Watch Bordertown Gun Fighters For Free

Too much of everything

Nice effects though.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Wild Bill Elliot and Gabby Hayes contend with a murderous gang of lottery swindlers in "Triggerman" director Howard Bretherton's "Bordertown Gun Fighters." The Treasury Department wants to crack down on the widespread Lone Star lottery scam and agents have finally caught a break. Basically, the conspirators have been defrauding honest lotto players by awarding themselves the jackpots rather than the players. This kind of criminal intrigue usually isn't the province of a frontier western. Otherwise, this 55- minute oater has everything that you would expect from a Wild Bill western. The comic repartee between Wild Bill and Gabby in their second big-screen appearance is excellent. Everybody makes nasty comments about Gabby's loquacity. The action unfolds after a stagecoach robbery. The villains kill a passenger and Wild Bill & Gabby show up before they can ransack the body. Our heroes find a large, white, sealed envelope on his corpses. Sheriff Jack Gatling (Roy Barcroft) returns, takes the envelope, and arrests our heroes for the death of the agent. Gatling is surprised when our heroes are taken from custody by a Washington, D.C. plainclothes agent, Dave Strickland (Harry Woods), and relocated. As it turns out, Strickland is a Treasury Man, too. The big surprise is perennial villain Harry Woods plays a genuine good guy for a change. An entertaining horse opera!

Wild Bill Elliott now riding the range as one of the stable of Republic Studio cowboy heroes is an undercover Treasury man in Bordertown Gun Fighters. Relations between the State of Texas and the territory of New Mexico are deteriorating rapidly because of a crooked Texas state lottery run out of El Paso by saloon owner Ian Keith.Local law enforcement has been unable to cope with the problem of worthless tickets flooding New Mexico with pre-determined Texas winners on the other side of the state line. So the Treasury steps in with agent Bill Elliott and sidekick Gabby Hayes working with sheriff Harry Woods to bring down the gang.The surprise here is Woods who in 95% of his films is always a bad guy, usually a fine western heavy. The classically trained Ian Keith best known for playing Octavian in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra, adds some nice bearing for his role as villain.Anne Jeffreys is in the cast as Keith's innocent niece who sings in his gambling palace, but also helps bring him down. Gabby who Woods is constantly putting down actually finds key evidence quite accidentally though.Nice B western which moves at a good clip. Elliott's Republic Pictures seem to be less violent than the ones he would do later on.

It was quite surprising to see Harry Woods in the role of a good guy marshal instead of the heavy he played along with Roy Barcroft in a dozen or so other westerns. Anne Jeffreys is always a pleasure to watch no matter the size of the part. Gordon Nance, as usual was cast as Wild Bill something or other, an identity crisis he assumed in earlier films where he was Wild Bill Saunders, then Wild Bill Hickock. Although, he was alleged to have been a quick draw artist, and often wore his hardware backwards, the notion became incongruous. This sorry portrayal was even further clouded by raising his six gun over his head and wildly throwing his arm towards the intended target. Perhaps that's where he derived his "Wild Bill" calling card. Good old matinee fare for those that miss it.