Star in the Dust

I watched another old movie on Encore Westerns the other night. Seems that they have added a new bunch of old movies recently. They have added some Hopalong Cassidy classics. Those are pretty bad movies but still fun to watch. This movie, Star in the Dust, from 1956 caught my eye because it starred Richard Boone and a young Mamie Van Doren.  

The story was a gunman hired by the cattlemen had been convicted of killing a farmer. The cattlemen wanted to bust him out of jail and the farmers wanted to lynch him. The old sodbusters vs the cattlemen story. The local sheriff was hellbent on carrying out the sentence exactly according to the law. Not a minute early.

Richard Boone was the bad guy which was pretty much his movie career. He spent almost all of the movie in a jail cell and still managed to overact. John Agar was the moral law abiding sheriff. Mamie was the sheriff's love interest but her father was the rich banker on the side of the cattle interests. That caused conflicts and mistrust in the relationship. 

It's not much of a movie and to be honest, I didn't pay very close attention to the plot twists and the character relationships. 

There were no outstanding acting performances and the plot was one that was recycled many times. They even had a town minstrel who told the story with a song, a pretty bad song. Coleen Gray did the heavy lifting for the female part. Mamie wasn't called on to do much acting, she was there for her other assets. John Agar, who played the sheriff, was adequate as the star. He is more famous for being married to Shirley Temple. 

What I did notice is that several future TV stars were in the movie. Of course, Richard Boone was a big star for several seasons when he played Paladin on Have Gun Will Travel. Mamie's father/banker was played by Leif Erickson who went on to star in High Chaparral. Harry Morgan was a leader of the cattlemen. He achieved TV fame as Col. Sherman Potter in M*A*S*H. Paul Fix played one of the deputies. He later became Marshal Micah Torrance on The Rifleman.  

As usual with these movies, good triumphed over evil. The real bad guys, Boone and Erickson, wound up dead. The good farmers got justice over the evil cattlemen. The good sheriff, Agar, got the girl, Van Doren. The minstrel closed the movie with the ending verse to his song. 

Most old western movies are pretty corny and predictable but still fun to watch. You get to see many future stars when they were young and not necessarily very good. 

wjh