Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Gunpoint (1966)

Looking around for something to watch on TV the other night, I noticed that Grit was showing an Audie Murphy Western I didn’t remember ever seeing. Audie was one of my dad’s favorite movie cowboys, along with Randolph Scott and Rod Cameron, and I watched many of those movies with him. Watching an Audie Murphy Western these days feels a little like my dad is visiting me for a while.

So, naturally, I watched GUNPOINT, from 1966, one of Audie’s last few movies before his untimely death in 1969. It starts with something else that held considerable nostalgia value for me: a train robbery filmed on the Durango-to-Silverton narrow gauge line in Colorado, which we rode on during a family vacation in the early Sixties. I recognized it right away. Audie, as the local sheriff, suspects the train will be held up by a gang of outlaws led by the vicious Drago (Morgan Woodward, who else?), but his efforts to foil the robbery are thwarted by his treacherous deputy who’s actually in with the gang. The deputy is played by Denver Pyle, a rare occasion of him playing a bad guy, but he handles the role well.

Through a rather convoluted setup, the outlaws wind up kidnapping a saloon songbird as well (Joan Staley), whose fiancée is gambler/gunman Warren Stevens. Before you know it, Audie and Stevens have teamed up with some other townspeople to form a posse and go after the outlaws. It's a long chase with plenty of action as the posse gets whittled down until finally there are only a couple left to settle things with the bad guys.

I have to admit, there’s not much in this movie that I didn’t feel like I had written dozens of times in dozens of my books, which made for a definite sense of déjà vu. But I enjoyed GUNPOINT quite a bit anyway. The cast is comfortingly familiar. In addition to those already mentioned, it includes Roy Barcroft as the town doctor and Edgar Buchanan and Royal Dano as a couple of half-loco mustangers. There’s a spectacular scene with the train early on and then good stunt work all the way through. The photography and scenery are nice. There are a few lapses of logic in the script by Mary and Willard Willingham, but veteran director Earl Bellamy keeps things moving along briskly enough that they’re not too much of a distraction.

GUNPOINT isn’t as good as most of the movies Audie made earlier in his career. It’s just an average Western. But sometimes that’s all you need, and I had a good time watching it. I think my dad would have, too.