O Domador de Cidades

Dana Andrews stars in Town Tamer and in the title role of a man hired by railroad entrepreneur Barton MacLane to clean up a town. Usually Andrews operates within the law, but not here because town boss Bruce Cabot owns both sides of the law. That leaves Andrews little room to maneuver.

But Andrews doesn't care, he and Cabot have some bad history which is topped off by Cabot hiring someone to bushwhack Andrews, but instead kills his wife Coleen Gray. That makes it personal.

Cabot is really some piece of work, as John Wayne said to Ed Asner in El Dorado 'you don't wear a gun so I guess you hire it done'. Cabot has quite a few gunslingers on the payroll and a couple peace officers in sheriff Lyle Bettger and punk deputy Richard Jaeckel. Only Bettger has a habit of going off the reservation every so often. He's the wild card in this deck.

Town Tamer is a pretty violent AC Lyles 'geezer' western and this one is directed by western veteran Lesley Selander who must have a couple of hundred directorial credits. Besides those already mentioned you'll find such people as Philip Carey, Terry Moore, Jeanne Cagney, Lon Chaney, Jr., Richard Arlen, and Sonny Tufts. And least we not forget Pat O'Brien as a most corrupt town judge. O'Brien has only one scene and I wish we saw a bit more of him.

I saw Town Tamer as a kid in theaters as the back end of a double feature. I liked it then and I like it now.

Barton Maclane used to own all the land around, but he sold off a lot of it to build a town, and is having a railroad built to it. But wile he's been working on that, saloon owner Bruce Cabot and his pals have taken over the town, installing a corrupt judge and marshal. So Maclane hires retired town tamer Dana Andrews to come in and settle things down. Andrews is agreeable, but what he wants is to kill the man who hired a killer to kill him, and who killed his wife by accident. That man is Cabot.

But the honest folks in town aren't lined up neatly behind Maclane. Some of them want to form a vigilante group, and Maclane and Andrews know that's a cure that can be worse than the disease.

It's a fine and intelligently written script by Frank Gruber, with many moving parts. The story is that Gary Cooper owned it, but he died several years earlier, and A. C. Lyles produced this version as one of the "geezer westerns" he did for Paramount at the time, with a lot of old-line talent, including Terry Moore, Pat O'Brien, Lon Chaney Jr., Richard Arlen, and DeForest Kelly. Lesley Selander, no stranger to the B western, directs efficiently, but the good script and practiced performers come through.

Oh, I love this movie. For all the wrong reasons. It's a creaking, crawling mess of clichés, enlivened by a geriatric cast. Town Tamer is surprisingly bloody (without the actual blood, of course). It all looks like a mid-sixties (and I mean that in more than one way) TV western with Dana Andrews and crew appearing to be dying from dyspepsia.

And yet, you might pick up on the ease in which all these many veteran actors and actresses fall--or totter--into their respective parts. I guess I have a weakness for movies that beg the MST3000 treatment.

If you ever get to see it, I'd suggest cutting out a silhouette of the guy and the two robots and taping them to the bottom of your TV screen.

C'mon, it'll be fun.

Town Tamer can only get better.

This is Selander's first film for Producer Lyles and his best Western for years. Like all of Lyles' Westerns, the main fault is the pedestrian screenplay which features Andrews as the hired killer seeking revenge for the death of his wife at the hands of Bettger and Cabot. He finds them ensconced as sheriff and saloon owner respectively, from which positions they're bleeding the town dry. Thus Andrews can liberate the town as well as secure his revenge in a corpse-strewn finale. Jaeckel has a marvellous part as Bettger's sadistic deputy.

Phil Hardy

This film begins in Kansas with a gunslinger by the name of "Tom Rosser" (Dana Andrews) having been hired to rid a small town of various criminal elements. Unfortunately, in the process of doing this his wife "Carol Rosser" (Coleen Gray) is accidentally shot and killed by an unknown assailant instead. To that effect, knowing only that a wealthy businessman by the name of "Riley Condor" (Bruce Cabot) paid the mysterious gunman, Tom makes it his mission in life to find and kill Riley regardless of what it takes. That being said, the scene then shifts to two years later with Tom riding on a stagecoach to Montana and while traveling he happens to strike up a conversation with an attractive woman named "Susan Tavenner" (Terry Moore) who tells him that she is joining her husband "Guy Tavenner" (DeForest Kelley) who works at a saloon in the same town in which Tom has been hired to clean up. She then informs him that her husband just happens to be employed by a man named Riley Condor-and this is exactly what Tom wanted to hear. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this film was made during a time in which the American Western dominated the drive-in movie circuit and it wasn't until the 70's that pictures of this type essentially went into decline and were replaced by their low-budget cousins from Italy and Spain. Be that as it may, although I happen to like both of these styles, those viewers who enjoy films of the Classic Western variety might want to check this one out and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.