In 1967's "Hostile Guns" George Montgomery plays a Texas sheriff who hires young troublemaker (Tab Hunter) to help him transport a handful of prisoners to the state penitentiary in another town. The captives include a burley tough guy (Leo Gordon), an embezzling railroad big shot (Robert Emhardt), an amiable Mexican (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez) and a woman who was forced to kill her no-good man (Yvonne DeCarlo). Gordon's character has relatives & friends who seek to break him free on the trip.This is basically a C-Grade version of "Stagecoach," but with a paddy wagon full of presumed ne'er-do-wells rather than just the Ringo Kid. Montgomery is an excellent masculine protagonist and the rest of the cast is solid, but the movie's letdown by the low-budget and melodramatic script. Like I said in my title blurb, the movie plays like a mediocre TV Western, which can be observed by the studio-bound sets and location shooting at Vasquez Rocks, where a lot of TV shows were shooting at the time (and to this day). This shouldn't come as a surprise since the director has a long history in TV productions.While the film is worth watching if you like the cast, its ineptness is sometimes glaring. Like the stuntman they use to replace Hunter in the longshots of a fistfight at the beginning where it's painfully obvious that the guy's not Hunter, to put it nicely. Speaking of this fight, the young punk takes on his out-of-shape uncle who appears to be at least 65 years old and the old guy holds his own and even appears to be winning. Why sure! The film runs 91 minutes.GRADE: C-

In 1967, when "Hostile Guns" was released, the movie western had already started to change. Spaghetti westerns were starting to be shown on this side of the Atlantic, and dark themes and anti-hero characters were starting to show up. Compared to other westerns coming out around this time, much of "Hostile Guns" seems old-fashioned, like the movie was actually made ten years earlier. The story is pretty predictable, even with the various twists that happen along the way. Still, the movie is competently made for what it is. No, it won't convert a non-western fan to the genre, but those who love westerns will probably find it acceptable.

What a cast! What a so-bad-it's-good movie! George Montgomery plays U.S. Marshall Gid McCool (dig that name!), who's in charge of transporting a wagon train of convicted felons to a state prison in Texas. Tab Hunter, playing his umpteenth juvenile role while in his mid-thirties, is his upstart of a deputy. (He's also got the most obvious stunt double you've ever seen!) Yvonne De Carlo, sporting the longest false eyelashes and giving the worst performance ever by an actress in a western, is one of the prisoners. Not a stereotype left unplayed!

The first half of this Western isn't bad at all. The dialogue is crisp, the situations believable, and it efficiently establishes all the central conflicts and relationships. But around the halfway point, things go terribly wrong. It's as if the filmmakers let their sons and daughters take over and complete the picture. Action scenes are poorly staged, characterizations become muddled and repetitious, plots and subplots get unsatisfyingly resolved in a strangely rushed, banal fashion. And the previously sharp dialogue gives way to howlers like "Mike, this could be your last chance to grow up!"Interesting mish-mash of a cast however. I had often wondered who George Montgomery was, having seen his name listed for so many films, and while this was evidently made towards the end of his career, he's certainly a classicly square-jawed, masculine lead in the Clark Gable mold. Tab Hunter is okay as the rowdy young hotshot deputized by Sheriff Montgomery for a dangerous prisoner transport, and there are faint (very faint) echoes of the Wayne/Clift relationship in "Red River". Yvonne DeCarlo, though aging, is still believably fetching as the woman prisoner who drives a wedge between the two men.I guess I should have known there was something fishy about this movie early on, judging by the God-awful stunt doubling done for Tab Hunter in his first fight scenes. The double, quite clearly and amusingly, doesn't look a thing like him.