Wyoming Renegades

Aside from an early appearance onscreen of Butch & Sundance with the former as a straightforward heavy, and a rousing punch-up at the conclusion in which the women demonstrate whose got the biggest balls.

It also provides a look at Aaron Spelling during his brief career as an actor. On the strength of this he'd have made a worthy successor to Dwight Frye had he not soon moved behind the camera.

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.

If you're thinking you'll be getting those lovable rogues from Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid in Wyoming Renegades you'd be dead wrong. This Hole In The Wall gang features a mean, but very crafty Butch Cassidy in Gene Evans and a charming, but deadly Sundance Kid in William Bishop.

I will say that Evans and Bishop don't end up in Bolivia but they do come to justice in Wyoming Renegades. And it's all because they won't let gang member Philip Carey just go his own way.

Carey returns to his home town and just wants to open the family blacksmith business again after his stretch in prison. But except for the girl he left behind Martha Hyer and a stranger in town Douglas Kennedy no one wants him. When Evans and Bishop try to pull a holdup of the bank then they really don't want him.

Without name stars this western has a nice ring of authenticity even though the plot is totally made up. I liked how Gene Evans played Cassidy, he's one crafty villain and nobody's fool.

As for how he's gotten, all I'll say is there was one person that Evans never figured on for outsmarting him.

It's 1955 and gun smoke is all over TV and movies. Maybe that's why this oater tries hard to distinguish itself with a really twisty storyline. In fact, you may need a scorecard to keep up with which side Brady and Veer are on. Seems Brady was once a Cassidy gang member, but now he wants to go straight or does he. And just what is aspiring gang member Veer up to. First he's here, then there. Meanwhile, Cassidy keeps a tight rope on his gang even if they can't seem to get their robberies straight. So how are all the shifting loyalties finally going to work out, with Cassidy looking to blow a hole in somebody, anybody.

It's a good cast, particularly the persuasively tough Evans as Cassidy. And catch Hyer looking about as much like a frontier woman as Marilyn Monroe at the Oscars. Still, I can see the movie getting a prophetic A+ from today's women's equality groups. And how about that goofy skinny guy in comedy relief. Oh my gosh, that's Aaron Spelling later to become one of TV's most successful bigshot producers ( e.g. Charlie's Angels). I wonder what he thought of this role while on top the Hollywood ladder.

Anyway, too bad Wyoming looks so much like greater LA, even though the color photography remains first-rate.

All in all, the oater strives hard to be different amidst the competing pack. Then again, maybe too hard. But then the 73-minutes is not without points of interest. So you might give it a try.