Kentucky Rifle

Filmed at Vasquez rocks and on a sound stage - obviously two different places as the by play shifts from scene to scene. Different scenes; wagon train, axle building, sound stage and location shots all have a different color quality, as if different brands of film were used at each location.

The best actors are in the roles of sidekick, Preacher and wagon master, while the lead actor seems to be asleep and the Indians a far from fierce...

TV shows of the time had better action and stage sets... Wagon Train, with Ward Bond had better sets, action and acting.

Chill Wills and Henry Hull should have thrown the script back in writer's face...

Strangely enough, some of the best scenes are the wood work and minor blacksmithing required to put the axle on the wagon.

I suspect those scenes were borrowed from another movie, just as some of the wagon train scenes were borrowed.

Out of the several hundred Westerns in my DVD collection, this one has to be the very worst. Totally incompetent. Hittleman must have been a better salesman than a movie maker to have even managed to raise what little money would have been needed to make this awful mess. It's devoid of even the campy charm that Ed Wood might have put into it. Wills, Downs, Holloway, & Cagney must have been hurting for money to have agreed to appear in something this bad. Released in 1956, the same year as George Stevens' Giant, Chill Wills must have been been rather amazed to find himself in two such different movie productions in the same year. I only wish that I could get back the time I wasted watching this trash.

Everyone in this film is sooo clean and smelling of roses even though they are in the middle of nowhere, and BO is never a problem in the hot sun ! Cheap Western, shot mostly in a studio with a few external shots somewhere just outside ... Oh, and the bad guys are the Red Indians as usual .

Modest low-budget Western in which a wagon is separated from its train when it breaks an axle deep in Comanche country. The unusual cast - Chill Will leads, Jimmy Cagney's sister provides support, Henry Hull plays a preacher, and the voice of Winnie the Pooh (Sheldon Leonard) provides what is presumably supposed to be comic relief - compensate for the bland but inoffensive material.

Hmmm. As B Westerns go, this has to be more of a C+ as Chill Wills really struggles to hold this together. He is "Taylor" who is in charge of repairing a busted wagon that's been left behind by the train - exposing it to a gang of marauding Comanches who want it's not-so-secret cargo of Winchesters. He's not helped by the fact that his colleagues are all a bit self-obsessed with each having their own agenda and who are all just a bit selfish. Can he get them all through safely without surrendering their lives and/or their weapons? I didn't really care, to be honest. The production is basic, the dialogue far too wordy and the characterisations, led by Wills but hardly augmented by the wooden as as spoon Cathy Downs ("Amy") and Lance Fuller's "Clay" do little to liven this rather procedural mix either. Henry Hull tries his best as the preacher, but by the mid-point I was the one praying: for the Comanches to do us all favour and put us out of our misery. One for list completists, I'd say - though quite what list this'd ever be on. Poor, sorry!