The Gun Hawk

Somehow I wound up with a bunch of westerns on my DVR several months back, which is why a few of them are going to show up in relatively close proximity. Up next is one I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM: The Gun Hawk.

We don't meet the titular gun hawk in the opening scene; that instead introduces us to the second lead, singer turned actor Rod Lauren. He plays "Reb" Roan, a drifter who winds up drunk in a town that's the old home town the "hawk" came from and is about to come back to. The sheriff, Ben Corey (Rod Cameron), is a childhood friend of the "hawk" but suggests to Roan that he settle down here since it's a growing town.

It's at this point that the "hawk", named Blaine Madden (Rory Calhoun) shows up in town, and has a conversation with the sheriff about not having been in town for three years. Not that he's planning on staying, since he has a new home that shows up later in the movie. But he runs into Roan, who is in the middle of being attacked by a couple of brothers for no good reason, other than we need a good plot reason to have Blaine and Reb fall in together.

While they're at the bar together, those two brothers who attacked Reb earlier show up again, this time harassing a drunk who happens to be Blaine's father. This is really a way to get at Blaine, although in the resulting gunfight it's Dad who gets killed. Against the advice of the sheriff, Blaine goes searching for the two men wanting to bring them to justice, even is his form of vigilante justice is illegal. Worse, he gets shot in the arm by the sheriff who has in turn followed Blaine, but is able to get away.

Reb goes after Blaine as well and eventually catches up to Blaine, removing the bullet from Blaine's arm and giving Reb some power over Blaine since he knows a crucial secret about Blaine. The two of them go back to Blaine's new home a town called Sanctuary that has a reputation for allowing people in regardless of their past, but with the proviso that it's a place where you go to cool off, which means no violence. And there's a man there to make certain everybody follows the rules: the gun hawk who we of course know is Blaine. But if he's been shot in his shooting arm, will he be able to maintain justice? And, of course, Sheriff Corey is going to be coming after Blaine.

The Gun Hawk was made at Allied Artists and released in 1963, at a time when there were still a lot of B westerns being cranked out. The Gun Hawk fits in well enough with the cycle of B westerns, which is to say that it's not doing anything particularly groundbreaking, and feels as though it could have been made easily enough for episodic TV. Western fans will probably be mildly entertained, although nobody will ever mistake this for one of the great westerns.

The Colossus of Rhodes

Another of the movies that I recorded some time back because it sounded like it might be fun was the sword-and-sandal epic The Colossus of Rhodes.

A pre-credits sequences shows people laboring away in an underground cavern, starting a fire to try to get away. They're clearly slave labor, but the ruse doesn't quite work. Then after the credits, we learn that this is the island of Rhodes, east of the mainland of what is now Greece, and that it's 280 BC. The king has just had a giant statue of Apollo built to guard the harbor, and an Athenian, Dario (Rory Calhoun), is visiting. The ceremony to christen the statue doesn't go well, however, as someone who opposes slavery tries to stop it and gets killed for his efforts. The King doesn't realize that there are a lot of people who aren't happy with the political situation on the island.

Worse, however, is that those people aren't quite united. Instead, they're in two factions. One faction is the good people who don't want slavery; they try to convince Dario to help them. Then there's a second faction, led by the prime minister Thar. Thar wants to ally with the Phoenicians against the rest of the Greeks, and it should be no surprise that the Greeks aren't pleased with this, especially because it will have a terrible effect on their shipping.

So the king responds by basically not allowing anybody to enter or leave the island, including people like poor Dario who was just a visitor here but is suspected by some of being a spy, something that's not an unnatural suspicion. Dario, for his part, is seeing Diala (Lea Massari), who is the daughter of the designer of the Colossus, trying to get information on it in the hopes he can use this to smuggle people out of Rhodes. He doesn't realize that she's also been sing Thar. Amusingly, when the anti-Phoenicians try to get out of Rhodes, we see what effective defenses the Colossus has, something I won't spoil here.

Many of the remaining anti-Phoenicians are arrested and sentenced to death, although since Dario is one of them we know he's going to escape because a movie like this wouldn't do with killing off its hero. Eventually he and the rest of the good Greeks try to take over the Colossus to prevent the Phoenicians from taking Rhodes themsevles. The Phoenicians arrive at just about the same time as an earthquake, so we get not just a sword-and-sandal movie, but a disaster film as well.

The Colossus of Rhodes is a movie that's probably remembered for only one thing, which is that it was directed by Sergio Leone early in his career, not that he made that many movies. It's a Spanish/Italian co-production, with Rory Calhoun only brought in because the production companies wanted an American name to get the picture onto American screens. One of the results is that everybody but Calhoun is dubbed into English, with very limited success.

The plot and exectuion of The Colossus of Rhodes is much to complex for the movie's own good; it runs a little over two hours and feels every bit of that two hours. It also doesn't help that the acting is for the most part not very good. But being a sword-and-sandal movie, there's still entertainment to be had even when it's a bad sword-and-sandal movie.

The Caper of Size, or: Rory Calhoun Does Noir?

TubiTV seems to have quite a bit of old black-and-white crime/noirish movies in the On Demand section. One that recently showed up in the main list of movies, at least for me since it's probably based on what else I watch, is one I'd never heard of before, The Big Caper. Since I'm up for this sort of 1950s crime movie, I decided I'd give it a chance and watch it.

The star here is Rory Calhoun of all people, someone I think is generally much more associated with westerns. He plays Frank Harper, a small time hood who is stupid enough to gamble his money on the horses and lose it all, as he informs his nominal boss, at least in the gang sense, Flood (James Gregory). Frank needs to make more money, and getting a legitimate job just won't cut it. So he has to come up with some other way, and thinks he has just the right idea.

Camp Pendleton is a military base for the Marine Corps. There are a lot of marines stationed there, and while the pay isn't exactly great, they all get paid in cash, this being the days before direct deposit, and there are a lot of marines. The US government has to bring in a lot of cash to pay all those marines, and the cash needs to be stored somewhere until the government can pay out the marines. And Frank knows which bank they use and what day the money is actually in the bank's vault.

Flood doesn't really need the money right now, but being a crime boss, he does have that admiration for a good crime scheme and this is one of those. So he decides he'll be willing to carry out the heist. But to be honest, a heist like this is going to take a lot of preparation. To prepare for it, Flood proposes sending Frank to the town just north of San Diego where the bank is, to play the part of a family man looking to open up a business in town. Of course, Frank doesn't have a wife, so standing in for the wife is Flood's girlfriend Kay (Mary Costa). Together, they pretend to be husband and wife, buying a gas station that's up for sale as well as a house to live in.

Of course, in a heist movie like this, since there's still that pesky Production Code, you know that the heist isn't really going to work. So how does it fail? There are several ways, but the biggest is that Kay decides she might just like the domestic life. She's got a sister back east who does the family thing, and even though their family isn't rich, they've got love. And that's the second half of the big problem: Kay begins to fall in love with Frank, and the feeling is eventually mutual, even though Frank doesn't really want to settle down in one place, and worse, even though Kay is supposed to be Flood's girlfriend. Flood is going to get exceedingly jealous.

And then there are the other people involved in the heist, since Flood and Frank can't do it alone. One is Harry (Paul Picerni), who is supposed to be the lookout. He brings his girlfriend along, and Flood is no dummy, realizing that the girlfriend will spill the beans. There's also Zimmer (Robert H. Harris), who has the job of creating diversions by setting off time bombs. Zimmer is good at that, but he's also both an alcoholic and a pyromaniac. And Flood tells Frank and Kay to put Zimmer up at their house passing him off as their uncle. There's also Roy (Corey Allen), who is apparently Flood's underling although Roy is written as a character who's probably gay except that the screenwriters couldn't make it explicit in the 1950s. Roy is violent and has a hair-trigger temper....

Most of The Big Caper is about the build-up to heist night, and less about the heist itself. As such, it's more about the relationships between the characters, which makes it an interesting little movie. However, the movie has a big problem in that it doesn't know how to resolve the plot, leading to a climax that makes no sense whatsoever. That's a shame, because the rest of the movie is a surprisingly good little 50s B movie. Rory Calhoun is actually fairly good in a non-western, and James Gregory is unsurprisingly good too. Definitely worth watching.

The Young and the Brave

Another of the movies that TCM ran over the Memorial Day war movie marathon was another new-to-me movie, The Young and the Brave. After watching it, I think there's a pretty good reason that I'd never heard of it before.

Sgt. Kane (William Bendix) and Master Sgt. Brent (Rory Calhoun) are a pair of US soldiers in the Korean War who were captured by the North Koreans. They escaped however, and are now trying to make their way south to the town where they think they can find safety. Along the way, they try to get information from a couple of farmers, but it's costly. Not for the soldiers, of course, but for the farmer couple who get shot by the commies for their trouble.

Worse for them, they had a son named Han (Manuel Padilla, a Mexican-American kid who looks oh so obviously Korean) who is now an orphan and tries to make his way to safety. Han winds up at an abandoned Army goods dump where somehow a dog got abandoned as well. This being a low-budget Hollywood movie, it's fairly obvious that the kid is going to be able to befriend the dog, and that the dog, a German shepherd now christened Lobo, is going to have quite a bit a skill and be able to help out the kid.

It's also clear that the two American POWs are going to run into Han again and have to bring him along as they try to make their way south, and that two extra mouths to feed are going to be an issue at some point along the way. And then rations get even tighter when the two POWs find a third escaped POW, Pvt. Wilson (Robert Ivers).

This brings in another hoary plot device, that of the POW who gave in to the Communist propaganda and brainwashing attempts, or at least did in the eyes of the two Americans who didn't. The problem for them is that Pvt. Wilson is the only one who knows how to get the radio working again, and without a radio, getting back to safety is going to be that much more difficult, especially with the North Koreans following the Americans not so far behind.

So it's easy to see why a movie like The Young and the Brave isn't that highly regarded. It's cheap, full of tropes, and fairly predictable. And then to top it all off it has the tacked-on plot line of an obnoxious boy and his dog. The only good thing I can say about the movie is tht it at least gave me something to blog about for one more day.

After the pirate of color comes a whip!?

A movie that recently made it into the FXM lineup is one that was new to me: The Silver Whip. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 4:45 AM, so now's the time to blog about it.

Robert Wagner plays Jess Harker, who at the beginning of the movie is driving a stagecoach on a line that basically nobody uses, from some isolated town to the main line stop at Silver City. There, he gets in a slight traffic collision and needs the help of Race Crim (Dale Robertson), a guard for the line, to get him out of it; this opening scene serves mostly to show that Jess isn't quite considered a true responsible man yet.

Jess wants to do well enough to be able to marry his girl Kathy (Kathleen Crowley), so the local sheriff, Tom Davisson (Rory Calhoun) convinces the manager of the stage line to let Jess drive a stage with a shipment of gold on it to the bigger city, with Race as the guard for this particular stage.

However, we learned that Jess still has some growing to do, so he makes some big mistakes. When the stage gets to the isolated post where they're supposed to change horses, it turns out that bandits have learned that this particular stage has the gold on it and they've hijacked the post. Race tells Jess to ride off but Jess would rather try to help Race, a mistake that results in multiple people getting killed. And then Jess wants to go off in search of the gang of criminals instead of taking the stage back to Silver City.

No wonder people think Jess isn't able to handle responsibility yet. To try to redeem himself, he goes and rides off with the sheriff and a posse to find the members of the gang and Race who is still hunting them down. Eventually, they've killed some of the gang and reach the gang leader Slater (John Kellogg), who went off in a different direction to evade capture. After a shootout, Race has Slater cornered and wants to kill Slater right then and there since he did after all kill multiple people. The sheriff understandably wants the execution to be done all nice and legal, so wants to take him back to town to stand trial. And he's got the force of law behind him.

But the judge isn't around to preside over the trial, so Slater is going to have to remain in prison overnight (no, they couldn't put him on a train to Yuma or something). The sheriff and Jess remain in the sheriff's office trying to keep Slater in jail, although the only people who are going to bust him out are Race and the townsfolk behind him who want to lynch Slater. Jess might just get his chance to stand up for the law and redeem himself....

The Silver Whip is a solid little western programmer. There's nothing particularly new here, but the familiar territory being trodden is handled well. It certainly isn't as memorable as the Technicolor westerns with bigger stars like James Stewart, but also a clear sight better than all the quickie B westerns. I suppose a few years later this would have been cut down from 73 minutes to the mid-40s to be a TV episode of one of the TV westerns popular in the late 50s. Definitely worth a watch if you've got a rainy day with nothing better to do, or if you just like westerns.

The Silver Whip got a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, although for whatever reason TCM's web-shop claims it's on backorder.