Overland Pacific

I see that there are no reviews here so I'll add my two-cents. This was a very poor Western in just about every way. It deserves its 5.0 rating average. I usually like the stars, Jock Mahoney and Peggie Castle. Here they were attractive, anyway. Everything else about the film was cheap, unrealistic, actually embarrassing. Mahoney is known as a stunt man early in his career; here his fistfights were awkwardly staged acrobatic doings. Westerns that have battle-winning ploys at the end of throwing sticks of dynamite or lighting brush fires are a sure sign of a ludicrous movie, and the former was used here. The basic story (the bad guy's plot)seemed pretty thin and unworkable to me.

This is an all right Western from 1954. The acting wasn't bad. I don't mind B & W films, so no problem there. One scene sticks with me. Jock Mahoney is in a gun battle with a rifleman a ways off. We see Mahoney take a bullet in the chest--right in his heart. There's not much blood on his shirt, but he deals with the injury by taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and sticking it under his shirt over the wound. The gunman approaches, and Mahoney gets into a fight with the guy and beats him using one hand after taking a bullet in the heart! Realistically, he'd have been dead after the shot. I didn't laugh, but I did find this to be the most memorable scene in the film.

The B-western Overland Pacific documents the struggle to build a railroad and how the whites are just as brutal as the natives. It seems like an early try at political correctness, and you can't fault the filmmakers for having the best of intentions.

Jock Mahoney headlines this frontier drama. Despite Mr. Mahoney's average amount of talent in the acting department, he does help bring subtle touches of realism to this picture. For example, when there is a brawl on the street and he brushes up against a building or a railing, we actually see dust fly. A lot of westerns are too clean; but the reality is that these old west towns are dirty and dusty.

A B-movie western that delivers the goods when it comes to action. Jock Mahoney plays a guy investigating a spate of Indian attacks on a pioneering railroad and soon undercovers a minor conspiracy taking place. What occurs plotwise is unremarkable, but this is a film better than average thanks to the execution, which favours momentum and action over tired dialogue and romance scenes. There's a feisty heroine, treachery, a square-jawed hero and a whole host of vivid battle sequences that are staged well on a low budget. It's one of those entirely forgettable films that nonetheless entertains while it's on.

This might have packed a bit more punch had the assembled acting talent had a bit more to them, but as it is it is really just a rather routine cowboy and indian western centring around the expanding railroad after the end of the American civil war. "Granger" (Jock Mahoney) is, ostensibly, a telegrapher sent in by the railway company but is soon embroiled in some gun-running that is providing the hostile Comanches with the wherewithal to hold up construction and cause mayhem amongst the workforce. It soon becomes clear that there is something more to this harassment - and evidence of bribery and corruption in order to have the line diverted quickly emerges. Can he get to the bottom of it? It takes it's time to get going this, but after about twenty minutes it becomes a predictable, but perfectly watchable, afternoon filler. There are some gunfights, fisticuffs and, of course, the obligatory romance before a denouement that we've all seen loads of times before. Nothing at all new, but it's not bad.