Gunfight at Comanche Creek

I recorded a series of westerns to my cloud DVR several months back, and they're getting close to the point of expiring, so I have to watch them all and write up posts on them. Next up is one that I mentioned briefly a few weeks back, Gunfight at Comanche Creek.

The movie starts off intriguingly, with the dulcet tones of Reed Hadley informing us it's summer, 1875 in Comanche Creek, CO. A bunch of strangers ride into town, and first thing in the morning, as someone from the hotel brings a hot meal over to the town jail, he's ambushed by a gang. They then take the meal to the jail themselves in order to be able to free the prisoner being held there, Jack Mason.

However, Jack Mason doesn't know the people who are freeing him! A reward is put on Mason's head, and that reward is increased as the gang commits more hold-ups, with only Mason being recognized. Eventually, the reward gets to $3500, at which point the gang kills Mason, with the intention of getting the reward money since Mason is wanted "dead or alive". It's a pretty nifty little scheme, and the authorities have no way of proving that whoever brought Mason in would have been involved with breaking him out of jail and using him in those robberies.

Mason wasn't the guy's real name, although that's not important since he gets bumped off in the first ten minutes or so of the movie. What is important is the fact that he was working for the National Detective Agency, based in Wichita, KS. The agency bosses understand this isn't the first time this has happened, and want to catch the gang leaders responsible for this. With that in mind, they come up with the idea of putting yet another of their detectives in the same situation Mason was in: get a guy arrested on some bogus charge and then have the gang break him out. To that end, they select Bob Gifford (Audie Murphy) to pass gold certificates allegedly stolen in a train robbery. This time, however, they'll send a second guy along, Nielson, to spy on the whole operation to try to keep Gifford from getting killed.

Gifford, taking the name Judd Tanner, goes to Comanche Creek to start the operation. Soon enough, he winds up in jail, and on the first night he's in jail, a sheriff named Simms shows up. Except that Simms isn't his name; it's Amos Troop (DeForest Kelley), and this is the plot to break Tanner out of jail and do to him what the Troop gang did to Mason previously.

Gifford tries to figure out exactly what's going on at the gang compound, without being revealed as an employee of the National Detective Agency. Things get complicated when there's another criminal who's not part of the gang and the gang discovers they might have a mole in their midst.

Gunfight at Comanche Creek is an effective little second-tier western, although it's apparently also a remake of a movie from the mid-1950s. Audie Murphy does well enough, and it's a lot of fun to see Bones from Star Trek as the bad guy in a western. It's nothing spectacular, but it certainly entertains.