Lesley Selander's Gunplay 1961

I am not particularly knowledgeable about the "B" Western but even when I was a kid I thought that motorcars in so-called Westerns (such as those of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry) were absurd and ridiculous.  Gunplay is one of seven movies that Tim Holt made in 1951 -- he made mostly Westerns but also appeared in Orson Welles and John Huston films -- and sticks fairly close to the populist iconography of the serious Western, with a drunken sheriff and a corrupt and murdering banker who owns the whole town and everybody in it.   The movie is intense and emotional, sixty minutes of a search for justice for a young boy whose father is lynched by cohorts of the banker.  Tim Holt plays a character named "Tim Holt" who goes to work on a ranch run single-handedly by Joan Dixon and he and his Mexican-Irish sidekick discover the young boy, lost and crying for his dead father, and take it upon themselves to seek justice.

Gunplay was one of nine movies that Lesley Selander directed in 1951.  His direction is crisp and the black-and-white cinematography by J. Roy Hunt (who photographed eight films in 1951) is straightforward and unobtrusive; Tim Holt does most of his stunts himself. and Joan Dixon plays a no-nonsense woman who is not afraid to get dressed up for a stagecoach ride. It is not surprising that in 1951 "B" Westerns were on the way out, replaced by the more claustrophobic TV Western.