Quand parle la poudre

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.

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.

For a western film, it's a pretty fun watch. Two of my favorite actors are in this one which makes it all that much better: Lon Chaney and Deforest Kelley.

Tom Rosser is hired to help clean and straighten up a town where some of the folks in the area want to keep the town as wild as possible - and running it the way they want it ran, not the way mayor and law want it to be. It's up to Rosser take the men out get the town back to good.

The movie does take a few turns which keeps the story on the interesting side. All the actors give fine performances - so it's worthwhile watching if you like a good old fashioned gun-slinging western film.

7.5/10

Producer A.C. Lyles made a spate of westerns in the mid-'60s that employed a lot of veteran actors who were, frankly, too old to get work anywhere else. While it was nice of him to give them jobs, the least he could have done was to not embarrass them, and I'm afraid that's what most of these movies do, especially this one. It's about a marshal hired to clean up a town, and the troubles he has and some long-ago secrets he's afraid might come out. Dana Andrews, like pretty much everyone else in this picture, is too old for the part; he was almost 60 when he made this, and age and a lifetime of drinking problems (which he has freely admitted to) had taken a toll on his physical appearance. He's just not even remotely believable as the kind of fast gun you'd hire to clean up your town. Although the cast is filled with old veterans, only a few of them, notably Lyle Bettger, can muster up the energy to turn in good performances. It's not their fault, of course, and the hack script and limp direction by Lesley Selander (who himself was 65 years old by then and had been making B westerns for more than 30 years) doesn't help either. The film has the look of someone who got some old friends together and said, "Let's make a western." While that may be a nice gesture, it doesn't make for a good movie. This one isn't. Avoid it.

1965's "Town Tamer" was the fifth of producer A. C. Lyles' run of 13 Paramount B-Westerns from the mid 60s, and one of the best, with a cast filled with more veteran performers than usual (Sonny Tufts?). Author Frank Gruber adapted from his own novel, starring Dana Andrews in the title role of Tom Rosser, whose wife (Coleen Gray) was accidentally shot by hired gun Les Ring (Lyle Bettger), on behalf of gambling house troublemaker Riley Condor (Bruce Cabot). Years later, Rosser is hired by businessman James Fenimore Fell (Barton MacLane) to take down Condor in a different town, where the corrupt judge (Pat O'Brien) and lawmen are in his pocket, leaving the citizens to hope that Rosser will succeed; if not, vigilantism will become the last dreaded resort. The most intriguing aspect is the town marshal, Les Parker, the very same gunman who murdered Rosser's wife, his unpredictable behavior keeping both sides guessing. Lon Chaney, now 5 for 5 for Lyles, enjoys a major role as Mayor Charlie Leach, who doubles as livery stable owner, Richard Arlen returns as town doctor, Richard Jaeckel makes for a despicable deputy, Bob Steele, Philip Carey, and Roger Torrey among Condor's men. In his second of four Lyles Westerns, DeForest Kelley often told the story of how he was doubled in an early fight scene opposite Dana Andrews, and how Michael Landon volunteered to do it without permission, and with his back to the camera remains easily recognizable taking the spills! (they just happened to be shooting on the same sets as his BONANZA series).