Young Billy Young

Billy Young and Jesse Boone (David Carradine) sneak onto a troop train and kill a Mexican General and his men. Billy loses his horse and is left behind with Mexican troops hot on Jesse's tail. Ben Kane (Robert Mitchum) is on his way to be a deputy sheriff and meets Billy. Ben is only allowed to be a tax collector. While in town, Billy gets into a fight over cards, kills the sheriff and gets run out of town. Billy runs into Ben Kane again. In town, Kane confronts John Behan and dancehall girl Lily Beloit (Angie Dickinson) offers her help alluding to an old incident. Jesse's father Frank Boone killed Ben's son.

This movie needs a darker harder edge. The material is geared more towards that end but the movie seems intent on making this a fun western. The light tones and music are ill-fitting. Also it's too precious with Ben's past. It should have explained the backstory much earlier which would have given the characters more compelling interactions. It would raise the stakes. By leaving the reveal so late, the characters don't have the connections. Ben and Billy should have stayed together but they keep bumping into each other haphazardly. They really need the time together to develop the needed chemistry.

"It's you and me Billy against the whole town!" Young Billy Young (Robert Walker Jr.) learns the hard way that he shouldn't mess with the stubborn but smarter Deputy Ben Kane (Robert Mitchum) and if you can't beat 'em, you may as well join 'em. It takes almost the entire film to realize that Deputy Kane has his personal reason(s) for trying to bring law and order to the local town. But Deputy Kane is up against the richest cattle rancher in a man named Boone (John Anderson) in the the territory who has hired the most hired hands and the best guns money can buy.

To keep this western interesting so that their male audience did not lose their attention the producers included a sexy saloon girl named Lily Beloit (Angie Dickinson) as the love interest of Deputy Kane. There is a memorable scene in the film in the latter half when Lily Beloit decides to take a bubble bath in her cabin and all Deputy Kane (the gentleman) can do to contain himself is to go out and get firewood and stoke the fire. Now this scene alone with Angie Dickinson in the bubble bath is worth watching this 1969 film for any teenage boy which is what I was when this film was first released.

The film moves along at a good clip with lots of gunfighting, and a good versus evil plot. I give the film a decent 6 out of 10 IMDB rating.

The title role of this western is played by Robert Walker, Jr. He's a young gun who with partner David Carradine gets separated after doing a contract hit on a Mexican general. In eluding their pursuers Carradine and Walker become separated. Walker comes upon the camp of lawman Robert Mitchum who takes a liking to Walker and makes him a protégé and reclamation project of sorts.

This is the first of two films Robert Mitchum did with writer/director Burt Kennedy. The second was the more humorous The Good Guys and the Bad Guys.

Not that Young Billy Young does not have its moments of hilarity. But it is a tripartite story involving the Walker reclamation, Mitchum's hunt for the bad who killed his son and a romantic triangle involving Mitchum, Angie Dickinson, and town boss Jack Kelly.

The film abounds with nepotism. David Carradine is John's son. Dean Martin's daughter Deana is in this, Walker is the son of Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones and Mitchum's son Chris plays Mitchum's son in some silent flashbacks.

Robert Mitchum got his start in westerns and always looks right at home in them. Angie Dickinson essentially repeats the role she had in Rio Bravo. Walker had a brief career playing rebellious youths and doing a good job at it. I've often wondered what happened to him. He looks hauntingly like his father. Maybe he didn't want to come to such a tragic early end like his father.

And it that wasn't enough, Mitchum fans get to hear old rumple eyes sing the title song at the beginning of the film.

Robert Mitchum plays a sheriff in a town dominated by evil bosses and their gangs. When MItchum arrests the son of the boss-man for murder, the gang is determined the sheriff won't live to punish the punk. As for his deputy (Robert Walker Jr.--who, inexplicably, gets the film named after his character), he's rather ambivalent--unsure whether to help or just get out of the way. Can they stand up against the combined forces of evil and survive (what do you think?!)? "Young Billy Young" is an enjoyable western. However, the plot is incredibly familiar--too familiar. Robert Mitchum himself (who stars in "Young Billy Young") appeared in "El Dorado" (a remake of "Rio Bravo")--which is pretty similar to such films as "High Noon" and "Last Train From Gun Hill". All these films (and many more) are like "YBY" because they, too, are stories about honest sheriffs who refuse to knuckle under to gangs who run old western towns. Because of this familiarity, the film just cannot rise above mediocrity even if it did star Mitchum.

In addition to Mitchum, the film stars two sons of famous actors--Robert Walker Jr. and David Carridine. They are competent but no more in the film. Its strengths are its acting by Mitchum as well as the nice relationship he has with Angie Dickenson (who was ALSO in Rio Bravo!). Negatives are Mitchum singing the opening song (uggh!) and the ridiculously easy way the two young guns kill off the Mexican general near the beginning of the film. The ending is also a bit abrupt.

Fans of the movie TOMBSTONE and other Wyatt Earp movies may be interested to know that this movie was very loosely based on Will Henry's WHO RIDES WITH Wyatt, a heavily fictionalized novel about Wyatt Earp's war with the Cowboy gang and his feud with Cowboy-sympathizing sheriff John Behan. In the novel, the "Billy Young" character is actually Johnny Ringo, who--in a completely fictional subplot--is at first protected, befriended and mentored by Wyatt (as Billy is by Kane in this movie), until Ringo gets more and more deeply involved with Curly Bill and the Clantons and Wyatt has to come after him. The novel is grim and dark, with an admirable but not very likable Wyatt. The movie is entertaining fluff, with a storyline that has less and less to do with the novel and the real Wyatt Earp as it goes along. Surprisingly, a good bit of the dialogue of the novel is retained, at least in the early scenes with Kane, and the script even retains the Earp-Behan-Lily triangle. The Behan character is even called "John Behan," and gets a surprising comeuppance from a surprising source. David Carradine is his usual watchable self as a more likable version of Ike Clanton.