I was pleasantly surprised by The Oklahoma Woman. After the steady decline of Corman's output from the height of his moderately entertaining first feature, Five Guns West, he returns to that level with another western, a tale of a man trying to keep out of a local power struggle done with the thin simplicity that Corman's filmmaking is known for. I mean...it still doesn't quite work, key elements not quite making sense and characters being little more than character traits, but it has a cohesiveness and narrative drive that Corman's movies stuck in one room never do.
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Steve Ward (Richard Denning) returns home to the small western town where he had spent his childhood. There, he meets the two halves of an effort to take control of the civil government. First is a woman he knew before he went to prison for six years, Marie (Peggie Castle), the titular Oklahoma Woman, who owns a tavern and uses the sheriff, Tom (Mike Conners), as her tool for accomplishing her goals. On the other side is Ed Grant (Tudor Owen), the executor of Steve's father's estate, current mayor, and father to Susan (Cathy Downs), a girl Steve knew as a child. Steve wants nothing to do with the fight between the two power brokers, wishing to, after his stint in prison, to stay out of the limelight and just live a quiet life.
The film's issue is the thinness of characters. They are little more than their drive to singular purposes without depth, the sort of thing one expects from cheaply and quickly produced B-movies. Also, the central fight between Ed and Oklahoma don't make the most sense. Ed seems like an awful mayor who can't control anything and prevents any kind of progress regarding development of the area. Honestly, I'm kind of on Marie's side. The only problem is that Marie is deeply corrupt and uses her unofficial power to twist the town to her whim. I mean...what good is Ed?
There's also, of course, a love triangle that develops. Marie came to the town for Steve. Steve is friendly with her, but she represents his old life. Susan is pretty and available. Of course Steve is going to get caught between them, and a lot of the plot mechanics revolve around this, mostly Marie striking out against Steve for not loving her. It creates subterfuge about a murder, a false accusation, and a need for action. It's basic plot-focused building blocks, and it works decently well.
Filming again in black and white, Corman finds little beauty in his images, but he does retain that simple and effective approach to framing things that he's shown even in his worst films. It's a nice, effective way to communicate the basic information of what's going on on screen, and he's never flashy with it. At least he keeps things visually decent to look at through the standard action.
And that's kind of the appeal here: it's very standard, pretty competent, but just thin. There's no real emotion or excitement to be had as we go through the motions of a standard western plot. However, Corman brings just enough craft, the writing by Lou Rusoff is just good enough to cover the bases, and the pacing is nice and tight so there's no real time to get bored. It's B-movie fare and little else. Exactly what Corman was setting out to create. It's fine.
