Black Spurs
                                                                                              
Director: R.  G. Springsteen
Year: 1965
Rating: 6.0
Rory Calhoun was one lucky s.o.b in his acting career. He looked fated to spend much of his life behind bars having been arrested and sentenced twice and with no employable skills. Then he runs into Alan Ladd while horseback riding and Ladd likes the look of him and suggests acting. Ladd's wife gets him a screen test at Fox. Rory gets a few small parts and then Ladd invited him to a dinner he is giving where an employee of David Selznick sees him and signs him to Selznick and changes his name to Rory Calhoun. And slowly parts opened to him. By the 1950s he was square in the B Western milieu and made loads of them. In 1959 he had his own TV show - The Texan. That is the way things can go. If you are lucky. B westerns were still a thing in the 50s into the 60s - as long as there were double features. The biggest years of the B Western were the 1930s and 40s when there were a slew of actors who became popular, but most of them had retired by the 1950s and certainly the 1960s but along with Rory there was Audie Murphy still knocking them out.  



His character Santee isn't very likable - kind of a scumbag in truth. He begins as a young man in love with his gal Anna but decides to hunt down a wanted man for the $3,000 reward. In a fair draw, he guns the man down. It took him ten months to do so and when he returns, he finds that Anna has gone off and married a sheriff in another town. Anna is played by Terry Moore - once nominated for an Oscar for Come Back, Little Sheba and also being in Mighty Joe Young - but best known for claiming that she was married to Howard Hughes. A perky blonde type. Santee decides he likes this bounty hunter business. He is good at it and it is profitable. He gains a reputation as a killer. When he enters a town, everyone with a criminal background gets nervous.



But the money is still not enough and gunslingers always have a bad day eventually or meet up with someone better. So, he gets another idea. The train company has decided to go through one town and leave the other high and dry. That means money. He offers to screw up this town so that the train company will change its mind. Not coincidentally perhaps, it is where his old girl is living with her husband. The big landowner played by Lon Chaney Jr. agrees to pay him. Santee brings in a bunch of gambling operators and a squad of girls from New Orleans to entertain the boys. The group of ladies is headed by none other than Linda Darnell, a few years past her beauty years but still an eyeful. Sadly, she was to die this same year in a house fire. So, this was her final film. More of a drama than a guns-a-blazing western. There is practically no action till the shootout at the end. DeForest Kelley makes a brief appearance as a corrupt lawman. Directed by R.G. Springsteen who had been directing B Westerns since his debut in 1945. 81 minutes in color.