Guns of Hate

Bob and his sidekick Chito are falsely accused of killing an elderly miner - but to prove their innocence, they must escape fromjail. The real culprits are Morgan, a shady saloon owner and his henchman Rocky who hunt down the miner to rob a map of the legendary Dutchman's Gold from him. They learn this golden nugget of information from a gold surveyor.

Another plot busy B-western with our heroes ending up in jail for murder which they didn't commit and then breaking out - chases, and an energetic fistfight between Holt and the shady saloon keeper. One of Chito's girlfriend helps. Every moves at a fast pace.

This is the old stand by plot of the wrongly accused men working to clear their names .Holt and Martin play two itinerant cowboys falsely accused of murdering an elderly prospector in order to lay hands on the map showing the location of the fabulously wealthy Lost Dutchman mine.The culprits are the local saloon owner and the manager of the assay officer -played respectively by Brodie and Barrett .The cowhands escape from jail and set about proving their innocence with a little help from a saloon singer and the prospector's daughter . The movie lasts just a tad over one hour and the enterprise is dispatched efficiently ,aided by some brisk direction from genre veteran Lesley Selander ,and solid performances all round .The one jarring note is the character played -perfectly well -by Martin -a womanising gigolo type , and the character rapidly becomes irritating despite the best endeavours of the actor Otherwise this is forgettable but entertaining B movie making

Tim Holt and Richard Martin help Jason Robards Sr. when the wheel comes off his wagon. He offers them jobs, but they're cowpokes, so he gives them a gold nugget as a keepsake. Assayer Steve Brodie recognizes it as coming from the famous Lost Dutchman Mine. Soon Robards is dead, Holt and Martin are accused of murder and the story is underway in this typically sturdy entry in Holt's long-running series for RKO.

Although it has the sort of random title that far too many B Westerns used, director Lesley Selander does his usual more than competent job, and cameraman George A. Diskant shoots the familiar Alabama Hills very nicely, with some handsome deep focus keeping the peaks beautiful in the background. The story is nothing remarkable, but competent, and the professionalism of cast and crew keep it interesting through the end.

Guns Of Hate finds Tim Holt and Richard Martin riding along minding their own business when they stop to offer a helping hand to Jason Robards, Sr. who has lost a wheel on his buckboard. Watching Robards trying to lift the wagon to get his wheel back on by himself made me wonder would the jack have to be invented after the automobile necessarily?

Anyway he tells them about finding the fabled Lost Dutchman gold mine and gives them a nugget for their troubles saying there was plenty more where that came from. When Tim and Richard cash the nugget in for folding money, the assayer Tony Barrett gets real greedy and tells the crooked saloon owner Steve Brodie who then murders poor Robards. As per usual in a theme that runs through Tim Holt westerns, he and his sidekick get blamed and spend the rest of the film trying to prove their innocence.

Tim's got a double reason as well since he also meets Robards niece Nan Leslie. And of course Richard Martin as the amorous Chito Jose Gonzalez Bustamante Rafferty has Myrna Dell, a saloon girl with a heart of gold who draws a line at her employer Brodie committing murder and robbery. Marriage is not on the horizon as Dell finds out sadly.

Guns Of Hate goes down as one of the lesser Holt efforts for RKO.

The plot and characters are oh so familiar, the one variation being that the hero's Mexican sidekick is part Irish. Holt has lost the fresh youthfulness of his lieutenant in Stagecoach and looks older than 30. Despite being strangers, he and Martin seem very familiar with the local topography, Holt even taking a short cut across country in the final chase. His relationship with Judy Jason jumps massively from her believing he killed her father to apparently being in love with him, but the romantic void is filled irritatingly by Martin's womanising. The two fist fights are first rate, even if villain Morgan quickly returns to his suavely-dressed self after the first.But it all moves along quite nicely.