A Good Western which I remember seeing at the Cinema as a child with by Mother and Father. My Mother loved the cinema as I do.

I can remember the last scenes of this film well.

It was in Technicolor and this was – and remains – impressive.

This is one of Alan Ladd’s lesser known and seldom-seen Westerns, a Civil War story with an excellent cast.  Alan Ladd plays Brett Sherwood, a captain from Georgia who has gone West in April 1865 to Colorado Territory to meet up with “Gen.” William Quantrell. 

The opening scene shows the legs of a person in the town of Broken Branch dismounting and killing an assayer, hiding his identity.  Since a rare form of Confederate ammunition was used, the locals figure that former Confederate soldier Lane Waldron (Arthur Kennedy), paroled after he was captured at Vicksburg, is responsible.

Lizabeth Scott was the female lead in this – her first Western. She was looking formard to starting filming but things didn’t quite live up to expectations. The very first day on location near Gallup New Mexico, the temperature was below zero and while the two male stars were quite well wrapped up, she had to appear in just a western shirt and slit skirt.

A few days later she slipped on a rock and injured her knee and that same afternoon she cut her hand during a scuffle and then to add insult to injury, she later fell in a clump of cactus.

She thought things would improve once they got back to Hollywood for the Studio scenes at Paramount but the director supervised a scene where Jeff Cory had to strike her after she rejected his advances. This called for quite a few re-takes before they were deemed to have success – so a painful time.

After the scene was completed Alan Ladd, who had been looking on asked ‘ How do you like Westerns, Liz ? To which she replied that this was her first and last one – and then said that if she gets any more Western scripts, she will just send them on to Dale Evans.

ABOVE – A tense scene

ABOVE – Alan Ladd with Lizabeth Scott – and BELOW she is with Arthur Kennedy.

She looks very serious in each picture.

ABOVE – That looks like Jay Silverheels – and it is. This was 1951 so he was shortly afterwards to star in ‘The Lone Ranger’ series that made him famous