Fred F. Sears's Badman's Country 1958

Hampton's script treats history in a cavalier fashion that is matched by Sears' exuberant direction.
--Phil Hardy on Badman's Country in The Western (William Morrow,1983)

Fred F. Sears was sometimes an actor but mainly a prolific director of B movies, most of them either in the horror or Western genres; he made 54 movies in his eighteen year career and Badman's Country was one of the five movies he directed that were released in 1958, a year after he died at the age of 44, and had to compete with the Westerns that were crowding the TV screen.  Badman's Country competed by doing what many of the B Westerns of that period did:  shooting on location and emphasizing action and violence.  Sears, writer Orville Hampton and producer Robert Kent came up with the effective idea that since they could not afford well-known actors they would use well known characters:  Pat Garrett (George Montgomery),Buffalo Bill Cody (Malcolm Atterbury), Wyatt Earp (Buster Crabbe), Bat Masterton (Gregory Walcott) and bad guys Butch Cassidy (Neville Brand) and the Sundance Kid (Russell Johnson) and included a significant number of impressive character actors:  Richard Devon, Morris Ankrum, et al.  The one woman in the cast was Karin Booth, who was involved in an adult subplot of supporting Pat Garrett in his last job of marshalling before they could leave for California.   Howard Hough was the second unit director responsible for the beautiful choreographed gunfights and Ben Kline --who started doing cinematography in the 20's --did the crisp black-and-white photography.  I'm sure I would have loved this movie if I had had a chance to see it when it came out; I was eleven years old at the time