Gunfight at Comanche Creek

In this Allied Artists quickie Audie Murphy once again has to infiltrate a gang of outlaws - helpfully explained by a Dragnet-style narration - and teach them the hard way that Crime Does Not Pay.

Made with the usual bloodless competence of TV westerns of the sixties; one feature of the film that dates it pretty precisely is the presence in the cast of DeForest Kelley during the period when he was treading water playing heavies.

Audie Murphy goes undercover to break up a gang who have come up with a gimmick: break an outlaw out of jail, put him in front of their raids while the rest of them are masked, drive up the price on his head, then shoot him and turn in the corpse for a reward.

It's directed by Frank McDonald, a prolific director who spent a lot of his career in the upper ranks of the Bs, mostly because of his speed and cheapness. Most of his movies were westerns. His actual strength lay in comedy, and like many a B director, he wound up in TV, where he directed several episodes of GET SMART.

This late Audie Murphy oater is marred by Hadley Reed's narration, explaining what is going on, as if it's an episode of DRAGNET and the producers are afraid to either trust the audience to figure out what is going on or allow the actors to indulge in exposition. Joseph Biroc's color camerawork is efficient and not particularly distinguished. All in all, a mediocre example of the vanishing western.

Set in 1875 at the location called Comanche Creek , Colorado, it begins with prisoner Jack Mason who is broken out of prison by a band of strangers . They use him in a robbery , then when the dead-or-alive reward is high enough , they shoot him and collect the elevated reward. The National Detective Agency, now knowing the gang's methods , killing delinquents for the bounty , arranges to have the intrepid agent Bob Gifford (Audie Murphy) jailed in Comanche Creek for train robbery. The gang led by Amos Troop (De Forest Kelley) takes the bait but then things go wrong when to be aware there's a traitor in the band . A Gunslinging Detective Smashes The Most Ruthless Outlaw Gang Of All Time ! Masked marauders... rampaging raiders blasting a trail of terror and violence across the West... and the man who pledged to stop them rode at their side! Gunslinging Man-Hunter...She Was All Woman to a Man's Man

This thrilling Western has a peculiar , sui-generis plot : a murderous outlaw gang who helps escape inmmates from prison , uses them to help in crimes , when the reward goes high enough then killing them to collect money and to solve this criminal set-up , the tough detective Murphy infliltrates the gang of bandits forcing wanted men to participate in robberies . Uneven , but at times quite nice Western in which Audie gets two heroines for the price of one and here he faces off a whole gang of cutthroats . As Audie Murphy gives a nice acting in his usual style as a ruthless detective out to smash the West's most notorious outlaws . While the two girls are the lovely saloon-keeper Colleen Miller as Murphy's sweetheart with whom he catches the eye , she like Eddie was a refugee from Universal-International and Susan Seaforth , both make the performing sparks fly . And in this grim-face Western there's a great support cast with plenty of familar faces , such as : Ben Cooper , Jan Merlin , Mort Mills , Eddie Killan , John Hubbard , John Milford , William A Wellman Jr and , of course, De Forest Kelley is the best of the baddies .

It displays a spectacular and brilliant cinematography in Panavision by cameraman Joseph F. Biroc. As well as rousing and moving musical score by composer Marlin Skiles. The motion picture was professionally directed in B-style by Frank MacDonald , though it has some failures , flaws and gaps. Frank was a prolific craftsman whose career spands over forty years . At first hired as a dialogue director, McDonald turned out some scripts and in the mid-'30s began directing . Working for almost every studio in Hollywood at one time or another, he did a lot of work for Republic, grinding out Gene Autry and Roy Rogers westerns, and at the Pine/Thomas "B" unit at Paramount , churning out westerns, action dramas and war pictures. Not entirely comfortable as a director , he nevertheless turned out more than 100 pictures in his career . As he made a lot of fims with penchant for Western genre , such as : ¨Sioux City Sue, Under Nevada Skies, My Pal Trigger, Rainbow Over Texas , Song of Arizona , Sunset in El Dorado , Along the Navajo Trail , Tell It to a Star , Man from Oklahoma , The Chicago Kid , Scared Stiff , Las campanas de Rosarita, Lights of Old Santa Fe , One Body Too Many , Sing, Neighbor, Sing , Take It Big , Gambler's Choice , Timber Quee , My Darling Clementine¨, among others. Rating : 5.5/10 . Acceptable and passable Murphy western.

The events leading up to the Gunfight At Comanche Creek find Audie Murphy working as an undercover detective who has infiltrated an outlaw gang led by DeForest Kelley. The film has a plot not dissimilar to that of the great urban noir drama A Street With No Name.

Kelley has a unique recruiting method to supplement the hard core of his gang for jobs. He just breaks wanted criminals out of jail gets the use of their service and then kills them for the reward which has gone up in value like a stock in the bull market. One undercover detective has already been killed for the reward on his head so Audie has to watch himself from all angles.

Before he got his signature role as Dr. Leonard McCoy of the star ship Enterprise, DeForest Kelley did a lot of western roles where he was mostly a really nasty villain. If he hadn't signed for Star Trek, Kelley might well have kept in this career path.

Murphy himself was getting older and could no longer be cast as callow western youths as he was early in his career. After failing with a television series Whispering Smith, as so many of his fellow players did, Murphy kept doing westerns of varying quality until the end of the Sixties and the end of the B westerns which played the bottom half of double bills.

Not at all saying however that some of his westerns weren't good. Gunfight At Comanche Creek was done very well for low budget studio Allied Artists and goes at a real nice pace and maintains suspense throughout. Audie has to rely a lot on his wits to keep from being discovered. The gunfight at the end of the film is well worth waiting for.

The plot, irritating narration, and lack of originality have been covered at length. Not Murphy's worst, not his best. Biggest problem I saw was its absolutely miserable sound. Remember the standard jet-fighter sound used in every jet movie of the '50s? It is omnipresent here... even revolver shots are truncated clips of the same noise. Otherwise, it has a relatively solid cast, and you won't feel like you wasted two hours of your life.