Gunfight at Comanche Creek

Gunfight at Comanche Creek is directed by Frank McDonald and written by Edward Bernds. It stars Audie Murphy, Ben Cooper, Colleen Miller, DeForest Kelley and Jan Merlin. A Panavision/De Luxe Color production with cinematography by Joseph Biroc and music by Marlin Skiles.

Murphy stars as an agent for the National Detective Agency who goes undercover to find the outlaw gang that has been breaking convicts out of jail to help them to commit more crimes. The resulting crimes cause the bounties upon the fugitives' heads to rise, thus the outlaws then kill the convicts and claim the rewards.

Apparently a remake of 1957 film The Last of the Badmen, Gunfight at Comanche Creek is a suspenseful and entertaining blend of detective shenanigans with Western staples. It's an interesting role for Murphy, playing Bob Gifford (AKA: Judd Tanner) as a fearless ladies man having to just use his wits instead of guns just to survive the undercover operation. It's not exactly what you would call a high energy action movie, since we don't really get the pulse raised until the finale, but there's enough twists and intelligence in the plotting to keep the story intriguing.

Negatives? There's a continuous narration by an uncredited Reed Hadley which is most intrusive. Instead of letting us be involved fully with the unfolding story, the makers felt the need to have Reed fill us in on what is happening at every turn in the plot! Clearly they were going for a hard-boiled detective angle, but it's misplaced. While Miller is saddled with one of those token female roles. But the support cast do what is required to make the film work, Murphy delivers a good one for his fans and Biroc's colour photography is very easy on the eye. 7/10

In this Allied Artists quickie Audie Murphy once again has to infiltrate a gang of outlaws - helpfully explained by a Dragnet-style narration - and teach them the hard way that Crime Does Not Pay.

Made with the usual bloodless competence of TV westerns of the sixties; one feature of the film that dates it pretty precisely is the presence in the cast of DeForest Kelley during the period when he was treading water playing heavies.

The National Detective Agency sends investigators Bob Gifford (Audie Murphy) and fellow agent (Jan Merlin) to Comanche Creek to infiltrate a ruthless gang of outlaws who have devised a clever scheme to break criminals out of jail and force them to be easily recognizable participants in a string of robberies. As the wanted dead or alive bounty on their heads escalates with each robbery, the gang eventually murders them and turns them in for the reward. Gifford posing as criminal Judd Tanner places a target on his own back after intentionally passing stolen bills in a Comanche Creek saloon in order to get himself arrested. In short order he is busted out of jail and finds himself on the inside of the gang, a disagreeable lot of scoundrels headed by chief bad guy Amos Troop (DeForest Kelley) and his henchmen (Ben Cooper, Adam Williams, Mort Mills). Instead of taking down the crime ring then and there, Gifford reckons none of these gang members are smart enough to run an operation like this themselves and that there must the brains of the enterprise lurking in the shadows back in town. The rest of the movie consists of Gifford finding the unknown 'Mr. Big' behind the operation before he is the next wanted dead or alive casualty.

This Allied Artists Picture directed by longtime B-Western veteran Frank McDonald is largely a workaday affair. Audie Murphy is cast a bit off-type as a urbane, womanizing frontier detective. Maybe this was an attempt to appeal to changing audience tastes or to capitalize off of the "shaken not stirred" secret agent mania popular at the time. Possibly just a way to update this late in the cycle, traditional horse opera which was a remake of the another mediocre film, 'Last Of The Badmen' starring George Montgomery. There is also a romantic side story line introduced between Ben Cooper and Susan Seaforth of which little is made. Production values are pretty typical of Allied Artists releases of the era, which is at best, average quality. For some bewildering reason it was decided to include a grating and unnecessary voice-over narration explaining plot movements that most viewers would find obvious.

Despite it's modest roots and aspirations 'Gunfight at Comanche Creek' is watchable Western fare made so by Murphy's presence as well as Director Frank McDonald and the rest of the cast who do about as much as could be expected given the cards they were dealt.

Audie Murphy goes undercover to break up a gang who have come up with a gimmick: break an outlaw out of jail, put him in front of their raids while the rest of them are masked, drive up the price on his head, then shoot him and turn in the corpse for a reward.

It's directed by Frank McDonald, a prolific director who spent a lot of his career in the upper ranks of the Bs, mostly because of his speed and cheapness. Most of his movies were westerns. His actual strength lay in comedy, and like many a B director, he wound up in TV, where he directed several episodes of GET SMART.

This late Audie Murphy oater is marred by Hadley Reed's narration, explaining what is going on, as if it's an episode of DRAGNET and the producers are afraid to either trust the audience to figure out what is going on or allow the actors to indulge in exposition. Joseph Biroc's color camerawork is efficient and not particularly distinguished. All in all, a mediocre example of the vanishing western.

I liked this film a lot, but then I love westerns. It's got Audie, Ben Cooper, Jan Merlin, and scores of others, so how can it go wrong? Well, for one thing, it's a blatant remake of the earlier western, Last Of The Badmen (1957). How the writers of that film could let writer Edward Bernds get by with taking full credit for writing this film is beyond me. Sure, the setting is different, the characters have different names, but the basic story is almost identical. Both films even feature an annoying narrator, who details facts that none of us need to hear voiced....all the way through the film. If you've seen both films, you'll know what I mean.

Which is the better version? It's hard to say. They are bot very good, with excellent casts and fine direction. Both would have benefited from losing the narrator.

Johnboy