Bonanza Town

Using marked bills, Steve is looking for the supposedly dead Henry Hardison. Coming to Bonanza Town he gets a job with the town boss Crag Bozeman and gets paid with marked bills. He suspects Hardison is Boseman's boss and he is right as Hardison and his men are now planning to get rid of both him and the Durango kid.

Bonanza" director Fred F. Sears appears in both films as the same character, who was supposed to die in the first film, but is back now making life miserable for a judge. It can be quite complicated as scenes from other Durango Kid is sewn into the flash back, which was Columbia's ways to cut down on costs. Still, it's a wholesome entertainment with some nifty shoot em up scenes.

The Durango Kid is called upon to clean up a town beset by a ruthless gang that goes unmolested due to the town's judge being in their hip pocket.

Bonanza Town is technically well made, fairly fast-paced, with an adequate amount of action, and also features a few good songs courtesy of Smiley Burnette. However, the script is quite tepid and the movie very forgettable.

I've never seen any of The Durango Kid movies before this one, so I'm not sure how it holds up to others in the series. But the fact that this Saturday matinée style B-western was made in 1951 instead of 1941 and the studio was Columbia Pictures and not Producers Releasing Corporation or Monogram Pictures, leads me to believe that this should have been a better overall picture than it ultimately was.