Four Guns to the Border

This is a really enjoyable movie, a tale of romance, self discovery and of course Native Americans. The performances are convincing and quite passionate, which really help sell the story to the audience. However the star of this movie is actually the musical score. It is tremendous. The music underscores the action on screen as well as any movie I have ever watched. Highly recommended.

I'm a western nut who's been watching horse-operas since the '50s and somehow I'd never heard of this before a TV showing here in England. The cast is superb, including Oscar-winner Walter Brennan in a more restrained performance than usual. Each of the four bank robbers has his own little quirks and it's fun to see Jay Silverheels in a more lively part than his legendary Tonto act, which was often so wooden you'd pick up splinters just from watching it. There's a familiar face playing the tiny role of the town barber - Paul Brinegar, who found TV fame five years later as trail-cook Wishbone on Rawhide.

Richard Carlson's direction is surprisingly effective. It's a darn shame he didn't do much else, though his 1964 low-budget Kid Rodelo was nowhere near as nifty a job as Four Guns, which must be filed as "underrated and worth a look." Both movies came from Louis L'Amour stories.

Four bank robbers run for the border. On the way, they run into leader Rory Calhoun's old friend Walter Brennan and his gorgeous daughter, Coleen Miller. Miss Miller and Calhoun fall for each other, despite Brennan's objection.

Richard Carlson takes one of his occasional trips behind the camera to direct this shaky A western. Brennan, of course, gives a fine performance, and the other performers are good, but it all seems to be too well calculated, from the occasional grace notes for the camera, to the arc of the plot. Perhaps tighter editing would have helped. With George Nader, Nina Foch, Jay Silverheels and Nestor Paiva.

Decent Universal International production full of action , violent characters , thrills and lots of shots . A good example of B-Hollywood western genre mostly filmed in studios and including gorgeous exteriors . An outlaw gang (Rory Calhoun ,George Nader ,John McIntire , Jay Silverheels) on the lam encounters former associate Simon Bhumer (Walter Brennan) and his beautiful daughter (Colleen Miller), who's drawn to their leader Cully. They get together at a desert inn where scheme a robbing . As the band heads for the border after a bank heist, they encounter a band of renegade Apaches. One for all and all for trouble!

This is an exciting film , plenty action , thrills , fights , gun-down and breathtaking outdoors . One of a long series of colorful , double-features made at Universal International studies in the Fifties , films which made starts on of male actors : Rock Hudson , Audie Murphy , Ray danton , George nader and female actresses as : Rhonda Fleming , Yvonne De Carlo , Mauren O'Hara , , besides the stars of this Western : Rory Calhoun , George Nader and Richard Carlson himself . Well-made action sequences with rousing attacks and spectacularly made shootouts . Charismatic performance for whole casting .The rough outlaw Rory Calhoun and Colleen Miller as the luscious daughter Lolly deliver a nice loving chemical , in fact the best scenes happen at a stormy night, when Cully/Rory and Lolly/Colleen almost have an affair, including some erotic shots . Support cast is pretty good , such as the good-looking George Nader , the eternal secondary Walter Brennan playing an old gunfighter who still has a fast draw and now planning to retire on a farm, Nina Foch , the veteran John McIntire , Charles Drake , Nestor Paiva , Mary Field , Jay Silverheels as a half-breed bandit though he was better for his character as Tonto in the long -running Lone Ranger series .

The motion picture was well directed and in traditional style by Richard Carlson . Richard was a notorious actor who even played two classic movies such as It came from outer space and Creature from the black lagoon . He subsequently accepted charge of directing a silly pseudo-scientific premise entitled Riders to the Stars (1954), a low-budget enterprise bogged down at the expense of drama. In the course of the next twelve years, he directed some better second features, including the westerns Four Guns to the Border (1954) , The saga of Hamp Brown and Kid Rodelo (1966), many of them starred by Rory Calhoun , as well as a number of television episodes. He also wrote the occasional TV script, as well as contributing articles on non-fiction subjects to several magazines .

This dull shoot-'em-up, a typical run-of-the-mill, cowboys 'n' Indians, robbers vs.posse oater, has one remarkably fascinating aspect: a bare-bones plot punctuated by surprisingly sexual imagery, much of which can be interpreted as homoerotic. Some scenes are steamingly obvious in their depiction of passion, and others are so gratuitously injected that they can only be seen as surreptitiously symbolic. (There's even a totally irrelevant pussycat with kittens). The creators must have had a bang-up good time foisting such a naughty piece on mid-fifties audiences, and modern viewers should have just as much fun ferreting out each and every nuance! Fans who favor peeking below the Production Code will have a ball!