This would have been a "prestige" western at the time, in color and Cinemascope, with recognizable stars. It keeps your interest despite the many broken promises.
First of all, the Cinemascope lens was plopped down on soundstages, wasting the panorama. The title is misleading. "Money" figures in the plot, granted. But I counted only two "Women." Neither projected the woman in the lobby poster (a soiled dove stripped down to her skivvies), being, instead, hardy frontier stock. And "Guns" suggests action that never really materializes.
Jock Mahoney was a legendary stuntman. He was pushing 40 by the time of this production, but still had a couple Tarzan roles in his future. You can see effortless grace in his movement, apparently weightless. Horseback, Mahoney appears to glide across the prairie hovering above his pounding steed. Mahoney's fight choreography was unsurpassed until the Hong Kong kung fu school a generation later. The script and direction simply declined to tap the resource. The fashion in westerns by the late '50s had shifted from action to the talk-burdened, angsty "psychological western."
In the early '50s there was a glut of syndicated half-hour westerns to fill the maw of local programming until networks could supply their own content. These were unabashed orgies of fistfight, shoot-out and horseplay (I mean on horses), with surprising amounts of plot - and absolutely no suspense: the hero brought the bad guy to justice. Within their formula, these actioners were brilliant catalogs of stunt work. They far surpassed the action scenes in big budget big screen productions. (John Wayne, just for example, was a lousy stage fighter. He had this big roundhouse right that took forever to land. Hey, bad guy! Move out of the way! Duck and land a couple uppercuts before that punch completes its orbit!)
Jock Mahoney as "The Range Rider" was hands-down the greatest of the syndicated cowboys. Simply mounting and dismounting were done with gymnastic flourish - even holstering his gun. No runaway stage went unboarded. No picket fence went unhurdled. No stick of furniture in a brawl went unsmashed. No monolithic boulder went unjumped up on or down from. These shows were the bridge between the astonishing physicality of the silent movie comedians and the flying fists of the chop-saki masters.
By the late '50s, oaters dominated network primetime. They strove to stand out from each other by issuing odd weaponry, or creating weird hybrids: the urbane western, the spy western, the jazz western. (Nobody thought to bring back the singing cowboy.)
"Money, Women and Guns" feels a lot like a pilot for a TV series. The story plays out episodically as our hero tracks down suspects in the murder of a rich old prospector. The suspects are also the beneficiaries of his will. We learn how the suspects were associated with the dead man. (Sort of a sagebrush "Citizen Kane".) Mahoney plays "Silver" Ward Hogan, a self-described "detective", not a bounty hunter or territorial marshal. Indeed, Hogan owes as much to Joe Friday as the Lone Ranger. The story is carried by the mystery. It also has some of the quality of "Law & Order" in that the first character suspected is never the murderer-unless, of course, the investigation circles back to him. I'm not saying it does or doesn't.
