a5c7b9f00b Stage line agent investigates a series of robberies by taking the job of a deputy sheriff in a border Arizona town. The latest of a series of stagecoach holdups in the Arizona Territory takes place on a stagecoach in which Mike Ryan, undercover agent for the stage line, and Molly Jones, daughter of the local sheriff, are passengers. The bandana masking one of the robbers slips and he is killed by the gang-leader Velvet Clark. The latter masquerades as a respectable piano-playing citizen of the community. The townspeople are aroused enough over the continued robberies that they ask Sheriff Tom Jones to resign but they agree to give him more time when he takes on Ryan as a deputy. Circumstantial evidence leads the sheriff to Clark, but the latter kills him and escapes. Ryan tracks him to Gunsight Ridge where there is a showdown gunfight. Joel McCrea stars in Gunsight Ridge as an undercover agent for Wells Fargo which has been getting regularly robbed on a certain stagecoach run through the territory of Addison Richard who is the sheriff. He's not getting the job done so McCrea's brought in.<br/><br/>The title refers to a particularly rough stretch of country where McCrea has his final showdown with the bad guy or at least the chief bad guy.<br/><br/>There are two sets of them, one is a group of four cowhands from George Chandler's ranch who do a little cattle rustling on the side, two of them western standbys L.Q. Jones and Morgan Woodward. The other is a man of mystery who plays an exquisite piano and goes by the unlikely western name of Velvet. This is a guy who clearly has some issues which in a better script would have been more explicitly dealt with. Mark Stevens may have had his career role in playing this man.<br/><br/>Addison Richard gives a nice performance as an aging sheriff who won't quit until the stagecoach bandit is taken dead or alive. McCrea does what he can to help and the sight of Richard's pretty daughter Joan Weldon gives him all that more interest.<br/><br/>Viewers might also note the presence of farm girl Carolyn Craig who helps both Stevens and then McCrea. She's one lonely girl with a budding libido and an itch to get off the farm. In a bit role as a bartender is Dan Blocker who with his frame and voice you can't miss.<br/><br/>Not one of Joel McCrea's best westerns, but his fans should like it. Joel McCrea is his usual stalwart self in this late 50s black-and-white Western. He finds a job as deputy in one of those dusty little Western towns with an old sheriff, whose daughter in pretty Joan Weldon, and a mean bandit on the loose, robbing people blind. Oh, we also have that gang of rowdy cowboys out on the ranch who take a break from rustlin' once in a while to come into town and bust things up a little.<br/><br/>So far it all sounds routine, and for the most part it is. There's McCrea as the good guy, Weldon as the girl he winds up with, and Mark Stevens as the miscreant.<br/><br/>But it's not as formulaic as it sounds. As deputy marshall, McCrea's duties include collecting taxes. He balks at first but then complies eagerly when he finds he gets ten percent of everything he collects. The "good guys" in cheap Westerns are usually above such earthly concerns.<br/><br/>Then there's the sneaky bandit, Mark Stevens, he of the spirit-level black eyebrows. Apart from being a kind of interesting man himself, he plays a robber with motives unusually murky. He has a real talent for the piano, which he demonstrates once or twice. But, growing up in a poor family, there was no money for lessons and no connections to get him a scholarship to the Curtis Institute. This has left him bitter and, at times, ugly. But the script gives him something resembling a girl friend too, whom he seems to genuinely like.<br/><br/>None of the acting is bravura. McCrea is stolid and sensible, as always. Mark Steven is intense. Joan Weldon – well, her acting can't really be criticized because it's so rudimentary. She wears one of those pointed 1950s brassieres that is more suggestive than no bra at all. She looked better in "Them", only three years earlier. But she was never an actress anyway. She was a singer in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera, and for THAT she will have my undying respect. I can act as well as she could – so could you – but, by God, I can't sing to save my soul. Well, not without a little chemical help anyway, and even then, not opera.<br/><br/>This was about the tail end of the enduring cheap Western B features. At one point, about when this was released, there were some twenty-one Western series running simultaneously on the three or four television broadcast networks, the unimaginative being driven out by the even less imaginative.
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