The Nevadan

Some time back I made my way through the first box set of Randolph Scott westerns that I picked up, so I bought a second set. Recently, I put in one of the DVDs to watch another Scott western I hadn't seen before, The Nevadan.

We don't see Scott right at the beginning. Instead, we see Forrest Tucker, who is playing Tom Tanner, a wanted criminal who is getting off a stagecoach in some western town while he and the marshal accompanying him wait for a change of coaches. Tanner uses this as an opportunty to escape, and he rides off into the wilderness, which is where he eventually catches up with Randolph Scott's character, Andrew Barclay.

The two fall in together, more as an alliance of convience, and make it to the next town, where Tanner goes into the bank to get something from what in the present day would be a safety deposit box if he were in a more advanced time and place. Instead the banker only has one lockbox with everybody's things, and fishes out the envelope Tanner requested. Except the banker wants to see some ID. Tanner uses a gun as his ID and, having taken the envelope, continues out into the wild with Barclay.

The two make there way somewhere -- we don't know yet where they're going -- when they come upon a pair of brothers, Jeff (Frank Faylen) and Bart (Jeff Corey). They want what Tanner get from the bank, except that we've already seen it's a piece of paper that Tanner burned without letting Barclay see it because it's none of Barclay's business. However, the brothers seem to know Tanner's past, and are able to deduce that he obtained a map to where a bunch of gold bullion that was stolen some years back was hidden, with the person holding the map apparently having died in the interim. The brothers would like the map for fairly obvious reasons.

They threaten to kill Tanner even though this would destroy the last source of knowledge of where the gold is hidden. In any case, Barclay saves Tanner's life, and has to beat a hasty escape before the brothers come upon him again. He winds up at the Galt ranch, where he meets Karen Galt (Dorothy Malone), daughter of the ranch owner, Edwrd (George Macready). Galt also owns the nearby town of Red Sand in one of those old western tropes.

Karen begins to take a liking to Barclay, not knowing why Barclay showed up and certainly not knowing anything about the gold. She also doesn't know that her father is among the people looking for that gold, he being the boss of Jeff and Bart. And why is Barclay around anyway...?

The Nevadan is in many ways a fairly standard B western. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking going on, but there's also nothing particularly wrong with it. In fact, thanks to the presence of a cast a cut above B actors, the quality of the movie is raised to something that's eminently entertaining even if you might find yourself confusing it with Scott's other westerns after a while. Still, it's absolutely worth a watch, and the sort of thing that's really nice to have on a box set like this.