Guns of Hate

Tim Holt and Richard Martin help Jason Robards Sr. when the wheel comes off his wagon. He offers them jobs, but they're cowpokes, so he gives them a gold nugget as a keepsake. Assayer Steve Brodie recognizes it as coming from the famous Lost Dutchman Mine. Soon Robards is dead, Holt and Martin are accused of murder and the story is underway in this typically sturdy entry in Holt's long-running series for RKO.

Although it has the sort of random title that far too many B Westerns used, director Lesley Selander does his usual more than competent job, and cameraman George A. Diskant shoots the familiar Alabama Hills very nicely, with some handsome deep focus keeping the peaks beautiful in the background. The story is nothing remarkable, but competent, and the professionalism of cast and crew keep it interesting through the end.

The plot and characters are oh so familiar, the one variation being that the hero's Mexican sidekick is part Irish. Holt has lost the fresh youthfulness of his lieutenant in Stagecoach and looks older than 30. Despite being strangers, he and Martin seem very familiar with the local topography, Holt even taking a short cut across country in the final chase. His relationship with Judy Jason jumps massively from her believing he killed her father to apparently being in love with him, but the romantic void is filled irritatingly by Martin's womanising. The two fist fights are first rate, even if villain Morgan quickly returns to his suavely-dressed self after the first.But it all moves along quite nicely.

Bob and his sidekick Chito are falsely accused of killing an elderly miner - but to prove their innocence, they must escape fromjail. The real culprits are Morgan, a shady saloon owner and his henchman Rocky who hunt down the miner to rob a map of the legendary Dutchman's Gold from him. They learn this golden nugget of information from a gold surveyor.

Another plot busy B-western with our heroes ending up in jail for murder which they didn't commit and then breaking out - chases, and an energetic fistfight between Holt and the shady saloon keeper. One of Chito's girlfriend helps. Every moves at a fast pace.

Guns Of Hate finds Tim Holt and Richard Martin riding along minding their own business when they stop to offer a helping hand to Jason Robards, Sr. who has lost a wheel on his buckboard. Watching Robards trying to lift the wagon to get his wheel back on by himself made me wonder would the jack have to be invented after the automobile necessarily?

Anyway he tells them about finding the fabled Lost Dutchman gold mine and gives them a nugget for their troubles saying there was plenty more where that came from. When Tim and Richard cash the nugget in for folding money, the assayer Tony Barrett gets real greedy and tells the crooked saloon owner Steve Brodie who then murders poor Robards. As per usual in a theme that runs through Tim Holt westerns, he and his sidekick get blamed and spend the rest of the film trying to prove their innocence.

Tim's got a double reason as well since he also meets Robards niece Nan Leslie. And of course Richard Martin as the amorous Chito Jose Gonzalez Bustamante Rafferty has Myrna Dell, a saloon girl with a heart of gold who draws a line at her employer Brodie committing murder and robbery. Marriage is not on the horizon as Dell finds out sadly.

Guns Of Hate goes down as one of the lesser Holt efforts for RKO.

When Banning and Rafferty stop to help a man in trouble with his cart, the man (Ben Johnson) thanks them, pays them with a nugget of gold and even offers them a job digging in a mine he has found. Banning and Rafferty head into town to let Ben's daughter Judy know that he'll be late and while in town they trade the nugget in for cash with Matt Wyatt. Wyatt sneaks to saloon owner Morgan and tells him about Ben's mine –Morgan heads out with Rocky to seize the land. Shortly afterwards, Banning and Rafferty go to the mine to take up Ben's offer of work only to arrive to find Ben murdered and the gunmen getting away. However when they are arrested for Ben's murder they are forced to break out and find the real killers to clear their names.

As much out of curiosity as anything else I decided to tape this film for later viewing, given that it was screened in the morning TV schedules while I was at work. Anything that has a handful of votes and no comments on IMDb always appeals to me because I wonder why so few others have seen it. The brash title and acting talent immediately marks this out as a b-movie western with a simple plot – my summary may sound complex but all that happens in the first 10 minutes, leading to a relatively straightforward hunt for the real killers. It is nothing special but it isn't awful either; the basic brash humour and action provide distraction if not thrills and the writing is pretty much par for the course for this sort of thing.

Of course, it is full of weaknesses and the film generally ignores the detail. For example Judy confronts Banning over him (allegedly) killing her father, and seconds after being disarmed by Rafferty is flirting with him despite still thinking he murdered her father! In this way it cannot possibly be considered a good film but it does the standard by-the-numbers stuff required of a filler film. The external shots look OK but the flat black and white don't pose any threat to John Ford's legacy but the internals look pretty impressive and I can only assume they were used for other films as well and not just constructed for this film.

The cast are workmanlike and provide all the clichés – square-jawed hero, comic sidekick, evil boss-type, simmering love interest for hero, perky love interest for sidekick etc. Holt is OK and does all that is asked of him but Martin is hilariously bad. I could be wrong here, but I'd hazard a guess that he isn't of Mexican birth and I did find his Irish/Mexican accent to be a bit forced and quite funny when it slips into American! The two men do have an OK charisma and they did alright for themselves in these characters, running for about 25 movies in the same roles. I'm not totally won over by their appeal but I will watch other films featuring them if I get the chance simply to try and see what it was all about. Leslie is all smiles and sweetness and, for my money, vapid – but I suppose she is what the b-movie customer expects. Dell impressed me not with her performance but with her character; yes it may all be clean but she is clearly a prostitute and the film makes reference to this several times – a surprise to see that in a film from the 1940's. Brodie and Barrett are OK bad guys but not that good, but the support cast throws in Jim Nolan and Jason Robards (no, his father) in small roles.

Overall, watched as a B-movie western with low expectations then this is an OK distraction. It has a basic plot, no real characters beyond the clichés, basic action and lazy writing but it fills an hour, which is all it was ever intended to do. The lack of comments on IMDb indicate that it has had no significant audience or fan base but I'm sure somewhere you can get the Banning & Rafferty series if you so desire! However for me it was an interesting filler but exactly the sort of film that would have been forgotten minutes into the main feature and something that I doubt will linger in my memory for very long.