Im Sattel ritt der Tod

A gang led by Amos Troop (DeForest Kelley) has been robbing banks. They break prisoners out of jail and use them as front-men in their robberies. The front-man is the only one who gets recognized. When the reward for each front-man gets high enough, they are killed off for the money. The National Detective Agency is desperate after an undercover agent got killed. They assign Bob Gifford (Audie Murphy) to go under. Saloon owner Abbie Stevens (Colleen Miller) and Kid Carter (Ben Cooper) are taken with the newly arrived Gifford under the name Judd Tanner.

I do like the premise although this is strictly an old style western. There is nothing to show any edginess or risk to the movie. I don't like the narrations which sounds like words from a book. Audie Murphy has never been that much to me. As a Star Trek fan, Deforest Kelley holds much more interest. In the end, this is very average and limited especially for the 60's.

The events leading up to the Gunfight At Comanche Creek find Audie Murphy working as an undercover detective who has infiltrated an outlaw gang led by DeForest Kelley. The film has a plot not dissimilar to that of the great urban noir drama A Street With No Name.

Kelley has a unique recruiting method to supplement the hard core of his gang for jobs. He just breaks wanted criminals out of jail gets the use of their service and then kills them for the reward which has gone up in value like a stock in the bull market. One undercover detective has already been killed for the reward on his head so Audie has to watch himself from all angles.

Before he got his signature role as Dr. Leonard McCoy of the star ship Enterprise, DeForest Kelley did a lot of western roles where he was mostly a really nasty villain. If he hadn't signed for Star Trek, Kelley might well have kept in this career path.

Murphy himself was getting older and could no longer be cast as callow western youths as he was early in his career. After failing with a television series Whispering Smith, as so many of his fellow players did, Murphy kept doing westerns of varying quality until the end of the Sixties and the end of the B westerns which played the bottom half of double bills.

Not at all saying however that some of his westerns weren't good. Gunfight At Comanche Creek was done very well for low budget studio Allied Artists and goes at a real nice pace and maintains suspense throughout. Audie has to rely a lot on his wits to keep from being discovered. The gunfight at the end of the film is well worth waiting for.

The plot, irritating narration, and lack of originality have been covered at length. Not Murphy's worst, not his best. Biggest problem I saw was its absolutely miserable sound. Remember the standard jet-fighter sound used in every jet movie of the '50s? It is omnipresent here... even revolver shots are truncated clips of the same noise. Otherwise, it has a relatively solid cast, and you won't feel like you wasted two hours of your life.

Audie Murphy goes undercover to break up a gang who have come up with a gimmick: break an outlaw out of jail, put him in front of their raids while the rest of them are masked, drive up the price on his head, then shoot him and turn in the corpse for a reward.

It's directed by Frank McDonald, a prolific director who spent a lot of his career in the upper ranks of the Bs, mostly because of his speed and cheapness. Most of his movies were westerns. His actual strength lay in comedy, and like many a B director, he wound up in TV, where he directed several episodes of GET SMART.

This late Audie Murphy oater is marred by Hadley Reed's narration, explaining what is going on, as if it's an episode of DRAGNET and the producers are afraid to either trust the audience to figure out what is going on or allow the actors to indulge in exposition. Joseph Biroc's color camerawork is efficient and not particularly distinguished. All in all, a mediocre example of the vanishing western.

Gunfight at Comanche Creek is directed by Frank McDonald and written by Edward Bernds. It stars Audie Murphy, Ben Cooper, Colleen Miller, DeForest Kelley and Jan Merlin. A Panavision/De Luxe Color production with cinematography by Joseph Biroc and music by Marlin Skiles.

Murphy stars as an agent for the National Detective Agency who goes undercover to find the outlaw gang that has been breaking convicts out of jail to help them to commit more crimes. The resulting crimes cause the bounties upon the fugitives' heads to rise, thus the outlaws then kill the convicts and claim the rewards.

Apparently a remake of 1957 film The Last of the Badmen, Gunfight at Comanche Creek is a suspenseful and entertaining blend of detective shenanigans with Western staples. It's an interesting role for Murphy, playing Bob Gifford (AKA: Judd Tanner) as a fearless ladies man having to just use his wits instead of guns just to survive the undercover operation. It's not exactly what you would call a high energy action movie, since we don't really get the pulse raised until the finale, but there's enough twists and intelligence in the plotting to keep the story intriguing.

Negatives? There's a continuous narration by an uncredited Reed Hadley which is most intrusive. Instead of letting us be involved fully with the unfolding story, the makers felt the need to have Reed fill us in on what is happening at every turn in the plot! Clearly they were going for a hard-boiled detective angle, but it's misplaced. While Miller is saddled with one of those token female roles. But the support cast do what is required to make the film work, Murphy delivers a good one for his fans and Biroc's colour photography is very easy on the eye. 7/10