The Kid from Broken Gun

Charles Starrett ends his acting career, having spent seven years as 'the Durango Kid', one of the regulars on the Top Ten Western Stars list, with this fairly interestingly set up courtroom drama. Here he is on trial for murder and the events are shown in flashback. It's an interesting story-telling technique, weakened, however, by the fact that we know Starrett is a good guy and didn't do it. Costs on this one were kept down by using a single courtroom set for half the one-hour film and using footage from an earlier picture for the rest, which is why Jock Mahoney appears in two roles.

Columbia, the studio that produced Starrett's movies, was getting out of bread-and-butter westerns. The studio had dropped most of its movie series like BLONDIE and THE LONE WOLF and relegated its B production to the cheap Sam Katzman unit. Within a couple of years B movies would be the province of independents like AIP and the movie western would disappear under the onslaught of TV series. Writer Ed Earl Repp would move to TV, cinematographer Fayte M. Browne would be DP on one more movie and director Fred Sears would move to cheap sci-fi flicks... and the long history of genre westerns would end. Too bad.