Yawn
I won’t
take up much of your time on Kentucky
Rifle because it’s so bad.
OK, we
all like Chill Wills, but I can’t think of a single other good thing to say
about it.
It’s set
in an unknown place, ‘the frontier’ (filmed at Vasquez Rocks), at an unknown
time (but the era of single-shot rifles and vaguely early nineteenth century costumes). A wagon train proceeds through Comanche
country and one wagon breaks down. Scout Chill and his pardner Jason (Lance
Fuller, ‘star’ of 50s horror and sci fi C-movies) elect to stay with the wagon while the train moves on,
as does a useless preacher (Henry Hull, hamming it up as usual but having
difficulty with lousy lines), a couple of other losers and, unbelievably stupidly,
two women. The wagon is carrying four cases of twenty-five Kentucky Rifles
(rarfles, as Chill calls them) which those Comanches want, and who can blame
them.
That’s
the plot, such as it is. The trouble is that the movie is so badly written and
directed that most of it is spent with the actors all lined up in a row,
talking.
Mostly it's just the actors lined up, talking
It was produced
by one Carl K Hittleman. Mr. Hittleman produced a few shockers for Poverty Row
studios in the 50s, Westerns among them. He worked with Samuel Fuller, so you
can tell they were mostly junk. They had titles like I Shot Jesse James, The
Return of Jesse James, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter and Billy
the Kid vs. Dracula. You get the picture. Sometimes, as was the case with Kentucky Rifle, he directed and wrote
them too. It was not a good idea.
He wasn’t
the only one on the set to have no talent. The actors were dire. Perhaps the
worst were Cathy Downs as one of the women and Jess Barker as the bad guy who wants
to sell out to the Indians. They stand rigid and recite their lines. Badly. It’s
painful.
The
action moves at about the speed of the broken-down wagon.
Another
problem, nowadays and maybe then, is that it is a lousy print. The sound and picture are so bad as
to make the movie barely watchable. You have to be a dedicated Western sad-case
to get through it. Like me.
Even the Indians mostly talk
Even
Chill could hardly be termed a giant of the thespian arts. Amusing old codger
that he was, he was not exactly Laurence Olivier. He was Oscar-nominated for best
supporting actor in John Wayne's The Alamo,
amazingly, but he didn’t win. In Kentucky
Rarfle he does his thing but…
The
stranded party is quite amazingly incompetent. Chill lectures a man on how
vital the horses are to save their lives but no one thinks to mount a guard on them. The
beasts are there for the Comanches to take.
The
American Longrifle, often called the Kentucky Rifle, came into service from the
early 1700s on. It was among the first weapons to have rifling and this and
the length of the barrel (sometimes as much as four feet, making the whole gun
up to 70 inches in length) gave it greater accuracy than the smooth-bored
muskets common at the time. The rifles played an important part in the Indian
wars and in the American Revolution and the war of 1812, though mostly they
were a hunting weapon. But of course they were still single-shot muzzle-loaders
and could just about manage two shots a minute at most. They also jammed quite
often.
American longrifles
Eminently
missable, Kentucky Rifle will nevertheless
serve you well if you suffer from insomnia.
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