The man who shepherded Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy through Saps at Sea (1940) their final film for producer Hal Roach, pitted Bela Lugosi against Zombies on Broadway (1945) and made a nest of giant ants believable in Them! (1954), had the challenge of turning TV cowboy Clint Walker into a movie star in this 1958 black-and-white Western. He had a lot of help from Virginia Mayo as the spirited widow Walker rescues from the Comanches, Brian Keith as a wise-cracking gunrunner who has managed to get Walker framed for murder, George W. George and Burt Kennedy's script and a score by Max Steiner. And walker brought the same simple, sincere acting and impressive physique to the film that had made his TV series, Cheyenne, a major hit that sparked a boom in small-screen Westerns. But even with critics raving about "the biggest, finest-looking Western hero ever to sag a horse, with a pair of shoulders rivaling King Kong's" (Howard Thompson, New York Times), the film, didn't enjoy the same success, possibly because audiences weren't willing to pay for what they got for free on television.

By Frank Miller