Johnny Rush (John Agar) returns from the Civil War to find his lands stolen by local rancher Dandy Dayton (Wayne Morris). When he is injured by Dayton’s henchmen, he finds himself unable to fire a gun – and instead seeks revenge with a bow and arrow.

There is a touch of Robin Hood to The Lonesome Trail, a modest B-picture directed by Richard Bartlett. There is a certain originality to the film as well, since it livens up an otherwise by-the-numbers main street showdown between the hero and the villain. Elsewhere things seem far more conventional: the lone hero facing up against a powerful and well-connected cattle baron, the female lead (Margia Dean) who loves one man but is promised to another, and the local town lush (Adele Jergens) who flirts with any man willing to pay her drinks bill. Like Bartlett’s earlier 1955 western it is a Lippert Pictures production, a company set up by cinema proprietor Robert L. Lippert to produce content at a much cheaper rate than the Hollywood studios were offering. As I said when reviewing that earlier film, The Silver Star, Lippert generally got what he paid for. The Lonesome Trail is almost inarguably the better western, but it still feels truncated, dramatically weak, and occasionally rather offensive.

A Jergens-versus-Dean cat fight in the town saloon is honestly just a little tiresome. Ian McDonald’s performance as local Native American Gonaga is actively painful to sit through: not just the brownface make-up but the performance of the character as a slow-witted, lumbering primitive. In a year when a growing number of westerns were coming to interrogate the role of the Native Americans in the western genre, it feels desperately retrograde.

It is something of a surprise seeing McDonald in the role. Only three years earlier he played the villainous Frank Miller in High Noon (1952). Likewise Douglas Fowley, likely best known as Roscoe Dexter in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), gives a weirdly exaggerated turn as the eccentric Crazy Charlie Bonesteel. Even Edgar Buchanan shows up as the ailing Dan Wells, father to Margia Dean’s Patricia. It is an unexpectedly prestigious cast all around, despite the production’s rather limited pedigree.

I suppose one argument in The Lonesome Trail‘s favour is that it is relatively short at 71 minutes. Even with that in mind, it is hard to get away from the truth: these films were made as cheap filler before the main feature, and were never really intended for future audiences or any kind of long-term legacy. They can be interesting, even fascinating, but struggle to be entertaining.

1955 West is a review project to watch as many western features from 1955 as possible, in order to gain a ‘snapshot’ view of the genre at its height. According to Letterboxd, there were 72 westerns released that year. You can see all of FictionMachine’s reviews of them to date by clicking here.