Audie Murphy Western which starts off fairly predictably - his father and brother are killed and Audie goes looking for revenge. But there's an unexpected lift when the local sheriff (who is dodgy) sends him to arrest a resident psycho gunman (played by the ever-reliable Dan Duyrea), and the two form an unlikely friendship. It's a great relationship, Duyrea and Murphy play off against each other well - you wish they'd done a better job on it (the movie still feels conventional). Still, be grateful for what you have.
There is a good support cast - in addition to Duyrea, there's Denver Pyle as a reverend, Gilligan's old professor Russell Johnson as a weak willed gunslinger (Johnson always played these sort of weak characters who were killed around the two-thirds mark), Susan Cabot as a woman who falls very quickly in love with Murphy despite being engaged to someone else (mostly, it seems, because her fiancee doesn't take her to a dance), Jack Elam as a baddie. Cabot's baddie fiancee has dark hair, as did most villains in Universal Westerns from this time. Murphy was born to play this sort of seemingly-wide-eyed-innocent-who-is-actually-deadly-with-a-gun, constantly underestimated by everyone, violence bubbling under the surface. It's one of his best performances from this time.
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