An incident out west

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because I hadn't seen it before and am always interested in new stuff to be able to blog about here, and because it sounded interesting enough to give it at least one watch, was a western called The Plunderers. Recently, I finally got around to watching it to do the obligatory post on here.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence of four young men riding into a town called Trail City. Jeb (Ray Stricklyn) is the leader of the group, accompanied by Mexican Rondo (John Saxon), muscle Mule, and the "baby" of the group Davy, who hasn't really had enough life experience to be considered fully a man. Coming in to town, they need a drink, so stop at the saloon where they order one drink each. However, they don't seem to have any cash on them, so when it comes time to pay, they can't. Mike, the owner of the bar, calls in the sheriff (Jay C. Flippen), who puts the four young men in jail for the night. At the bar watching is Sam Christy (Jeff Chandler), who owns a ranch just outside of town. Sam served in the Civil War and wound up with a bum left arm as a result.

Come the morning, the sheriff should order the four men out of town, but he doesn't. By this time, we learned that they had to leave their previous town under cloudy circumstances, but they decid that they like this place and want to spend a bit of time resting up here. They go to the local general store and stiff Ellie (Dolores Hart) and her father the owner, before getting a hotel room from Kate (Marsha Hunt), who didn't know how they had already scammed the store owner. Nobody seems to want to do anything about the four men.

Of course, part of the reason for that is that they're all afraid of the four young men who are armed. And yet, it should be the sheriff's job. When he goes to the hotel room and they humiliate him, they realize they're helpless. The one person who might be able to do something is outsider Sam, although he seems to have more of a past than just having served in the Civil War.

The interlopers are also smart enough to know that it can't stay this way; they're pissing off enough people that somebody could ambush them at night or something. So they decide to confiscate all the guns in town, an effort that is not without violence and results in at least one person getting killed. They're also smart enough to realize that Sam outside of town is still going to have guns at his place. But thanks to the Production Code, we know that the bad guys aren't going to win in the end. It's the question of how exactly the loss comes about that remains to be answered.

As I watched The Plunderers, I noticed a directorial credit for Joseph Pevney. It's a name that I recognized first from the episodes of the original Star Trek series that he directed. Pevney directed more movies than I realized, but still The Plunderers made me think of something that was more suited to TV than the big screen. It's not bad, but it doesn't feel terribly imaginative. Definitely a suitable enough time-passer, though.