if it were for a TV show.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Veteran B film western director Ray Nazarro’s (”The Domino Kid”)
black-and-white traditional oater is flatly directed and acted as if it
were for a TV show. It’s based on the story by Buckley Angell. This cheapie
production was produced by Rory Calhoun’s own company which was formed
after he broke from Universal. It seems shortly before the film was released,
Confidential magazine, the scandal tabloid, had run a story about Rory’s
record as a juvenile delinquent. Its source of information was rumored
to be Universal, which gave up lesser star Rory as a trade-off to protect
a juicy story about superstar Rock Hudson that the magazine was planning
to run. Rory admitted it was true and his career resumed uninterrupted.
Anne Francis plays Ellen Beldon, the Texas gal who has been convicted
in a rigged trial of killing her husband Cliff. On the day she’s to be
hanged in the small Texas town, Judd Farrow (Chuck Connors) poses as a
preacher and with a gun hid in his Bible frees Ellen. They elude the posse
on their horse and buggy carriage, and the escape beomes more elaborately
disclosed when Ellen’s wealthy New Mexico rancher Uncle Nathan Conroy (Robert
Burton), the one who planned the escape, meets them at a mountain pass
and takes her back to his ranch while the posse goes after the decoys moving
in another direction. New Mexico refuses to extradict Ellen because they
believe the Texas trial was a miscarriage of justice. Ellen’s wealthy angry
father-in-law Mace Beldon (John Litel) wants justice and hires professional
gunslinger Gil McCord (Rory Calhoun) for $5,000 to bring back Ellen to
Texas. To make it legal, Gil’s deputized. Gil gets hired for the busy roundup
as a ranchhand on Conway’s ranch and snatches Ellen. On the way back, he
believes her story of innocence and becomes convinced that it was Cliff’s
brother Kell (Vince Edwards) who killed his step-brother over their inheritance
and framed Ellen by having the drunken horse thief Kirby lie at the trial.
It predictably works out as expected as Rory goes about proving Anne’s
innocence by going after the guilty culprits. It’s only unusual because
a woman is sentenced to be hanged, otherwise the story is strictly routine.
After the film Rory appeared in the successful TV show The Texans, while
Chuck Connors became TV’s The Rifleman, and Anne Francis also made her
mark on TV with frequent appearances on various shows.