Black Hills

Struggling rancher Steve Clark tells his children, Shirley Patterson and Steve Drake, that he may have a surprise that will save the ranch. When he shows the gold vein he has located to his friend Terry Frost, Frost shoots him, hides the body, and begins to plot how to get his hands on the ranch, despite the avuncular attitude of George Chesebro, who owns the mortgage. Good thing they have Eddie Dean coming in to be top hand!

It's competently handled by director Ray Taylor, but so bog standard in its plot that Dean's mediocre acting abilities can't keep it particularly interesting. The songs are all right, Roscoe Ates plays card tricks, and it's so undistinguished that, even though there's nothing wrong with it, if you don't have anything better to do for an hour..... take a nap.

Tresspassing villains run across a local ranch owner in his recently discovered goldmine and promptly kill him in order to try and swindle his heirs out of the ranch and the secret mine.

Luckily for the son and daughter of the rancher, their old friend Eddie Dean is already on his way to the ranch to work as the new foreman and doesn't mind righting a few wrongs in addition to his work duties.

Black Hills is pleasant enough if not particularly memorable entertainment with the requisite amount of gun play and horse riding.

Eddie's always good for a few songs, but in this they seem to have been lifted lifted from previous films!

With the exception of the brief theatrical run of The Night Rider, a twenty-six minute failed TV pilot with Johnny Cash, this was Dean's final appearance in a theatrical motion picture and the final film produced by poverty row studio Producers Releasing Corporation.