Another goddamn John Wayne western. I hated the first one (The Searchers, way up at #7), so I wasn’t optimistic about this one, and… yep, hated it!

Like, if anything, this gave me a better appreciation for how good The Searchers was, by the standards of shitty-ass Westerns. Like, sure, that movie was stupid, but at least it was about something and made with real craft. This is just… fluff.

So John Wayne is a sheriff, and they have a Bad Guy locked up, and the Bad Guy Gang wants him, so there’s all this alleged tension like omg are they going to come in the night and attack ‘n’ stuff? But who cares.

There’s also a comic relief deputy, who is annoying. And there’s a musical interlude, where two other deputies croon a song. And there’s a tedious boring shootout where everyone leans around corners and shoots and Bad Guys fall out of a window waving their arms wildly. Every fucking Western stereotype there is.

The only good thing in the movie is the female romantic lead, played by Angie Dickinson, who is 1000% more interesting as a character than stupid ol’ John Wayne and Ricky Martin and whoever else. But even she is ruined by a) the part where they pair her (age 27) with John Wayne (age 51) like that’s reasonable, and b) the part where they have to destroy her character in order to make that romance work. Oh, did she seem independent and free-spirited? Haha, no, what she really wants is to be with a dude who is too emotionally unavailable to ever say anything even vaguely honest. (The big finale scene is where he threatens to arrest her, and she bursts out in tears because that means he loves her, so yeah.)

I have no idea what this is doing on this list. It’s basically just a slickly made genre film that I’m sure was very popular with the crowds, back in the ’50s, but it has nothing of any value or interest to make it memorable or enduring.