Streets of Ghost Town (1950)

Too much of everything

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

... and that's the case here. The story is told mainly in flashback as The Durango Kid (Charles Starrett) recounts the tale of a stolen stash of gold known only to blind outlaw Bill Donner and a child in which Donner confided, but is desired by outlaw Frank Fenton. The "ghost town" was once a thriving place, but Fenton ran everyone out of town by terrorizing the settlers, all so he could have the place to himself and eventually find the gold. There are lots of good action shots in this film mainly because about two thirds of the film is stock footage from past Durango Kid westerns. Only the ending shots and the scenes where Durango is recounting the tale are new footage. There are some macabre elements here you don't normally see in these westerns, such as outlaw Bill Donner locking his partners in the hidden vault with the gold and leaving them, now two of the richest men in the world, to die in a grave of gold. In another scene Donner is captured by Fenton's gang and then returns blinded. It is not clear whether Donner blinded himself so he could not be forced to divulge the location of the loot, or if Fenton did it out of meanness, and in this case, stupidity. If you haven't seen the past Durango Kid westerns and therefore recognize all of the stock footage, and you like westerns in general, you should like this one.

Streets of Ghost Town (1950) *** (out of 4) Surprisenly good, if very cheap, "B" Western from Columbia has Steve Woods (Charles Starrett) arriving in a ghost town where we hear about a legend involving a hidden treasure. It turns out that the only person who knows where the treasure is is currently blind, in jail and isn't telling his secret. This entry in the studio's Durango Kid series is actually the best I've seen for a couple reasons. For starters, this entry dabbles in quite a few horror elements including the heroes messing around with a skull early on and there are other elements including how dark some of the material is. Another thing that keeps this one entertaining is that all sorts of stock footage is used and I found it rather fun seeing how they used it for the story. This includes a rather amazing looking cattle stampede, which was perhaps the highlight of this film (I'm not sure which film it was originally in). Starrett seems to be a bit more energized here in the dual role but he also serves a third part as the narrator. Smiley Burnette is added here and manages to bring quite a few laughs including one sequence where he gets tired of his horse not doing what he says so he decides to just run himself. STREETS OF GHOST TOWN isn't going to remind you of John Ford but it's goal wasn't to be a classic. It was meant to be entertaining and I think it does just that.

I would like to comment on the previous blogs about the re-use of old footage. Yes, there was a lot of stock footage used in the Durango Kid films, just as there had been in the Lash Larue series. This had nothing to do with television, since TV's influence didn't make an impression until the early Fifties. Post-war production costs and the tight budgets which governed these films were to blame. Actually, it made sense. Why would you shoot new footage of a masked rider on a white horse again and again when you already had footage on this? My friend Barry Shipman, who wrote the Durangos, told me that at the end of the series in 1952, he was simply writing continuity so that the old footage and the new footage could be matched up. What the hey? The kids didn't care about story lines. Just keep the Durango Kid riding and shooting. The comment about the hokey comedy of 1950 amused me. Burnette was doing the same comedy on Petticoat Junction, but there was a laugh track added to tell the audience when to laugh. We didn't have the laugh track at the movies so we had to decide for ourselves what was funny and what wasn't. Also, note the printed narratives at the beginning of every Durango with no off screen narrator reading. Judging from those words, the scriptwriters must have thought we were pretty intelligent. Could the kids today read that without help?

I found it interesting that this film was not original, but used stock footage from previous westerns: "Gunning For Vengeance" and "Landrush." I always suspected that a lot of the shooting and chasing in westerns appeared the same, but I never realized that they actually used the same film. Roger Corman would be proud.I also found it interesting in this particular western the use of the protection racket by the outlaws. Agasin, something I had never seen previously. Using stampeding horses or cows to intimidate and collect protection money. Cowboy Mafia? The cowboys here, including the Durtango Kid, really need to take some shooting lessons. Bullets were flying all over the place and no one got shot./ The only time anyone did get shot was at point blank range from 3-4 feet. Interesting.