Count the Hours

Back in March, TCM's Noir Alley ran a movie that was surprisingly new to me considering the fact that it was distributed by RKO and, as such, ought to be part of the old Turner library that's made up the bulk of TCM's programming. That movie is Count the Hours, and it's getting another airing tomorrow (April 30) at 7:30 AM.

The movie opens one night in the house of a man named Fred Morgan. Somebody breaks into the house and breaks open a locked desk, looking for money. Fred is asleep in the next room but this wakes him up, so he gets his rifle to confront the burglar. Unfortunately, the burglar is quicker, shooting Fred dead, and that wakes up Mrs. Morgan, who also gets shot for her trouble. They're not discovered until the following morning when Morgan's nephew and heir shows up and finds his aunt and uncle dead.

The first person the police talk to is George Braden (John Craven), who works as an itinerant farm laborer and is currently renting a small house on Morgan's property. When George hears that Morgan was shot with a .32 caliber bullet, he's scared since he has a .32 gun of his own, and lies about it. His pregnant wife Ellen (Teresa Wright) overhears the conversation with the police and does something terribly stupid. She gets her hands on the gun and tries to destroy the evidence by throwing the gun in a lake. She's spotted doing this but dragging the lake doesn't find the gun, so husband and wife are both taken in for long questioning.

The questioning is so long that George finally gives in and confesses, even though he soon after regrets this and insists he didn't do it. Ellen realizes she has to find the gun so a ballistics test can be done and exonerate her husband, and this is what gets local attorney Doug Madison (Macdonald Carey) to take George's defense. However, without the gun, there's so much circumstantial evidence that it could still convict George. And then the gun is found -- but it's been underwater so long that they can no longer get a good ballistics report from the gun to prove whether it was or was not the murder weapon.

So with that, George is convicted and sentenced to death, and nobody lives happily ever after. Except that we're maybe halfway through the movie if that, so there's going to be an appeal, especially after Madison learns of a man named Max Verne (Jack Elam) who has a criminal history as well as a connection to Morgan. Proving George's innocence isn't going to be so easy.

Eddie Muller, when he presented Count the Hours, commented that professional lawyers are probably going to have big problems with the movie considering how it takes serious liberties with the criminal process. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd have to agree that if the movie has a problem, it's that the plot doesn't seem so tight, or at least not so realistic. That is, I think part of a bigger issue for the movie, which is that it was a very low-budget affair. Teresa Wright, despite being the star, isn't given much to do other than act like the poor suffering spouse. John Craven as the husband doesn't exude much personality, and the rest of the movie feels perfunctory.

That's all a bit of a shame, as the movie feels like it had some potential. With a bigger budget and some polishing, it could have been, if not a classic, at least a gem of a B movie.

End of month briefs

Gene Hackman died back in February, and TCM is going to be giving him a programming salute in a couple weeks' time. When that comes up I'll be doing a brief post on it. In the meantime, I'd like to point out that his starring role in Hoosiers is coming up on TCM tonight at 8:00 PM. It kicks off an evening of sports-themed films, which concludes with two of Ronald Reagan's movies: Knute Rockne, All American at 2:00 AM, and The Winning Team at 4:00 AM. I've blogged about both of them before, of course.

There's also the passing of Richard Chamberlain some time back; when he died, I mentioned how he did the Star of the Month piece on Claude Rains because of his appearance with Rains in Twilight of Honor. That movie can be seen on TCM tomorrow (April 30) at 2:30 PM.

I'm still not certain how much FXM is pulling out of the vaults that they haven't run in a while, although I think that's in part because I've blogged about pretty much everything that's in their current rotation. I will, however, note that I don't think I've see the Perry Como/Carmen Mirand film If I'm Lucky on FXM in a while, and that gets an airing tomorrow at 6:00 AM.

It looks like today is a day with a surprising number of birthdays that might be worth mentioning if I hadn't done so before. I'm pretty certain I've done a standalone post on Fred Zinneman (April 29, 1907) before, while Celeste Holm (April 29, 1917) died after I started writing this blog so she got an obituary post. It's also the 68th birthday of three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, while both Michelle Pfeiffer and Eve Plumb were born on this day in 1958. Rather younger, but still older than me, is Uma Thurman, who turns 55 today.

Now watch somebody of note die after I put up this post.

The Yellow Cab Man

Tonight's final night of TCM's Star of the Month salute to Red Skelton includes a pair of movies that are already on my DVR, although I'm only doing a post on one of them today. That movie is The Yellow Cab Man, which you can see at 9:45 PM.

The opening credits are done somewhat differently, with the names of the cast printed on, well, plaster casts. Those casts are worn by a character named Red Pirdy (Red Skelton) who, as you might guess, is accident-prone, to the point that insurance companies don't want to insure him. After the credits, he's trying to carry an oversized cuckoo clock down the sidewalks, when he accidentally starts crossing the street when the traffic has the right of way, not the pedestrians. This causes him to get hit by a taxicab from the Yellow Cab Co.

Now, Red is an honest, and inconceivably stupid man, so he's open about the accident being entirely his fault. Ellen Goodrich (Gloria De Haven) works for the cab company's insurer, an she tries to get Red to sign a waiver. Also showing up is a lawyer, Martin Creavy (Edward Arnold), who seems to have a way of committing insurance fraud and realizes he can use Red to make a ton of money, or so he thinks. Well, he will have that chance, but in a completely different way.

As part of Red's seeing Ellen and Creavy, Red reveals that not only is he one of those tinkering inventors who nowadays would be the target of those scammy commercials about getting a patent for your invention. But because of Red's stupidity, he also mentions that he's invented, but not yet patented, something called Elastiglass, which I suppose isn't that much of an invention since things like Plexiglas/Perspex and Lucite had been invented a good decade before the movie was released. Elastiglass is, like those other acrylics, shatter-proof and therefore much safer than traditional glass.

Ellen, and the executives at Yellow Cab, think that installing safer glass would be a good thing for the cab company's insurance bills, and hiring Red wouldn't be a bad PR move either. Martin, for his part, sees dollar signs if he can get the formula out of Red's mind. To that end, Martin hires a quack psychiatrist named Dokstedder (Walter Slezak) who uses drugs and hypnosis to try to obtain the formula. Murder is also involved, leading to a madcap climax.

I'm guessing that The Yellow Cab Man was conceived as a way for MGM to use Red Skelton's brand of physical comedy and sight gags. There's certainly a lot of that in the movie. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to come up with an intelligent enough script. Red is just way too stupid, to the point that you wonder how he's been able to live independently as an adult, never mind the concussions. The bad guys are cartoonishly bad, although I suppose that befits the cartoonish nature of the whole film. But to me it often came across more as grating than as working well.

Silkwood

I've been mentioning over the past few weeks how I've got a glut of movies on my DVR that I recorded during TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August that I need(ed) to watch before they expire from the DVR. One such star is Meryl Streep, from whose day I recorded three movies. First up is Silkwood.

Silkwood was released in late 1983, when I was still in elementary school, so it's one of those movies that I'd always known the basic story of but certainly didn't get the chance to see back when it was released. Streep plays Karen Silkwood, who is working at a facility in Oklahoma that processes nuclear fuel for the US's test breeder reactor site in Washington. It's a big contract, and one that management says they're falling behind on, which would have dire financial consequences. That much may be true; I was at a job where we lost one of our contracts leading to the layoff of a bunch of people. Additionally, the way the workers on the production floor interact with each other makes you wonder just how seriously they're taking their work.

They need to take it fairly seriously, too, since working with plutonium carries the risk of radiation exposure. How much exposure is acceptable is a matter of debate, but the consequences of exposure are bad even if it's just the decontamination procedure as we see from one older woman whose daughter is dying of cancer and who has to be scrubbed down herself.

Meanwhile, Karen is living with her boyfriend Drew (Kurt Russell) and another friend Dolly (Cher) who happens to be a lesbian and at one point finds a girlfriend who is a "beautician" for a funeral parlor whose job is to make the dead people look presentable, and who has some not-so-nice things to say about the dead people who worked at the plant where Karen, Drew, and Dolly all work. Karen is also a divorcée, with her ex having custody of the kids down in Texas.

Karen begins to suspect after seeing workers deal with the disposal of a truck that's been found to be too radioactive that perhaps, in the drive to fulfill that contract with the feds, corners are being cut regarding safety. Her suspicions grow when she's reassigned to a different unit of the factory. First, this can be seen as retaliation, since it puts seniority for dealing with overtime back to zero; secondly, she discovers that photo negatives used to check the safety of fuel rod welds are being doctored by a colleague (played by Craig T. Nelson as part of a fine ensemble cast).

The locals feel that the union isn't really representing them on wages, so there's a vote on decertification that galvanizes Karen in to action. She starts working with Washington labor lawyer Paul Stone (Ron Silver) on the safety issues, which does not really endear her to her co-workers since they're more worried about bread-and-butter issues. Karen tries to gather evidence against the company's lax safety, which is of course dangerous for her to do, leading ultimately to the ending you may well know since this is all based on a true story. As I recall, coverage of the movie back when it was released didn't do anything to hide the details of Silkwood's life.

Silkwood is a well-made movie that today is probably better remembered for the acting performances. Unsurprisingly, Meryl Streep is quite good and picked up another Oscar nomination. It's the performance of Cher, however, that's interesting. At this point, it wasn't really known how capable of an actress Cher was, having been known more for her singing and her variety show with Sonny Bono. But Cher gives a fine performance, getting a Supporting Actress nomination (she lost to Linda Hunt's outstanding performance in The Year of Living Dangerously). Less mentioned is Kurt Russell, who also gives a very good performance in a sort of movie he hadn't done to this point, he beting better remembered for more lightweight stuff. I also found the production design to be quite good as it really captures working-class life of that era: the Formica kitchen table, and the Texas diner were two scenes that really sprung to mind.

If you haven't seen Silkwood before, it's definitely one worth watching.

Not the multiple arcade machine emulator

Another of the movies that's on my DVR and is coming up on TCM is the musical Mame, tomorrow, April 27, at 3:45 PM.

Mame is a film version of a Broadway musical, which in turn was adapted from the play/movie Auntie Mame, with that ultimately having been adapted from a novel. I'm pretty certain I did a post on Auntie Mame ages ago, and the story is well-known enough that you might know the basics of it. Patrick Dennis is a 9-year-old kid in late-1920s Chicago whose well-to-do and conservative parents have died. The movie opens with the reading of Dad's will, which stipulates that he's going to live with his only living relative, Aunt Mame (Lucille Ball), in New York. But the will also stipulates that trustee Mr. Babcock (John McGiver) is going to be able to ensure that Patrick goes to a good traditional school and is raised Protestant. These are important for reasons we shall soon see.

Patrick shows up to Mame's large New York house one night with his nanny Agnes. His arrival is technically not unannounced, but Mame has made an error: the arrival is on December 1, as the telegram informed her, while Mame thought today was November 31. So when Patrick shows up, Mame is throwing a fairly wild party with a ton of guests and performing a Broadway-type musical number since this is after all a musical. Agnes is a bit put off at first, but Mame is a lot of a bohemian and a complete change of pace from the life Patrick knew up to this point. Some might think it's just what he needs, although Mr. Babcock is definitely not one of those people.

Life is pleasant enough for them, however, at least until October, 1929. That is of course the date of the stock market crash, and Mame is one of the people greatly affected by the lose in value of her investments. Somehow, though, she's able to retain her servants -- not on Patrick's money, since that is controlled by the trustees. But she has to go out and actually work, first in a Broadway show where her best friend, actress Vera (Bea Arthur), gets her the part, and then in a department store. It's there that Mame meets wealthy southerner Beauregard Pickett (Robert Preston), who ultimately marries her and makes her financially secure, at least until he dies suddenly.

By this time, Patrick has grown up (played as an adult by Bruce Davison) and is about to go off to college, with it not really beine mentioned that Pearl Harbor would have happened about the time he'd be a senior in college. Some time presumably after the war, Patrick has become conservative and is engaged to nice Connecticut girl Gloria Upson, who has fabulously wealthy relatives. The only thing is that they're also conservative in all the ways Mame abhors.

Mame was savaged by critics when it was released in 1974, and it's easy to see why. In the musical number at the party early on, the shots shift from long-focus and medium shots to close-ups of Mame. Every close-up is in exceedingly soft focus, to the point that it's distracting. Rosalind Russell was in her late 40s when she made Auntie Mame; the first stage musical version of Mame starred Angela Lansbury when she was about 40; Lucille Ball, however, was in her early 60s when she made this. She's not quite up to the singing, and the more slapstick screen persona of Lucille Ball is not what the Mame character needs. It's like all the charm was sucked out of the movie in turning it into a musical.

But, as always you may want to watch and judge for yourself.

Harry & Son

Yet another of the people to be honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars was Ossie Davis, as I mentioned several weeks back when I did a post on Hot Stuff. Another movie in which he had a smallish role and therefore TCM could use for their programming, was Harry & Son. I had never heard of it, and having watched it, I understand why I'd never heard of it.

Davis is, of course, not the star here. That honor goes to Paul Newman, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay. He plays the titular Harry, last name Keach. Harry lives in the Miami area where he works in construction although for some inexplicable reason he doesn't wear any safety equipment while operating the wrecking ball. One day he goes out with his co-workers to the bowling alley, where he has some sort of attack that screws up his vision. My first thought was that this was going to be a brain tumor, but when he finally does see a doctor later in the movie, it's explained as some sort of heart issue.

Harry lives with his adult son Howard (Robby Benson), who as the film opens is working detailing cars while wearing just a pair of cut-off jeans shorts. Now, you'd think he could make money by doing this in front of his female clientele, since Benson was clearly cast for his perceived sex appeal since the Robby Benson of this era couldn't act to save his life. But no. And in any case, Howard really wants to be a writer, a desire that his father doesn't get since being a writer has so far done nothing to pay the bills.

Harry has another attack while on the job that causes him to lose his job. You'd think he could go on disability since he's close to retirement age, but again that's not really discussed especially since he's a proud man and that pride has made his relationships with everybody else in his life difficult: his daughter Nina, his brother Tom (Wilford Brimley), and Lilly (Joanne Woodward), who operates a pet store nearby and who was a good friend of Harry's now deceased wife.

Lilly's daughter Katie (Ellen Barkin) was Howard's girlfriend back in high school, but they broke up, or rather Howard ghosted Katie even though they didn't use that word back in the 1980s, when rumor got out that Katie was promiscuous. Indeed, she's now pregnant and doesn't seem to care who the father was, although we're led to believe that it's definitely not Howard who's the father. Along the way, Howard gets a series of jobs trying to please his father. The first he gets thinking he's going to do PR thanks to a nymphomaniac who is one of his detailing clients. Instead, he winds up in a box factory working under Morgan Freeman. Then he tries to get a job repossessing cars, although I was wondering during that scene whether this was in fact a front operation for a chop shop. It's here that we meet Ossie Davis as a man whose truck Howard is asked to repo.

Harry & Son doesn't work for a whole bunch of reasons. One big one is the screenplay, which as I've implied above has several plot holes. The script also seems to both meander and jump from one plot point to the next, making it feel both slow (lasting a shade under two hours) and disjointed. But an equally big problem is Robby Benson, who just isn't (or certainly wasn't in the 1980s; I see that his later career seems disproportionately based on having voiced Beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast) a very good actor. So all these flaws are a good reason why I'd never heard of Harry & Son before TCM ran it last August.

Lord of the Flies

TCM's lineup for tomorrow (April 25) is a bunch of movies set on islands, and includes a movie that I happen to have on my DVR: the 1963 adaptation of the novel Lord of the Flies. That movie comes on at 2:30 PM.

Now, I think this is another of those movies where most people have at least a basic knowledge of the source material and story before going into it, because of the way in which the original book has gained a lasting sense of endurance. In a sequence that's done, like La jetée, with mostly still photos, we're shown how England is faced with another non-nuclear war and bombardment from the air as in World War II. This leads to the evacuation of children not only from the big cities, but from the country itself to places abroad. One of the flights carrying a large group of boarding school students, however, is hit by a missile somewhere over the Pacific.

We now head to the live action, and discover that two boys have survived the crash. One is Ralph, while the other is a chubby, bescpectacled, and presumably more intellectual boy who was given the nickname Piggy at school. Here, Piggy does something stupid, which is to tell Ralph that everybody gave him the nickname Piggy, rather than give out his real name. Eventually, Ralph and Piggy come across a conch shell, which can be blown to produce a distinctive sound that any other possible survivors can hear. Sure enough, there are other survivors, but they're all young boys like Ralph and Piggy.

Ralph and Piggy bring the group together to try to figure out what to do next, until they hear voices and find another group walking along the beach, wearing not only the standard school uniform but robes that seem to mark them as part of a choir, which makes you wonder how this group of students knew each other but nobody from either of the two groups knew the people in the other group. Things need to be done to figure out whether they're on an island and whether there might be any civilization to save them, along with building shelter and finding out whether there's any possible food on the island. That involves electing a leader.

The election, such as it is, immediately devolves into a sort of tribal conflict, as the choir kids all vote for their leader Jack, while the other boys outvote them and select Ralph as the leader. Jack is none too pleased with this and, having a knife, immediately sets out turning his clique into hunters by fashioning spears to hunt for any possible meat. They find wild boars and something that suggests there might be a "beast" on the island. This, combined with deteriorating relations between the two cliques, leads to despotism and tragedy....

William Golding's original story is a parable on how it doesn't take much to destroy civilized norms, and that's something the movie version does quite well. Director Peter Brook, a stage director by training, gave the child actors, all non-professionals at the time, copies of the book and basically had the kids improvise the action which he would then edit together. I had the fear that this would make the editing extremely choppy at some point, but surprisingly, that doesn't happen, and the movie mostly works.

This version of Lord of the Flies is definitely worth watching. There was another version made around 1990 that I haven't seen.

Operation Frankton

Another person who was honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars and whose movies are getting close to expiring from my DVR as a result is José Ferrer. A movie of which I'd heard the title but had never actually seen the movie is The Cockleshell Heroes, so I recorded it to do a post on it.

Intertitles just after the opening credits inform us a bit about the history of the Royal Marines, which were founded in the late 17th century but didn't get the "Royal" appellation until April 1802. Fast forward 140 years, to early 1942. This is, of course, the middle of the European theater of World War II. The Nazis have occupied a goodly portion of the continent, and are using various ports to make a mess of Allied shipping and naval movements in the Atlantic. Maj. Stringer (José Ferrer) shows up seemingly unannounced at a British military base, since he decided to kayak in which seems like a serious military breach.

Of course, that's part of the plan. Maj. Stringer is sent to where he's going to have his office, next to Capt. Hugh Thompson (Trevor Howard). Capt. Thompson has been in the military since 1918, but is only a captain, so outranked by Maj. Stringer, which is a bit of a plot point since it implies that Thompson did something that prevented him from rising above the rank of captain. In any case, Stringer informs Thompson of his plan, which is to come up with a type of collapsible two-man kayak (they us the word "canoe" because British English considers kayaks a type of canoe) and paddle up the estuary of the Gironde to the city of Bordeaux, where the Germans have a base from which they're attacking the British. Then, the commandos will attach magnetic mines to the hulls of the ships, which should blow up and sink the ships.

Now, if you've seen enough war movies, you'll know that there are several standard tropes. One is that the first part of the plot involves preparations for the operation. Maj. Stringer brings in a bunch of Marines to see who might be most suitable for the operation, and eventually whittles the crew down to about a dozen who were able to get across Britain dressed as Nazis in a way that frankly makes the British populace look stupid. But the men don't really respect Stringer, with the result that their first practice event trying to paddle up the Thames at night is a total disaster. There is, however, one funny scene involving what is actually a live mine and the marines' attempt to dispose of it at sea dressed only in their swimming trunks. (I did, however, wonder why they trained in trunks since the real operation would have them in a frogman's swimming outfit.)

And then they head off to the southwest of France for the difficult operation. One of the boats gets damaged, and those two men quickly get captured by the Germans, although they refuse to give up any information. The others do make it to Bordeaux, as you might guess since the title of the movie is The Cockleshell Heroes. But can they escape?

As you might have guessed from the title of this blog post, The Cockleshell Heroes is based on a real operation called "Operation Frankton" that tried to destroy German ships in Bordeaux. However, the real Operation Frankton was a failure because of its secrecy: it apparently interfered with another operation that likely would have had a higher chance of success and didn't cause as much damage as the British might have liked. José Ferrer directed, and the direction feels formulaic, although that may be down to the script as well, from actor/director Bryan Forbes.

Having watched The Cockleshell Heroes, I can see why it's not so well remembered. It's by-the-numbers, but something that in the end is entertaining enough if unmemorable.

Gotta love how the Code treated women

I always enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies, so when one that I haven't done a post on before shows up on TCM, I try to make certain to record it so I can watch it. One such movie that I only recently got around to watching despite it having been on my DVR for some time is The Law in Her Hands.

The main "her" in the title of the movie is Mary Wentworth, played by Margaret Lindsay. As the movie opens, she and her friend Dot Davis (Glenda Farrell) are getting sworn into the New York State bar, having passed the bar exam. They had been working at a restaurant to pay their way through law school, and plan to start their own law firm together. After the bar ceremony, they go back to their old restaurant to celebrate. A man shows up there, obviously from a protection racket, and trying to induce the boss to join the "benevolent association" voluntarily. When that doesn't work, the guy sets off a smoke bomb.

Frank Gordon (Lyle Talbot) runs the protection rackets in New York, and he's none too pleased about the violence his underling used. Now he's going to have to get the witnesses to find a reason not to show up at the trial. He's almost successful enough that ADA Robert Mitchell (Warren Hull) is unable to prosecute, at least until Mary, who also happens to be Mitchell's girlfriend, shows up with a photograph taken with the defendant in the background, convicting the defendant.

Mary and Dot's law practice isn't particularly successful, although a process server who is only in the movie for comic relief tries to help them. Mitchell tells Mary that perhaps she should give up practicing law and just marry him and start a family together, as all good women were supposed to do back in the 1930s. Gordon, for his part, has a different way of dealing with Mary, which is to try to get her on a very highly-paid retainer.

Of course, working for the man behind the protection rackets is bound to cause problems, and that eventually becomes the case. Mary is successful enough, but the way she gets acquittals challenges judicial ethics, jokes about the idea that lawyers actually care about ethics aside. The breaking point comes when Mary learns that in trying to spoil the milk of people who didn't want to join the dairy protection racket, Gordon's men actually poisoned it. Mary doesn't want to defend Gordon, but how can she get him convicted without violating attorney-client privilege?

The Law in Her Hands is entertaining enough for a B movie, which is to say that it does entertain although it won't be well-remembered after watching and doesn't bear much resemblance to reality. But then there's a coda at the end which I have a feeling would have dissatisfied a lot of women even in the 1930s. Glenda Farrell doesn't get as much to do as I would have liked, and Eddie Acuff as the comic relief isn't the most relieving person. But then again, The Law in Her Hands, being a B movie, is the sort of thing that the studio probably had no expectation that people 90 years in the future would be watching.

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.