La Taverne des révoltés

Supposed killer and Army deserter Randolph Scott heads to Los Angeles sometime before the Civil War. Posing as a schoolteacher who can't shoot straight, he gets knee-deep in some intrigue involving a group of separatists, the assassination of a US senator, and their attempts to split California into free and slave states.

Costumes and sets are lavish and there's lots of great old-California atmosphere. However, The Man Behind The Gun is disappointingly routine. It's really too bad, because this is really one handsome production!

The actors are game and some of their characters are quite colorful. The filmmakers should have pumped a little more action and suspense into the script, or trimmed the final product to about an hour.

I had to resume this film from the beginning at the fifty minute mark because I was getting so confused with the plot strands. There seemed so many! Who were the good guys, who were the bad guys all that kind of thing because it was so confusing. To me anyway! It's a good job the film had only a modest running time to allow this to be practicable.

It's a shame because there was some good work that went into this film from both the cast and the crew. There are elements of humour, action, romantic scenes. Good location photography and sound. Some good performances from the supporting cast as well.

It's definitely a film that has to be watched if you are going to seriously explore the Randolph Scott movies because he had such a filmography.

I suppose the film did remind me of some plot in future Hollywood output from films as varied as A Few Good Men (1992) when a character talks about duty and it's importance in the army and the control of the Californian water supply reminded me of the James Bond film Quantum Of Solace (2008) albeit that was Bolivia.

The Man Behind The Gun is a Randolph Scott western with Randy on a most serious mission. He's going undercover in southern California just before the Civil War to prevent a secessionist plot from taking California out of the union or at a very least splitting off southern California as a separate state for the southern Confederacy to be.

Scott's only got two allies from his previous army service Alan Hale,Jr., and Dick Wesson whom he can rely on. The situation is such that he can't tell who's on what side, least of all the army commander in the Los Angeles area, Philip Carey.

The film boasts a top notch cast of players that include Roy Roberts, Douglas Fowley, Anthony Caruso, Katharine Warren, Morris Ankrum, and as a young Joaquin Murietta, Robert Cabal. The two female leads are Patrice Wymore better known as the third Mrs. Errol Flynn and band singer Lina Romay who formally was with both the Xavier Cugar Orchestra and the Bing Crosby radio show at different times. Romay gets to sing a couple of sultry songs in Spanish. Also since this was a Warner Brothers film, Some Sunday Morning which was introduced in the Errol Flynn film San Antonio gets interpolated here.

Telling you who the head of the secessionist group would spoil things, but I will say it's one very deadly individual.

The Man Behind The Gun is a very good Randolph Scott western which would please his still devoted legion of fans.

All the things that made the Scott movies the most agreeable matine fare are present - an opening shoot out in foggy San Francisco streets, a stage hold up, historical plotting about stealing the L.A. water supply (well before CHINATOWN), false identity, opening an empty grave and hard riding and shoot outs in the great out of doors. On top of that it's delivered in Technicolor by some of Warners' most assured technicians, complete with stock shots from the Flynn movies and snatches of earlier Warner scores.

The reason it's so mechanical must be the routine direction of Felix Feist who fades away as Scott takes on sure hands Andre de Toth and Budd Boetticher as directors. The scene with Lina Ronay against the studio sky is particularly lack lustre. Randy grins his way through events and is doubled in the final river punch out while villain Roy Roberts does his own stunts - like I mean - really!

THE MAN BEHIND THE GUN (listed as 1952 in Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide) is a Warner Bros. western starring Randolph Scott and set in Los Angeles, California in the early 1850s. The script is okay, the pace is fast and it has a large, colorful cast. There are a number of interesting elements in it that are worth noting. The Southern California setting enables the script to name-check landmarks in the area: San Pedro, Santa Monica and the LaBrea Tar Pits—which two characters visit at one point. (No sightings of woolly mammoths, though.) They even mention San Luis Obispo, which is further up the coast. The plot involves manipulation of the water supply to L.A. with a corrupt politician trying to take control of it. As such, it looks forward to Roman Polanski's CHINATOWN (1974), 22 years later. There's even a direct casting connection. The actor who plays a California senator here, Roy Roberts, plays L.A.'s mayor in CHINATOWN.

There are two significant Latino characters. One is female nightclub owner Chona Degnon, played by singer Lina Romay. She's the film's resident femme fatale and she tries to recruit Scott to help out with her gun-running sideline. She sings a couple of numbers, too. Some of you may remember her from her delightful live-action cameo in Tex Avery's cartoon, "Señor Droopy" (1950). The other Latino character is famed California bandit and folk hero Joaquin Murietta, well played by Robert Cabal, an actor I'm otherwise unfamiliar with. Other movies have been made about Murietta, including the TV movie, "Desperate Mission" (1971), starring Ricardo Montalban. Murietta is seen here on the cusp of his outlaw career and he becomes an ally of the hero. He's quite handy with both guns and knives and kills seven opponents, often quite casually.

The cast includes Patrice Wymore (looking quite beautiful) as the fiancée of a military officer (Philip Carey) assigned to work with Scott. She soon finds herself falling for Scott, an undercover officer sent by Washington to put down a planned secessionist revolt. Wymore and Romay have a pretty convincing catfight at one point. Dick Wesson and Alan Hale Jr. (taking up where his dad, a longtime Warners contract player, left off) play ex-soldiers who'd served with Scott in the Mexican War and who act as his reluctant sidekicks here. They provide much of the (forced) comic relief. Dependable heavy Morris Ankrum has too small a part as a die-hard secessionist. Other dependable heavies in the cast include Douglas Fowley and Anthony Caruso.

It's all mostly shot on studio sets, with location work saved for the action finale—a spectacular raid on the water pirates' camp. In a few sequences, the film uses stock footage culled from an earlier Warner Technicolor western. IMDb says it was SAN ANTONIO (1945). I'm more inclined to say it was DODGE CITY (1939)—and it's quite possible that the footage used in SAN ANTONIO was indeed taken from DODGE CITY as well. If anyone wants to watch all three of these films back-to-back just to get this straight, be my guest.

This isn't the best Randolph Scott western I've ever seen, but it's certainly above average for him.