Wyoming Renegades

Brady Sutton {Phil Carey}, once a member of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch gang, returns home to Broken Bow after serving three years in jail. Wanting a fresh start, he finds the town are unwilling to believe he has gone straight; only his girlfriend, Nancy Warren, and a stranger, Charlie Veer, are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Things turn bad when Cassidy and mob turn up to rob the town bank and Brady is believed to have been part of a set up. Forced to go on the run with Charlie, can Brady clear his name? Or is he destined to forever be an outlaw as part of Cassidy's crew?

Directed by Fred F. Sears {Earth vs. the Flying Saucers}, Wyoming Renegades has no stars of note, no real pedigree and a pretty mundane script. It is however enjoyable enough if one can get past the bad acting and the suspend disbelief ending. The story, although a familiar one of a bad guy trying to go good, is just about interesting enough to hold the viewer for the short running time of just under 75 minutes. Putting yet another spin on the Butch Cassidy {Gene Evans, great voice, bad actor} story, the film is at least offering up insight into a gang dynamic. And of course there's a little romantic angle {Martha Hyler solid enough and with nice hair} to keep things spicy in the last quarter. Decent enough location work comes from Iverson Ranch in California and Douglas Kennedy {The Last Wagon} as Veer earns his wages. 5/10

Of course, from such a lame director Fred Sears, we could not expect to obtain here a good quality western, some kind of a Joseph Lewis or Budd Boetticher's western; I mean low budget but sharply done. Here, nothing of the kind, but it remains bearable, with the help of Phil Carey, his charisma, his presence. Good action scenes and the best to say and summarize is that this Columbia production is not monitorized by the infamous Sam Katzman, who would have given us something very worst. Just check several Fred Sears's films, produced by Sam Katzman. It remains worth the watch for western buffs.

It's impossible to hear about Butch Cassidy and Sundance without thinking of Paul Newman and Robert Redford... but a decade earlier, more regular-looking Gene Evans and William Bishop played the cowboy outlaws but are secondary to Philip Carey's Brady Sutton, one of their fictional gang members who splits early on...

The main problem with so many low-budget western-potboilers is expository dialogue explaining what could have been compelling/entertaining actual content as, three years later, Carey, having been imprisoned, turns up completely unwelcome in the small town he had come from...

So we have to take the written word for almost the entire set-up of WYOMING RENEGADES, a completely cliche yet downright bizarre B-Western featuring future TV-producer Aaron Spelling as the ratty wimp of the outlaw gang, who eventually makes Carey seem like the town's bank robber, providing a wrong-man device more familiar in present-time film-noir melodramas...

And the strangest element is the rushed kinship between Carey and his new blacksmith-partner Douglas Kennedy, secretly a Pinkerton Detective going after the Cassidy gang...

This right after randomly admitting that he's a wannabe outlaw that desperately wants to join Cassidy's gang... which would have been a far more adventurously-intriguing premise...

Featuring beautiful blonde Martha Hyer as Carey's fiance, with a token romance between rowdy arguments between the bickering crooks... planning to finish-off the town they'd already robbed... WYOMING is too complicated for its own good: an unnecessarily awkward attempt to hybrid the Western genre with mazy espionage.

Brady Sutton, a former member of Butch Cassidy's gang, wants to go straight after spending three years in prison. He returns to his home to get married and start a blacksmith business, and all is well until Cassidy's gang comes into town and robs the bank. Accused of conspiring with Cassidy, Sutton escapes, knowing the only way to redeem his name with the townspeople and his future bride is by taking Cassidy down.

Phil Carey was an underrated actor, who starred in a slew of westerns such as Gun Fury - he was villain in that one, and in this one he is a hero, well an ex-convict gone straight and is ready to settle down, but ends up running with the Hole in the wall gang again, albeit with the sole intention to stop them.

Wyoming Renegades is a nifty action western littered with historic baddies and a very strong plot that twists and turns like a well oiled machine. It's very enjoyable - individual personalities of the gang come to the fore. Gene Evans is one mean hombre as Cassidy and William Bishop is equally slimy as Sundance kid. No bicycles, or someone singing about raindrops falling on their head - just pure colourful action. It concludes with a surprising ending.

This unassuming western tale from 1954 concerns an ex-con who once rode the outlaw trail with Butch Cassidy & the Wild Bunch. Blamed for a new series of crimes, Phil Carey must fight to clear his name and put an end to Cassidy's rash of robberies.

Phil Carey has had a long career, starting out in program Westerns after WWII. He is very good in this one, but the script is not especially believable--- sometimes seeming a little too predictable. Veteran character actor Gene Evans hams it up as a greedy Butch Cassidy.

This film is routine, with little to recommend it. The casting was interesting, but the finished film fails to blaze any new trails about the legend of Butch Cassidy.