Desert Guns

Roger Moore is best known for playing James Bond in the 1970s, as well as Simon Templar on the British TV version of The Saint in the 1960s. So when one of his non-Bond movies shows up, I'm always willing to give it a watch. One of those movies, Gold of the Seven Saints showed up on TCM some months back, and is interesting in part because it's a western, a genre I don't think anybody would associate Roger Moore with. With all that in mind, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

Roger Moore plays Shaun Garrett, an Irish immigrant who has been trapping fur with his friend Jim Rainbolt (Clint Walker). As the movie opens, however, Shaun is riding into town one night looking to steal a horse, which is a serious offense. He's caught, and one of the men working for McCracken (Gene Evans), threatens to shoot Shaun. With that in mind, Shaun barters for the horse, paying with the one valuable possession he has: a nugget of gold.

That was an extremely risky thing to do, as Rainbolt tells Shaun when he gets back to Shaun up in the hills. The nugget, as both of them know, came from a gold strike that they discovered and so produced a bunch of gold. So in theory they should be rich, at least once they can get to civilization and deposit the gold with a bank or something. But having used one of the nuggets now, whoever gets paid with it is going to know that there's excess gold somewhere -- and they're going to go chasing after Shaun to find that gold. It doesn't take long before Jim looks back and sees a cloud of dust and white men on horses.

Shaun and Jim keep pressing forward, but because they're carrying all that gold, they can't move as quickly as the men pursuing them, meaning that eventually they're going to get caught. They look for a defensive position, and even hide the gold in a place that Jim can navigate back to, but not Shaun since he doesn't know the territory as well as Jim does. McCracken and his men do get to Jim and Shaun and get in a fight that results in Shaun's getting a broken leg. But Jim and Shaun are saved by a passing doctor, Gates (Chill Wills). As a result, Jim and Shaun are forced to bring him into their confidence. Eventually they wind up at the ranch of an old friend of Jim's named Gondora (Robert Middleton). In theory Shaun can recover there. But certainly word of that gold is going to get out and people are going to come looking for it.

Gold of the Seven Saints is one of those movies that's really only a western because it takes place in that certain time and place. As I thought about the movie while skimming it a second time to do this post, I suddenly remembered the old movie Nightfall, where a modern-day Aldo Ray waits for spring so he can fetch $350,000 buried under the Wyoming snow once it melts. There's something about the present-day setting that let the writers come up with better material instead of relying on western tropes. It's not that Gold of the Seven Saints is bad; it's just pedestrian. I'd probably have a higher opinion of it if had been made in the earlier days of westerns instead of being released in 1961.