El juez de la horca

A.C. Lyles gets together a cast of Hollywood veterans for another of his low budget westerns which vary in quality though the veteran players are always giving it their best shot. This one doesn't quite come off mainly because of the near saintliness of the lead, Dale Robertson.

Dale should have been put in for beatification. He plays a former fast gun who still straps his iron on the left side as he did in television's Tales Of Wells Fargo, but who has now studied law and become a judge. In his courtroom the unwritten law about shootouts is not enforced, you get hung. An old pal played by John Agar is awaiting trial for just such a shootout where he provoked a young man into a gunfight. Agar is truly a rat and when you learn the circumstances of the gunfight, you'll agree he ought to be hung.

However Barton MacLane who is Agar's father doesn't see it that way. He tests Robertson in a variety of ways with saloon girl Yvonne DeCarlo, when young deputy Rod Lauren is killed, and finally with imported fast gun Bruce Cabot who happens to be the man who outdrew Robertson's father. Robertson emerges with his halo intact.

William Bendix is in the cast as well as both sheriff and prosecutor and Kent Taylor is Agar's attorney. Law Of The Lawless is tight and compact and if Robertson's character was a little more human, this could have been one of A.C. Lyles best senior citizen westerns.

This star studded Western is a combination of action and drama, and it is more than meets the eye.

It has the look of a traditional "lawman" trying to keep the land baron from freeing his son from justice theme, but we get a variety of things going on, and see all of them.

On the surface, we see the "old timers" at work, and while we are fooled into thinking this is a nostalgic film, we eventually see that this is a point of the film, that it is about the way justice in the West changes, and the people who change with it.

In effect, it is a drama with the look and feel of action, because of some clever directing that changes the location just enough to keep it flowing.

Decent B Western but with one of the better frontier criminal trials I've seen in a movie. Seems very realistic by modern standards, (other than the sheriff acting as prosecutor).

A judge rides into a Kansas town (Dale Robertson) to arbitrate a murder trial involving the son of the formidable mogul (John Agar and Barton MacLane). Yvonne De Carlo plays a saloon girl, Lon Chaney Jr. A friend of the accused and Bruce Cabot a hired gun.

"Law of the Lawless" (1964) is an A. C. Lyles Western, who produced over a dozen 'second-feature' Westerns in the mid-60s, which all featured former A-list actors and were shot in 10-14 days. The teams Lyles gathered together for his productions always knew what they were doing and did it competently and efficiently.

As such, there's little artistic merit to this Western, but it effectively gets the job done if you're in the mode for traditional town-bound Western. De Carlo was certainly a beauty and this was her last film before focusing on The Munsters for the next few years.

The movie runs 1 hour, 27 minutes, and was shot at Iverson Ranch & Paramount Studios, Los Angeles.

GRADE: B-/C+

Producer A.C. Lyles is chiefly remembered today for the series of 13 B-Westerns done for Paramount from late 1963-late 1967. A former publicist for the studio, Lyles knew many of Hollywood's greatest stars, and got his start as a film producer after James Cagney agreed to direct 1957's "Short Cut to Hell." In 1963, he began a series of Westerns generally shot in 10-14 days, often back to back then issued months apart, with "Law of the Lawless," successful enough as a second feature to spawn a dozen more. Like all those that followed, the veteran cast provides the greatest interest, in both major and minor roles, a spate of stories where the good guys win out over the bad in the end, no longer viable by the next decade, the nihilistic 70s. "Law of the Lawless" makes for a decent start, with Dale Robertson (TALES OF WELLS FARGO) as Judge Clem Rogers, whose latest assignment in Stone Junction Kansas has him deciding the fate of old friend Pete Stone (John Agar), whose father Big Tom (Barton MacLane) wields great power among the townsfolk, and believes his son was involved in a fair shootout. The old pros were as happy to get the work as Lyles was to have them: still sexy Yvonne De Carlo as the saloon girl sweet on the judge, William Bendix as the wounded sheriff, Bruce Cabot as hired gunman Joe Rile, Richard Arlen as Bartender Ben, Kent Taylor as Pete's Kansas City defense attorney, Bill Williams as a wheelchair-bound witness to the alleged crime (the last half hour takes place in the courtroom). Special billing as 'Tiny' goes to veteran Western heavy Lon Chaney, in typical form as Pete Stone's main henchman, assaulting poor Yvonne as he tries to persuade her to implicate the high and mighty Judge in a seamy scandal; and just like his character in his earliest Lyles production, "Albuquerque" (Randolph Scott), never loses the cigarette dangling from his lips! Leonard Maltin disparagingly referred to the series in general as being only 'for buffs who want to play spot the star,' but they still endure in the 21st Century, even as the Old West recedes further into the past.