As is well known in movie lore, John Clark Gable is the posthumous son of Clark Gable and his last wife Kay Williams Spreckels. By dint of his father's estate and the fact his mom had previously been married to the heir of the Spreckels sugar fortune, young Mr. Gable had a fairly comfortable childhood. In fact his mom took great care to raise him with a degree of privacy and away from Hollywood. She never allowed him to be photographed for an understandable fear of kidnappers.
I guess when he decided to claim his dad's legacy he should have picked a better vehicle than this. I suppose it's only natural that I look for something of his father's persona in him on the screen, but I didn't see it. Probably takes after mom.
Gable, along with cowboy pals James Brolin and Richard Roundtree come upon outlaw Pepe Serna who rode with the recently deceased Billy the Kid. In fact he's got the Kid's horse with him which he's willing to swap. Young Gable does swap with him and he and friends decide that they're not exactly upwardly mobile punching cattle. They decide to become outlaws.
Naturally after killing several members of a posse trailing them after they rob a bank they become notorious. Of course the fact that it's every day you have a typical outlaw gang of three consisting of two white and one black man doesn't give them the least little clue that splitting up might increase their survival chances. But these three aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
So with this less than sterling debut in this film, John Clark Gable decided the movie life wasn't for him.
What the producers should have done is find a vehicle that would have teamed him with that other posthumous son of a screen legend, Tyrone Power, Jr. Now that might have brought in a few dollars at the box office. And young Power definitely has his father's persona.
