boblipton A motley assortment of passengers take the stage for Lordsburg and Apache Wells; two of them -- Rory Calhoun and Arthur Hunnicutt -- tell Richard Arlen that the Apaches burned a wagon train. I was all prepared for an A.C. Lyles produced remake of STAGECOACH. Instead, it switched halfway through and turned into something quite different.It's still a Geezer Western, with all the actors of an earlier era, happy to pick up a paycheck: Red Barry. Jean Parker and Johnny Mack Brown in small parts, Lon Chaney Jr. as the coach driver, DeForest Kelly as the psycho gunman ... but in the end it switched gears often enough in surprising but sensible ways to keep up my interest, and turned into a tough, hard western.

JohnHowardReid SYNOPSIS: A stagecoach operator plans to rob a relay station of its gold. NOTES: Locations in the Mojave Desert. COMMENT: While not quite up to their usual actionful, briskly-paced standard, this A. C. Lyles/R. G. Springsteen western is worth seeing if only for the opportunity of renewing screen acquaintance with such a grand roster of veteran players, particularly John Russell as the criminal mastermind, Johnny Mack Brown as a self-seeking sheriff, Lon Chaney as a laughing stage driver and DeForest Kelley as a schizoid gunfighter. Arlen's part is small, but Gene Evans is delightful as Kelley's sidekick. Technically, the film shows signs of hasty shooting, particularly in its variable color photography and obvious back projection. Production values are fair — though the film was made on a very limited budget, there is no utilization of stock footage.

classicsoncall I thought the screen writers were playing havoc with history here so I had to look a couple of things up. At one point Rory Calhoun's character Jim Walker states that the name 'Apache' means enemy. For some reason I doubted that, but checking a Dictionary.com entry I found that the word origin of 'Apache' comes from Mexican Spanish and quite literally means 'enemy'.Then there was that business about the movie's sect of Apaches being known as 'Tonto's'. It sounded a little too reminiscent of the Lone Ranger to me, but again, it turns out the Tonto Apache was one of a group of Western Apache Indians and the word also refers to their dialect. The Chiricahua Indians who lived to the South of the Apache called them 'brainless people' or 'people without minds', a more sophisticated way of saying wild or crazy.So once again I surprise myself with information I pick up in a movie Western. However all of this could have been put to better use in a more compelling story. I thought it kind of odd that the Cavalry troop under the command of Captain Gannon (Richard Arlen) gave such short shrift to Walker and his sidekick Bill Gibson (Arthur Hunnicutt) about the danger of Apaches in the vicinity of Apache Wells. I mean come on, it's right there in the name isn't it? Now I'm on record in some of my other movie reviews as having a preference for John Russell as an outlaw, but man, he was pretty intense here, wasn't he? That nasty scar below his right eye was a bonus as far as I was concerned, although it did look like his make-up changed from time to time. And if that wasn't obvious enough, whenever Jim Walker got physical with one of the bad guys in a dust up you could clearly make out a stunt double filling in for him. I don't think I've ever seen it as noticeable before even though it happens all the time.But the actor who takes the gold star here for 'over the top' is DeForrest Kelley and his manic performance as an all around lunatic stage robber; no self control whatsoever. With 'Star Trek' just around the corner the following year, I was waiting for him to come up with something like, "Jim, I'm an outlaw, not a good guy". And you know what, he would have been right all the way around.

frankfob but not by a whole lot. The cast is a bit more vigorous than the usual group of senior citizen actors who populate the typical Lyles western, the action is staged a bit more professionally and the script isn't one of the worst of the series (although it's nothing to write home about, either). Rory Calhoun and John Russell, unlike most of the leading men in this series, seem to have matured rather than "aged," and that fact alone lifts this picture up a notch from the usual run-of-the-mill Lyles extravaganza. It's still nothing special, but it's not as embarrassing as some of the other entries in Lyles' string of geezer oaters.