The Toughest Gun in Tombstone Film Review

Director: Earl Bellamy
Year: 1958
Rating: 5.5

It's Tombstone in the 1880s. Johnny Ringo, Ike Clanton, Curly Brocious and of course . . . Captain Matt Sloane. What the heck. Matt Sloane? Where is Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in this film? Nowhere. Maybe it would have cost the producers extra money to get the right to use Earp and Holiday's names but they had no problem with Clanton, Ringo and Brocious - all the folks that Earp in real life went after and, in many films killed. George Montgomery plays Sloane and he must have been disappointed that he wasn't named Earp since he had played Bat Masterson, Pat Garrett, Tom Horn, Gentleman Jim Corbett, Hawkeye and Davy Crockett - not to mention Phillip Marlowe in other films. In Gun Belt he was one of the Ringo's along with Earp and the Clanton's. So, this was familiar ground for him.

Ringo is running a gang with Ike and Curly that is terrorizing Arizona and stopping them from becoming a state - this all told by a stern narrator of the type you usually only get in true life mob films. Sloane and his band of lawmen are told to clean it up. His wife has been killed by the gang and his son was a witness to it and is on the run. A sweetie Della (Beverly Tyler) picked the boy up on the road and there isn't much doubt that she and Sloane will be playing the marimbas together by the end of the film. But Sloane is passing himself off as an outlaw to get close to the gang, so she wants nothing to do with him. Neither does his son when he hears the story. Not much action goes on till the end and the kid is annoying as hell. Don Beddoe as the father of Della and Harry Lauter as one of Sloane's men are also in it. But my favorite was Hank Worden as the stable man.

You may not recognize Worden's name but if you have seen many Westerns, you have likely come across him. Especially ones which starred John Wayne who took a liking to him. 17 of Wayne's films. He usually plays slow-talking slow-thinking characters. He was Mose Harper in The Searchers, Reeves in Red River. Before getting into acting, he was trained as an engineer, worked in rodeos and was a cab driver in New York City. He has a face and pattern of speech that you don't forget. Smallish-budget black and white film directed by Earl Bellamy who primarily directed TV westerns - The Lone Ranger and Tales of Well Fargo.