don't see in most pictures.

This is the second Western in a row I've seen in which the main character, in this case Guthrie, discovers that his former flame married in his absence but had a son from their earlier relationship. Rory Calhoun faced the same situation in 1965's "Black Spurs" and wound up not upsetting the new status quo as it were once the story came to an end. I thought Donna Reed's character Laurie Mastin would have been more conflicted by the outcome, but at least Guthrie achieved his original goal.

No one else mentioned it in their reviews, but there was a real puzzler during the final confrontation between Guthrie and Sheriff Ben (Stephen Elliot). During their exchange of gunfire, Guthrie reacted at one point as if he was hit by his opponent's bullet, grabbing his right shoulder in pain and falling to the ground. But as their encounter continued, Guthrie fought Ben one on one and wound up shooting Ben while showing no ill effects of a wound, and no bullet hole or blood to show for it. If the feigned reaction was a ruse it would have made sense to acknowledge it later but that never happened. So that gunfight remains a mystery to me.

Not the greatest, but better than a lot of the mid '50s westerns; and you know there were tons and tons of cowboy shows. THREE HOURS TO KILL meets all qualifications of representing those Saturday afternoon flicks from the Old West we enjoyed. Jim Guthrie(Dana Andrews)is a cowboy tired of running and three years after escaping a lynch mob returns to prove he was framed for murder. Still with the rope burn around his neck, he convinces Sheriff Ben East(Stephen Elliott)to give him three hours to bring in the real killer. Of course, Jim still carries anger for being forced to leave the women he planned to marry, Laurie(Donna Reed). Just maybe she waited for him and he could begin his life over with a cleared name. Andrews manages to make this movie to stand out a bit better than the ordinary Westerns of the time period. A fine supporting cast that includes: Richard Coogan, Whit Bissell, Dianne Foster, Richard Webb and Carolyn Jones.

Typical western fanfare of the 1950s is tinged by uneven writing. What did our hero, Dana Andrews,do while he was away from the town for 3 years? Why did he suddenly return? This is not properly dealt with in the movie.

When his girl's brother is shot in the back, everyone in town thinks Andrews had done it as the two had just finished fighting. Andrews certainly had become used to mob violence through hanging. After all, he appeared in the infamous "Oxbow Incident" of 1943.

He returns to town unexpectedly looking to find the real killer. Along the way, he discovers that he has a son by girlfriend Donna Reid. It even appears that Reid's husband, the man she married because she was pregnant, was the real culprit. True to an Alfred Hitchock-like ending, the surprise killer was revealed.

I know that Andrews wanted to forget what had happened that awful night of the attempted lynching and the rope around his neck while the cart ran wild with him in it. Yet, the writers have him leave Reed and the boy at film's end. Of course, there is a dance hall queen who rides out of town to be with her man. Those Hollywood endings!

"Three Hours to Kill" is a suspenseful little 77 minute revenge western with Dana Andrews playing Jim Guthrie a man who was wrongly lynched and returns to exact his revenge and find the real guilty party.

Jim Guthrie an embittered man returns to the scene of his lynching three years earlier for a murder he did not commit. He seeks out the members of the lynch mob whom he believes may be guilty. First there is bartender Sam Minor (James Westerfield), the barber Deke (Whit Bissell) to whom he recounts his story through a flashback.

The flashback begins at the town dance where Guthrie and his beloved Laurie Mastin (Donna Reed) are planning to marry the next day. Her possessive brother Carter (Richard Webb) violently opposes the union. He and Guthrie fight and Guthrie is knocked out. While unconscious, Carter is shot down in the back with Guthrie's gun. Deke discovers Guthrie standing over the corpse with the smoking gun in hand.

The results in an instant lynch mob. About to be hanged, Laurie intervenes and spooks the horse and buggy team holding Guthrie. As the team bolts, the hanging rope remains attached to Guthrie's neck and he sustains a serious rope burn on his neck. He manages to escape and flees.

Returning to the present, Guthrie identifies gambler Marty Nasswell (Laurence Hugo) and banker/rancher Niles Hendricks (Richard Coogan) as the other suspects in Carter Mastin's murder. Sheriff Ben East (Stephen Elliott) an old friend of Guthrie's sympathizes with him and gives him until sundown (Three Hours to Kill) to find the killer and then leave town.

Guthrie goes to Hendrick's ranch to seek him out discovers that Laurie has married Hendricks and that she has a son by Guthrie. Gutrhrie treis to reconcile with Laurie to no avail and leaves. Hendrick's returns and fearful for his life goes after Guthrie. The two meet and a well staged fight follows. Before Guthrie can exact his revenge, Deputy Vince (Francis McDonald) intervenes and arrests Guthrie who escapes en route.. Laurie goes top Sheriff East to beg him to go find her husband before he or Guthrie are killed. Rival for Guthrie's affections Chris Palmer (Dianne Foster) pleads with Laurie to pledge her love for Guthrie to avoid any killing.

The four suspects gather at Minor's saloon and Guthrie sneaks in through a back door to confront them. After grilling the suspects he learns the identity of the killer and.................................................................................

The ending is rather neat. After killing the real killer a mob forms and again demands that Guthrie be lynched but....................................................

A better than average little western.

This is a really good dark psychological western, not quite film noir like "Pursued", "The Furies" or "The Violent Men", a bit closer to"High Noon" but with a mind of its own. The film deals with Dana Andrews' return to his home town after escaping a lynch mob after he was pulled out of a saloon, accused and convicted without trial for shooting Richard Webb in cold blood. For the missing years, most everyone in town believed him to be the killer, even Webb's sister, Donna Reed, whom Andrews wanted to marry. She's held onto a secret and married Andrews' enemy, Richard Coogan, while several of the town's men are obviously nervous of what will be revealed in the time that sheriff Stephen Elliott gives Andrews to prove his innocence.

This is a very colorful Columbia western with good performances all round and including Whit Bissell, Laurence Hugo and a young Carolyn Jones quite memorable. Dianne Foster is your typical saloon floozy, tough on the outside yet a piece of fluff when dealing with a particular little boy who is important to the story's twists. The ending is rather bittersweet considering the fact that it doesn't end the way you think it might, but justice is served, and that's all that matters.

...I suddenly thought to myself, "How did Donna Reed ever get stuck in this this film?"

It actually started out okay, and often rather liked Dana Andrews. But this just seemed to sink deeper and deeper into maudlin behavior AND, perhaps more importantly, made a fatal error (at least for me). Andrew's character was given 3 hours to accomplish all he had to do. That wasn't practical at all, and was clearly not sensible as the plot moved along. Three days might have worked. But not 3 hours. That pretty much killed the film for me. Then there was the so sloppy film editing, where we see Donna Reed's son run out of the farm house, then he's suddenly back in the farm house. Then he runs out of the farm house...again. Mama mia!

I didn't even like Donna Reed's performance here, and yet I always felt she was an underrated actress.

Frankly, there's not a lot to say about this film. But it is key to the reality that it was in the middle of several films that led to Dana Andrew's career decline. Although this is a Technicolor film, it simply wasn't very engaging. Not recommended unless you are a tremendous fan of Dana Andrews. It's simply just another of those 'one too many Westerns" that pretty much led to the near death of the genre.

Director Alfred L. Werker's "Three Hours to Kill" is a solid, well-made, unpretentious, but formulaic mystery-on-the-range horse opera that clocks in at a trim 77 minutes with sturdy performances from a veteran cast including Dana Andrews, Donna Reed, Whit Bissell,and Stephen Elliot. Carolyn Jones appears in a peripheral role sporting blonde curls. The only thing missing from this suspenseful western is an opening credits ballad, otherwise it is as 50s as a 1950s western can get. Producer Harry Joe Brown, who specialized in Randolph Scott oaters, doesn't stiff on anything where production values are concerned and ace cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr., who also lensed his share of Scott westerns, such as "Hangman's Knot," "Man in the Saddle," and "Comanche Station" as well as a couple of Glenn Ford frontier sagas like "3:10 to Yuma" and "Cowboy," gives this dust-raiser a colorful leathery look that adds to the picture's overall sense of authenticity.

Dana Andrews plays Jim Guthrie, an accused killer who has been on the lam for three years, who decides to ride back to the town that he once called home. He discusses his dark past with the town marshal, Bob (Stephen Elliot of "Beverly Hills Cop"), who gives him until sundown to clear up his affairs. Nobody in town is happy to see Jim. Two ranchers run into him at a waterhole and ride clear of him. Jim wears a gun. Before he got into trouble with the law, he rode shotgun for the stagecoach line. It seems that Jim was on the road to a long, happy life with his girl Laurie (Donna Reed of "From Here to Eternity") until her brother Carter (Richard Webb of "The Nebraskan") intervened the night of a big dance in town and beat Jim to a pulp. When Jim recovered, he found Carter lying face down in the dirt with two bloody bullet holes in his back. Jim found the murder weapon, a derringer that he had drawn earlier on Carter, but Carter knocked it out of his hand. Everybody heard the two shots, and Deke (Whit Bissell of "The Magnificent Seven") saw Jim standing over Carter's corpse with the murder weapon. The townspeople lynch Jim. They loop the noose around his neck, hurl the hemp over a tree branch, and boost him up onto a buckboard. They are about to hang him when Laurie intervenes and fires a gun that she appropriates from a bystander. The horses spook and careen through town with Jim floundering in the wagon bed struggling to slip the noose off. As the two horses rampage through town, the rope repeatedly snags on something and Jim has a hell of a time before he manages to get the rope off his badly burned neck. All along Jim protested his innocence before the townspeople but they gave into their mob instincts and went ahead with the lynching. Now, as Jim tells the town marshal, he is back to find the man who really killed Carter Mastin and let him shoulder the blame.

Dana Andrews is perfectly cast as the wronged hero. One of Andrews' first movies was most famous western lynch drama "The Ox-Bow Incident" where he was not lynched and hanged by a mob. Anytime that an actor plays a role similar to an earlier one, that actor has a better change of convincing us that he is right for the role. Andrews makes a decent, compassionate hero who refuses to let the past die, even after his friend the town marshal warns him that the sheriff is on the way to arrest him. Nevertheless, Jim intends to prove his innocence.

The literate screenplay by Richard Allen Simmons of "Yellow Tomahawk" and Roy Huggins of "Hangman's Knot" slowly lets the pressure build to the boiling point as heroic Jim Guthrie searches for the killer. Guthrie learns to his chagrin that the girl he wanted to wed, Laurie, has married another man, Niles Hendricks (Richard Coogan of TV's "Captain Video" fame). Hendricks is the local banker. He was going to sell Jim a ranch so Jim could settle down with Laurie. Before they got into a slugfest, Carter told Jim that Niles would never sell him the ranch. Consequently, Jim is as suspicious of Niles as any of the others; Niles participated in the lynching. At this point, Niles wants Jim dead, too, but largely because Laurie has never gotten Jim out of her heart. It seems that Laurie and Jim engaged in pre-marital sex and Laurie was pregnant with her son about the same time that the townspeople lynched Jim and tried to hang him. Eventually, Jim learns that truth that Laurie's boy is actually his son.

"Three Hours to Kill" is another one of those 1950s westerns with a time imposed deadline. Dana Andrews is well cast as Jim Guthrie. Richard Coogan and he have a terrific, knock-down, drag-out fist fight that tumbles their obvious stuntmen stand-ins down a brush covered slope. This taut little oater never loses sight of its plot, but it relents somewhat in the end. Of course, the Production Code Administration would never let the hero break up a marriage if they had any say, and our heroine Laurie decides to stand by the man that she didn't love because he has been so patient. As Jim rides out of town alone at the end, a red-haired beauty Chris Palmer (Diane Foster of "The Violent Men") rides out to join him. Although Jim is punished for having pre-marital sex with Laurie, he compensates enough for his misdeed by letting go of Laurie and his own son and leaving town. Only after he has proved his merit does society allow him to have a woman of his own. "Three Hours to Kill" doesn't rank as a classic, or a near classic, but it is an entertaining vintage western with strong production values and a worthwhile cast.

A lynch mob breaks up the romance between Jim Guthrie (Dana Andrews) and Laurie Mastin (Donna Reed), when Laurie's over-protective brother Carter (Richard Webb) is found dead. Everyone is sure it's Jim who killed him because he (Carter) wouldn't let Jim marry Laurie. He wanted her to marry the more respectable and wealthy Niles (Richard Coogan). Deke, the town barber, played by Whit Bissel, leads the mob that puts the rope around Jim's neck. Bissel's part is pretty interesting, as he is normally cast in more sympathetic roles. Only by luck does Jim get away, only to return from hiding out in the desert months later to find out who really killed Laurie's brother and to clear his own name. When he does come back he finds that Laurie and Niles are now married and their son is actually his. That aspect of this movie makes it interesting. There are enough bad lines in the movie to make it not very worthy, but by the end the story's more intriguing aspects win out, making this a more thoughtful western than it actually appears to be.