Powder River ** (1953, Rory Calhoun, Cameron Mitchell, Corinne Calvet) – Classic Movie Review 6949

Director Louis King’s 1953 Western stars Cameron Mitchell as Mitch Herdin, an alcoholic doctor with a brain tumour, who helps new Wyatt Earp-like marshal Chino Bullock (Rory Calhoun), who is trying to find his prospecting partner buddy’s killer. Corinne Calvet also stars as the tough but romantically inclined saloon owner Frenchie Drumont, recalling Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. The villainous outlaw brothers are played by Carl Betz as Loney Hogan and John Dehner as Harvey Logan.

It is an adequate version of the Wyatt Earp story in another guise, modestly written by Daniel Mainwaring (as Geoffrey Holmes) and routinely handled by King, without any special imagination or spark, though it does have a decent production and look good in Technicolor, and there are a couple of bursts of good action.

If the film is an average Fifties B-movie Western, unfortunately the acting is below average. The performances vary from the ordinary to the very dull to the completely wooden.

Also in the cast are Penny Edwards as Debbie Allen, Raymond Greenleaf as Prudy, Victor Sutherland as Mayor Lowery, Ethan Laidlaw, Robert J Wilke [Bob Wilke], Harry Carter, Robert Adler, Post Park, Richard Garrick and Walter Sande.

Powder River is directed by Louis King, runs 78 minutes, is produced and released by 20th Century Fox, is written by Daniel Mainwaring (as Geoffrey Holmes), is shot in Technicolor by Edward Cronjager, is produced by André Hakim and is scored by Lionel Newman.

It is the fourth film based on Stuart Lake’s 1931 book Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, following Frontier Marshal (1934) and Frontier Marshal (1939) and John Ford’s My Darling Clementine. The characters and their names are changed and only some events from Lake’s book are used, with no mention of Wyatt Earp. John Sturges’s Gunfight at OK Corral in 1957 is another version of the Wyatt Earp story.

In 1955 Lake was story consultant on the ABC/Desilu Western TV series, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6949

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