Texas Lady (1955)

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Really Surprised!

Nice effects though.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Flat and disappointing. As suggested by others, Claudette Colbert didn't convince in her role, nor did the affable Ray Collins as the local big land owner, Mica Ralston. Only towards the end of the film was the idea put over that he and the other cattle baron, aided by corrupt lawmen, were dominating the town.The barons and their henchmen never seem very threatening.The film's opening sequences suggest that Chris Mooney is an ace gambler, but he can't be that great if he's wiped out first by a woman who's only learnt the game a year ago and then by the owner of a small-town saloon, the Wigwam, Meade Moore. And he's a very forgiving guy because he falls for the woman and immediately becomes close buddies with Moore.It doesn't seem to dawn on the barons that the US mailman would seek help once they let him through their cordon around the town. Mind you, the help turns out be just two Texas Rangers, to whom Ralston meekly gives in.Yet again in a 1950s Western, I wondered if the sums being gambled had been inflated to present-day values to convey their size; $10,000 was a heck of a lot of money in the 1880s.Several of the supporting cast were very wooden.The best thing were some of the outdoor shots of the countryside, albeit photographed in slightly curious tints.

>>Claudette Colbert looking far too old and matronly for the part of an ambitious small-town journalist and card sharp Colbert certainly doesn't look matronly in this film - she's just as slender and attractive as ever.I've just attended the WIllimasburg Film Festival, which showed this film. It has great meaning for Gregory Walcott- it was his "breakthrough" role, and his wife was pregnant with his first child, which she gave birth to a week after the movie finished filming.In Walcott's biography, Hollywood Adventures, he tells the story of how he first met Colbert, who was concerned that he was so much younger than she was. But if older leading men can be put in with actresses 20 years younger than them, than women should be able to get the same treatment.It is a bit episodic, but fun nevertheless.

On the way to a small Texas town to claim the local newspaper as her inheritance, Prudence Webb stops off to fleece a infamous gambler (Chris Mooney) in revenge for him winning a lot of money off her father – a debt that eventually led to his suicide. On arriving in the town, Prudence finds that the paper is run by Clay Ballard who denies that the paper was ever signed over to Webb's father and refuses to give up ownership. Prudence turns to the law and quickly makes enemies in the town by using the court system to claim her inheritance and wins her case. With the town's powerbase against her, who'd have expected that it would be Chris Mooney who would come to her aid?! And so goes the story with this fairly run-of-the-mill western that is strangely coloured and lacking anything special to really justify watching. The basic plot sees a bit of romance set against a back drop of a stranger in town causing a conflict with the bad element and, yes, it is delivered as flatly and unimaginatively as that summary suggests. The basic characters don't really add anything of interest and I did struggle to really care about any of them mainly because they were fairly cardboard and uninteresting. Of course, this being a b-movie sort of affair then it is maybe a bit unfair to be harsh on it because all it is aiming to do is fill time and provide a bit of entertainment and not much else. In that regard the film does alright – with poker games, fights, shoot outs, horse riding and action; none of it is anything special of course but it just about does enough to be distracting.The cast pretty much match this with average performances all round. Colbert is OK but never made a lasting impression on me; she seems to enjoy the lead role and she matches the material. Sullivan should have been the slick man of the film and brought a spark to all his scenes, instead he is rather bland and only really has chemistry with Colbert in his opening poker scene. Support is nothing special at all and the "baddies" never really made much of an impact and thus didn't feed the tension within the narrative.Overall this is a fairly average film with nothing special to really recommend it for. The story is OK and is delivered with enough stuff of entertainment value to make it passable and distracting on a wet Sunday afternoon but there are much better westerns than this around.

My how the mighty have fallen. Roles must have gotten mighty hard to come by for an actress of Miss Colbert's caliber. This movie is very typical of 1950's oaters. The one unusal aspect is that Prudence (Miss Colbert) is initially a strong, independent woman, kind of unusual for a western. But in the end Gene Barry Sullivan Fitzgerald becomes her "protector". This is a very cornball movie and Gregory Walcott who plays Jess Foley has got to be one of the most wooden actors ever to grace the silver screen. One can almost see the pain on Miss Colbert's face as she delivers some of the corniest lines in movie history. It is such a can of corn it is worth watching for the unintentional humor it delivers.