Where's the Kenny Loggins song or the shirtless volleyball?

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, DirecTV had a free preview weekend of all the movie channels, so I got the chance to record a bunch of stuff I otherwise wouldn't have. (Having a brand new empty DVR helped, too.) One of the movies I recorded was the 1955 western Top Gun.

Sterling Martin plays Rick Martin, who doesn't seem to be into superstion, black cats, or voodoo dolls. Instead, he's a gunfighter who's returning to his hometown in the Wyoming territory where his mom is buried. The townsfolk don't like him because they know his reputation and consider him responsible for a couple of the bodies in the cemetery. Indeed, people like Lem Sutter (a young Rod Taylor) would like to take Martin down in a gunfight.

But Martin has other ideas. He'd been spending some time with outlaw gang leader Tom Quentin (John Dehner), and has learned that Quentin and his gang plan to raid the town tomorrow to make it an open town safe for all sorts of vice. He tells the marshal, Bat Davis (James Millican), and the marshal is sympathetic. But is the town council, led by big landowner Canby Judd (William Bishop) going to listen to Martin?

It turns out that there's a lot more going on between between Martin and Judd. First is the matter of Martin's dead mother. The offical story is that she mortgaged the family ranch for $5,000, and the night she did so the money was taken from her and she was shot, enabling Judd to get his hands on the land. But a look at the records office shows that somebody had glued a mortgage declaration on top of what was really a bill of sale, do Judd used dirty tricks to get the Martin ranch.

The other big thing is Laura (Karin Booth). She was Martin's girl before he had to leave town the last time some years back, and in the meantime she decided that she didn't want to be married to a gunfighter, even though Martin's plan was to pick her up to head west for California and start a new life there. Instead, Laura has gotten engaged to... Canby Judd, a wedding that's supposed to take place in a few days' time.

That is if the Quentin raid doesn't do terrible things to the town. Two strangers walk into the town bar, and Bat quickly figures out they're from Quentin's gang, trying to get information. And Judd is still trying to figure out ways to get ride of Martin, the sort of keeping your eye off the ball that could make the Quentin raid more likely to succeed.

Top Gun, as you can probably figure out, has absolutely nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same title or the coming remake, but is just a standard-issue 1950s programmer western. There's nothing notably bad about it, but also nothing that will make it stand out. It's available on DVD as well as Amazon streaming if you get the Starz package. Note that when StarzEncore Westerns ran it, the put it in a 16:9 format when IMDb claims it's still in the Academy ratio (not surprising for a B western even though it's after the introduction of Cinemascope). Indeed, the StarzEncore presentation looked badly stretched until I was able to adjust the aspect ratio.