by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s curtain-raiser
was an intriguing Western item called The Kid from Broken Gun, last in a seven-year series of “B” Westerns from
Columbia that starred Charles Starrett (one of those actors, like Randolph
Scott, who extended his career about 20 years longer than it would otherwise
have run by focusing on Westerns exclusively) as the Durango Kid, a.k.a. Steve
Reynolds. Framed by a trial sequence and liberally filled out with stock
footage from previous Durango Kid efforts, notably a movie called The
Fighting Frontiersman, The Kid from Broken
Gun is intriguing because it
features Smiley Burnette as Starrett’s comic-relief sidekick — Burnette worked
with Gene Autry so long (not only on-screen but also as co-writer of many of
Autry’s original songs) it’s somewhat jarring to see him without Autry,
especially since he’d got quite a bit more heavy-set than he’d been in his
early days with Autry and he’d grown out his hair to a tousled mop that gave
him an odd resemblance to Chico Marx.
The Kid from Broken Gun is a fascinating little movie, written by Barry
Shipman and Ed. Earl Repp (the period after the two-letter first name is
actually on his on-screen credit) with a bit more creativity than the norm for
a “B” Western and quite well directed by Fred F. Sears, who was usually pretty
hacky but who opens this film with some fascinating overhead shots of a
courtroom with a trial in progress five years before the launch of the Perry Mason TV series, which made these sorts of angles a
trademark. Sears also delivers a few bits of narration on the soundtrack,
telling us that in the old West the sentence for murder was to be hanged by the
neck until you were dead, before introducing us to defendant Jack Mahoney (also
the real name of the actor playing him, though he was usually credited as Jock Mahoney and the actual name on his birth
certificate was Jacques O’Mahoney), who’s on trial for murdering Matt Fallon
(Chris Alcaide) in what, in a series of flashbacks representing the stories
told during the trial testimony, turns out to be an altercation over a
strongbox containing a part of the gold Antonio López de Santa Anna left behind
as he and his army were fleeing Texas following their rout at San Jacinto in
1836. Mahoney is being represented by a female attorney, Gail Kingston (an
effective Angela Stevens) — this is Wyoming, the first state to give women the
vote — and Steve Reynolds, a.k.a. the Durango Kid (Charles Starrett), is
watching the trial with his friend Smiley Burnette (also using his own name for
his character) when he isn’t out riding around with a black bandana across the
lower half of his face — the total extent of his “Durango Kid” disguise and
which, as I’ve noted about earlier films in the series, seems to have been
effected only to allow stunt doubles to substitute for Starrett in the action
scenes. (There’s a comic tag scene at the end which pathetically tries to make
us believe that Smiley has no idea his friend is the Durango Kid.)
What sets
this apart from most “B” Westerns is, first, the excellent shape it’s survived
in — Fayte M. Browne’s cinematography is rich in high-contrast chiaroscuro black-and-white images and the print as it stands
does full justice to it: the images are crisp and clear and there are no
visible or audible splices or scratches in the film (a boon to anyone who’s
suffered through cloudy, grainy, splice-ridden prints of “B” Westerns from the
1930’s) — and the surprising inventiveness of the writing: towards the end
Shipman and Repp give us some neck-snapping but still believable reversals,
including revealing that Matt Fallon’s girlfriend, saloon entertainer Dixie
King (Helen Mowery) was actually attorney Gail Kingston’s sister, and was also
part of a plot headed by local 1 percenter Martin Donohugh (Tristram Coffin)
and also involving Matt Fallon — that’s right, this is another one of those
plots in which not only did the good guy not commit murder, the person he’s supposed to have
murdered isn’t really dead at all! — to steal the gold-filled strongbox and set
up Mahoney for the theft as well as getting him hanged on a murder charge. This
isn’t exactly a world-beater of a movie, but it is a reasonably entertaining way to spend 53 minutes
and the clever writing, acceptable acting (and in Angela Stevens’ case
considerably better than that; she’s quite good both as the good girl and the
bad girl, and she and Helen Mowery look enough like each other to be believable
as sisters) and excellent print condition make this one a cut above most “B”
Westerns.
