bkoganbing TV's Range Rider tried his hand at big screen westerns and this one, Joe Dakota is one of them. Sad to say though that Jock Mahoney came along a bit too late to be a big screen cowboy hero. And the film while good is not anything you wouldn't see as a Gunsmoke episode.The plot is considerably borrowed from MGM's Bad Day At Black Rock, but its hero is a soft spoken Tom Destry like character. Jock Mahoney is in the title role and he comes to town looking for someone the locals only knew as 'The Old Indian'. He's disappeared now and a bunch of the locals under the supervision of town tough Charles McGraw are drilling an oil well on the Old Indian's land.Only it's not his land, it's Mahoney's land which 'the old Indian' was squatting on for Mahoney. Mahoney starts investigating, start asking questions and pretty soon the town is riled. Something McGraw hopes to use when the time comes.Mahoney does make a good cowboy hero, born a little too late to have made a career on the big screen. I remember him well as the Range Rider during my childhood years. As for 'the Old Indian' and McGraw if you've seen Bad Day At Black Rock you know how this one comes out.Such fine folks as Luana Patten, Barbara Lawrence, Paul Birch, Claude Akins and Lee Van Cleef fill out the cast. Sad Jock Mahoney came along too late to be a big screen cowboy hero.

dougdoepke A mysterious stranger (Mahoney) comes to town asking after the whereabouts of former resident Joe Dakota. Townsfolk are not very obliging, which seems to have something to do with a recently drilled oil well and who owns it.The movie year 1957 was saturated with westerns. This one tries to be different, and largely succeeds. Notice that no one—not even arch-movie villains Van Cleef or Akins—sports a six- gun. And, unless I missed something, not even a single shot is fired. Add to that an oil well, of all things, plus a woebegone little prairie town that's definitely not a studio set, and you've got a different looking western.Then too, the first part manages some pretty good low-key humor; at the same time, Mahoney gets an oil bath, courtesy the townsfolk, that leaves him looking like a human inkblot. For a western, however, there's not much action and none of the usual suspense of good-guy vs. bad-guy showdown. And truth be told, the basic plot is borrowed from 1955's mega-hit Bad Day at Black Rock. But the writers have added enough clever twists and turns to keep the viewer entertained. All in all, it's an interesting, if not very intense, little western.(In passing—I checked to see if the oil well was an anachronism for this time period. It's not. The first well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. Also, note that William Tallman who played the DA on the old Perry Mason series is one of the two screenwriters here.)

bonfay-1 I saw this movie when I was younger and never forgot the story, but I couldn't recall the title. I'm so glad to find it after a long search. A man called Joe Dakota arrives in a small western town in California looking for his friend, an old Native American who owns a farm nearby. Why is there such secrecy around the old man's disappearance? Nobody in town wants to talk about it. The mystery slowly unfolds as Joe Dakota launches an investigation. One scene that was unforgettable to me was the bathing scene with the sound of meadowlark birds singing in the background. Great story!

yortsnave I saw this Western movie on afternoon TV when I was a child. I remember it as suspenseful, yet sweet and touching. There's the mystery: who is this Stranger who rides into town, what does he want, and what has happened to the old Indian scout named "Joe Dakota"? What are the townspeople hiding? The sweet and touching ending: the Stranger exposes the injustice that has been done, which leads the townspeople into repentance.