Gunfight at Comanche Creek

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.

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 National Detective Agency sends investigators Bob Gifford (Audie Murphy) and fellow agent (Jan Merlin) to Comanche Creek to infiltrate a ruthless gang of outlaws who have devised a clever scheme to break criminals out of jail and force them to be easily recognizable participants in a string of robberies. As the wanted dead or alive bounty on their heads escalates with each robbery, the gang eventually murders them and turns them in for the reward. Gifford posing as criminal Judd Tanner places a target on his own back after intentionally passing stolen bills in a Comanche Creek saloon in order to get himself arrested. In short order he is busted out of jail and finds himself on the inside of the gang, a disagreeable lot of scoundrels headed by chief bad guy Amos Troop (DeForest Kelley) and his henchmen (Ben Cooper, Adam Williams, Mort Mills). Instead of taking down the crime ring then and there, Gifford reckons none of these gang members are smart enough to run an operation like this themselves and that there must the brains of the enterprise lurking in the shadows back in town. The rest of the movie consists of Gifford finding the unknown 'Mr. Big' behind the operation before he is the next wanted dead or alive casualty.

This Allied Artists Picture directed by longtime B-Western veteran Frank McDonald is largely a workaday affair. Audie Murphy is cast a bit off-type as a urbane, womanizing frontier detective. Maybe this was an attempt to appeal to changing audience tastes or to capitalize off of the "shaken not stirred" secret agent mania popular at the time. Possibly just a way to update this late in the cycle, traditional horse opera which was a remake of the another mediocre film, 'Last Of The Badmen' starring George Montgomery. There is also a romantic side story line introduced between Ben Cooper and Susan Seaforth of which little is made. Production values are pretty typical of Allied Artists releases of the era, which is at best, average quality. For some bewildering reason it was decided to include a grating and unnecessary voice-over narration explaining plot movements that most viewers would find obvious.

Despite it's modest roots and aspirations 'Gunfight at Comanche Creek' is watchable Western fare made so by Murphy's presence as well as Director Frank McDonald and the rest of the cast who do about as much as could be expected given the cards they were dealt.

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.

I liked this film a lot, but then I love westerns. It's got Audie, Ben Cooper, Jan Merlin, and scores of others, so how can it go wrong? Well, for one thing, it's a blatant remake of the earlier western, Last Of The Badmen (1957). How the writers of that film could let writer Edward Bernds get by with taking full credit for writing this film is beyond me. Sure, the setting is different, the characters have different names, but the basic story is almost identical. Both films even feature an annoying narrator, who details facts that none of us need to hear voiced....all the way through the film. If you've seen both films, you'll know what I mean.

Which is the better version? It's hard to say. They are bot very good, with excellent casts and fine direction. Both would have benefited from losing the narrator.

Johnboy