Some of my favorite moving-going when I was quite young were William Castle's cheap horror movies and The Tingler (1959) was one of the first I saw, because I was just old enough to get a paper route and had some spare cash. My father had forbidden me to go to the movies because, as he put it, "you know what kind of people hang out at movie theaters," though I didn't know what he actually meant; I was not allowed to go alone or with peers, only with my parents who, of course, never wanted to go, much less to take me or my two siblings. My father felt it was wrong to spend money on something that gave one pleasure, unless there was also some way to make money on the deal, so I had to be discreet about my movie-going.
I did not know at that time that Castle had started our making Westerns for schlockmeister Sam Katzman at Columbia, including Masterson of Kansas, which Turner Classic Movies recently showed in tribute to actress Nancy Gates, who died this year at the age of 93. She was vulnerable and touching in the film, as she tried to prevent her father from being lynched because he sold grassland to the Indians, and dominated the film's palette of blue, brown and gray with a bright orange feather in her hat. Bat Masterton (George Montgomery), Wyatt Earp (Bruce Cowling) and Doc Holliday (James Griffith) overcome their differences to defeat the cattlemen who are trying to take Dodge for themselves and the land away from the Indians; they stride down the main street of Dodge, shooting the bad guys, each of them firing guns with both hands.
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