TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Nonureva Really Surprised!

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

classicsoncall With all due respect to Audie Murphy the war hero, I'm going to wind up repeating myself here as in my other reviews of his films. He just doesn't have the looks or charisma to appear in a Western, either as an outlaw or a hero. And when the story itself isn't very exciting, the end result leaves you with just a ho-hum experience.I don't really want to be that critical of "The Quick Gun", as the premise was a decent one. Murphy's character Clint Cooper returns to the town of Shelby, Montana a couple of quick years after killing a pair of brothers in self defense. Apparently the citizens of Shelby were never in on that secret, or else Tom Morrison (Walter Sande), father of the dead men, did a pretty good job of keeping the murder angle alive. I guess it didn't help Clint's cause when he winds up killing Morrison and his nephew Rick (Rex Holman) in another throw down while the good folks of Shelby were preparing to defend themselves against the Spangler gang, intent on robbing the bank, ravaging the women and then burning it down for a night cap.You know, I was thinking about something after Clint knocked off two of Spangler's (Ted de Corsia) henchmen in the early going. If only a couple more villains gave chase and caught up to him, Clint would have been toast. It's not like he had a real easy time with the first two.The other thing that bothered me in a way was how quick and easy sheriff Scotty Grant was taken out by Spangler himself. James Best might not be the best character actor, but I always enjoy seeing him show up in a picture. In this one, he had the unenviable assignment of being engaged to Clint Cooper's former gal Helen Reed (Merry Anders), so they had to find a way for Clint to get back together with her without destroying the friendship between the two men. But having him gunned down was just a bit too convenient.Oh well, if you're a Western movie junkie like me you'll give this one a go and move on I guess. If I had to come up with a recommendation for an Audie Murphy flick, try 1959's "No Name on the Bullet" for a better than average one. Of course there's always his real life story, one in which he plays himself in 1955's "To Hell and Back".

zardoz-13 "The Last Man On Earth" director Sidney Salkow's "The Quick Gun" ranks as one of Audie Murphy's lesser efforts. Nevertheless, western movie fans may find it tolerably entertaining as a B-movie horse opera with enough noisy gun play, clattering hoof beats, and dead bodies to compensate for all its dusty clichés. Audie plays Clint Cooper, a swift-shooting son of a six-gun who returns to the quiet frontier town of Shelby, two years after he shot it out with an influential rancher's two sons, to work the ranch that his deceased dad left him. Along the trail to Shelby, Clint runs into outlaw leader Jud Spangler and his gang of trigger-happy hard-cases. Spangler plans to raid Shelby, rob the bank brimming with cattle money, drink the town dry and carry off the women folk. When Clint and Jud (veteran tough guy Ted de Corsica of "Nevada Smith") tangle early on, we know half of everything that will transpire in this predictable but bloodthirsty oater. It seems that Jud and Clint were old pals that are now on opposite ends of the gun barrel. Clint escapes from Jud's army of pistoleros and rides to Shelby to warn Sheriff Wade (James Best before "The Dukes of Hazzard"). Meanwhile, one of Clint's vengeful enemies Tom Morrison (pot-bellied Walter Sande of "Bad Day at Black Rock") wants to settle an old score between them. Clint gunned down two of Tom's sons before he rode out two years ago, and Tom refuses to let anything stand in his way when it comes to payback. At the same time, Sheriff Wade has herded all the women and children into the local church and the remaining townspeople have erected a barricade across Main Street and doused it with kerosene to discourage Spangler's gun-hands. Were that not enough drama, the town's schoolmarm—Helen Reed (Merry Andrews of "Women of the Prehistoric Planet")—plans to wed Wade until she lays eyes on Clint and second thoughts plague her. The surprises are few and far between in "Utah Blaine" scenarist Robert E. Kent's saddle sore screenplay, but he serves up a passel of quotable dialogue. Surprises aren't what count here, it's the complications that give "The Quick Gun" its fleeting edge. As the townspeople are erecting the barricade, Tom and his nephew jump Clint in the barn and try to string him up. As a result, our hero is compelled to kill them. Wade arrives in time to disarm Clint and haul him off to jail, even when they need everything gun that they can lay their hands on. Unshaven Ted de Corsica is more obnoxious than intimidating, but he chews the scenery with such gusto that you actually look forward to seeing him. Murphy plays his usual,tight-lipped protagonist. Murphy's stuntman gets a good workout, especially in one scene when he leaps from a second-story balcony and hits the ground running. Clocking in at a brisk 87 minutes, "The Quick Gun" doesn't wear out its welcome and a higher-than-average body count gives it more menace than most American oaters made 1964 typically had before the advent of the spaghetti western. Seasoned western director Sidney Salkow doesn't waste a lot of time getting around to the gun play. The ending has a "High Noon" quality to it.

djlouey It's your standard bad guy vs. good bad guy western. Clint Cooper returns to the town that ran him off and reluctantly agrees to stay and fight the coming horde of thieves. Though this is a very predictable plot, it doesn't feature the huge leaps that are common in some westerns from the era.Watching this movie 41 years after it's release and judging it by today's standards isn't really fair. It is from a simpler time in history and as a result seems naive to us.Today you would never see scenes that are supposed to occur at night happening in obvious sunlight. The melo-drama is passe. Everyone knows that gunshots are messy, except in old westerns. Having said all of that, fans of the genre and Audie Murphey will no doubt enjoy this film.I also enjoyed watching James Best before his Dukes of Hazard days. While I am not one who thinks that his performances as Sheriff of Hazard County are un-noteworthy, this role really opened my eyes to his versatility and talent as an actor.

frankfob Director Sidney Salkow made quite a few westerns over the course of his career, and the one thing they have in common is that none of them are particularly good. If you want to see why, then watch this picture. Salkow has no sense of pacing whatsoever (a trait even more evident in his "Sitting Bull" from 1954, which has to be among the most disjointed pictures ever made). Stuff happens, then nothing happens for a while, then stuff happens again, then nothing happens for a while again, and so on, and so on, and so on. That describes this picture pretty much to a T, and what's even worse is that, unlike many of Salkow's other westerns, this one actually has a cast of experienced western actors in roles both large and small: James Best, Frank Ferguson, Rex Holman, Rick Vallin, Frank Gerstle and Mort Mills, among others, have done good work in other westerns, and Audie Murphy is earnest as always, but there's not much they can do with this. They try hard, but Salkow's limp direction and the drivel they're forced to recite kill whatever small chances there may have been of making something out of nothing. Even though the plot is somewhat tired, good--or even halfway competent--writing could have made this picture at least watchable. The writing here is laughable hack work, just cliché piled on top of cliché, overheated dramatics, eye-rolling villainy--it seems more like a William S. Hart western from 1915 than an Audie Murphy western from 1964. The last part of the picture picks up a bit--"picks up" being a relative term, considering that virtually nothing has happened up to that point--when the outlaw gang attacks the town, but even that isn't in the least exciting. Salkow's tenuous skills as a filmmaker completely evaporate when the "action" starts (again, check out his 1954 "Sitting Bull") and this picture is no exception--a few desultory gunshots and a bad guy falls off his horse, another gunshot or two and a townsman falls down (it's hard to tell if it's because he was "shot" or if he just dropped from exhaustion--the outlaws and the townsmen in this picture have to be among the OLDEST people to engage in a gun battle in the history of westerns) and the same thing is pretty much repeated for the next eight or ten minutes. There's no sense of excitement, danger, or anything other than boredom. In the end, of course, everything works out exactly as you knew it would, but it's not really worth sitting through this dull, lumbering mess to have your suspicions confirmed.