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.