George O'Brien was under contract to RKO for several years, during which he made a pretty neat series of westerns. He had an easygoing Irish charm, was a good actor and a tremendous athlete, and his westerns were models of the B genre--efficiently but not cheaply made, fast-paced but not rushed, briskly directed, and leavened with touches of clever humor not often found in B westerns, where comedy was usually restricted to overacting sidekicks and forced slapstick. Unfortunately, this is not one of O'Brien's better entries. One of the problems is that much of the action (and there isn't all that much of it to begin with) takes place on railroad cars, and the fact that these scenes were shot on a studio soundstage is painfully obvious by the surprisingly shoddy use of rear projection. The subject matter itself--a big meat packing company trying to squeeze its smaller competitors out of business so it can have the market to itself--doesn't really lend itself well to the western genre, and the result is that stretches of the film are, frankly, boring. Director D. Ross Lederman cut his teeth on B westerns at Columbia, first as a second-unit director and then as a director of Tim McCoy westerns, but he can't really do all that much here, being restricted as he was to a soundstage for much of the "action." There's a gun battle shot on location which takes place on a cattle train that's being attacked by outlaws, but it doesn't last long and is actually not done all that well. O'Brien tries hard, but this one just really doesn't work. It's worth one look, maybe, but O'Brien has done far better.
