Il ranch delle tre campane

Joel McCrea, Douglas Kennedy, and Zachary Scott are partners in the Three Bell Ranch in Texas as the Civil War starts. When war does come it splits the partners up. The ranch is raided by Victor Jory and his cutthroats and the partners are wiped out. Kennedy opts for enlisting in the Confederate Army. McCrea and Scott decide to go into gunrunning to make enough money to re-stock the ranch. McCrea makes enough, but Scott likes the profits and he wants to keep on gunrunning.

As you can see the three partners all have different agendas. In fact everyone in this movie is working on his own agenda. The female leads Alexis Smith and Dorothy Malone have a hankering for McCrea. Victor Jory rides for the Union the Confederates and for himself. Bob Steele who's a slimy sort that Scott recruits in the gunrunning business has his own plans.

Believe it or not it all jells into a very nice plot and is good entertainment. Joel McCrea was his usual stalwart hero as was Douglas Kennedy. Zachary Scott was no better than he had to be on any occasion.

It's a good western and I wish it was shown more often.

This movie is filled with every cliche you can think of, and absolutely none of them work. The plot is predictable and the characters are not interesting, but boring. The acting is pretty bad, even by Joel McCrea. Even western fans should stay away from this one.

Good old fashioned Western, the plot however is very similar to the Jimmy Cagney classic "The Roaring 20's" re-fashioned to a Western setting and with a sanitised ending, McCrea as the Cagney character survives and Scott as the Bogart character is killed after changing sides back to the law and Order camp. Worth watching as a good example of Hollywood in its pre message era when a Western was for entertainment. The production values were good with great Technicolour and a strong cast. McCrea was always good in his Westerns having played both comedy and drama in his earlier years and Zachary Scott was a very under-rated actor, good in any movie he was in.

Joel McCrea, Zachary Scott, and Douglas Kennedy were three friends who tried to ranch together, and dorothy Malone was the good girl they all loved. Then came the Civil War, and now in its closing days, their ranch is destroyed, so they turn to arms smuggling. But cracks show in their friendship, and when the War ends, will it mean the start of their battle?

Warner Brothers had been putting Erroll Flynn in handsome westerns for some time, and this looks like it was intended as another. It's handsome, engaging, has a fine cast, including Alan Hale as a politician, Alexis Smith as the bad girl with a heart of gold, and Bob Steele as the mean henchman. But despite Karl Freund's typically fine camerawork, it all seems like a b western writ large. Perhaps it's because the villain of the piece is Victor Jory as Quantrell, but they were afraid of a lawsuit, so they called his 'Cotrell'. There are no obvious errors, just a feeling it has too many moving parts that never quite mesh.

Not as bad as one IMDb critic found it, nor as bad as the "Time Out" review suggests. The opening shot was a bit amateurish, with the usually excellent Victor Jory emerging from behind a flaming torch, laughing manically and chucking it through a window. His character's name, Cottrell, and behaviour brings to mind Quantrell and his raiders, but Jory is mainly on the Union side, something not appreciated by one Union officer when Jory and his henchmen swagger into a saloon. Alexis Smith as the saloon girl Rouge did a lot of grimacing, and, rather more effectively, Bob Steele did a lot of glowering,.

The ending was a bit contrived, and everything works out as one might have predicted, though I'm not sure that McCrea got the best girl.