BY JOHN M. WHALEN

In Raoul Walsh’s “Gun Fury,” a 1953 Columbia western, Donna Reed plays genteel southern belle, Jennifer Ballard, who is traveling west by stage to meet her fiancé, Rock Hudson, who plays a former confederate soldier by the name of Ben Warren. Warren now owns a ranch in California and all the two of them want to do is forget the war and settle down near the ocean. Also on the stage is Phil Carey (you remember him as Asa Buchanan on “One Life to Live;” and years earlier as Philip Marlowe on an ABC TV series). Carey plays Frank Slayton, an “unreconstructed” Southerner who’s pretty ticked off on the way the war turned out. He’s immediately attracted to Donna Reed, though. She represents the kind of southern woman of good breeding he’d always hoped to settle down with some day. He tries to ingratiate himself with her but she gives him the cold shoulder.

Also on the coach is the lantern-jawed Leo Gordon, who has played bad guys in more westerns than you can shake a stick at. He plays Jess Burgess, Frank’s partner. The stage stop for the night at a relay station with a hotel and Ben arrives to claim his bride-to-be, much to Slayton’s chagrin. At dinner we have some character development in which we learn Ben had enough social interaction during the war and now just wants to mind his own business and settle down with Jennifer and ignore the rest of the world. After spending the night in the hotel (in separate rooms, of course) they climb back on the stage next morning, only to be attacked by an escort of Union troops, who shoot the driver and shotgun. Turns out Frank and and Jess are stage coach robbers and the soldiers are really members of Slate’s gang. They killed the real soldiers and took their uniforms. There’s some gun fury action and Ben is shot and left for dead. Slayton and his gang run off with the gold and the girl.

So far, not a bad set up. The first cliché’d plot twist comes right after that, however, when we see Old Ben isn’t as dead as Slayton thought he was. It’s the old “merely a nick on the side of the head” routine. He’s pretty upset, though, when he finds his fiancé has been kidnapped and he takes out after them. Meantime Slayton and his gang reach a hideout and Slayton and Jess get into a fight over the girl. Jess wants her left behind, otherwise she’ll cause trouble. Slayton wins the argument and Jess ends up left behind and hog-tied to a fence. Ben shows up a bit later and frees Jess and they make a deal to ride together. Ben wants his girl and Jess wants revenge and his share of the fortune he helped steal. It’s an unlikely alliance, but given that neither one of them have any alternative but to work together, it’s more or less believable.

They ride on and stop to the next town and ask the sheriff there for help. The lawman says it’s none of his concern; the robbery happened outside his jurisdiction. Rock’s isolationist philosophy of just minding his own affairs comes back to bite him in the butt. But he’s determined to get Jennifer back and Jess still wants his money. So they move on and there’s a lot of riding and some nice views of the Red Rock country around Sedona, Arizona, where the movie was filmed. Ben and Jess are soon joined by an Apache who wants revenge on Slayton and his gang for killing some of his people. The three of them eventually catch up with the gang, who have also kidnapped a Mexican girl that gang member Blackie (Lee Marvin) took a shine to. When Slayton realizes he’s being hunted not only by Ben Warren, (who he thought he had killed), but also by his old buddy Jess (who he’d left hog-tied to a fence), and an unknown Indian, well, it shakes him up.

Slayton and his gang are only a few miles from the Mexican border, he’s got to decide what to do fast. He comes up with the idea that they’ll trade Jennifer for Jess and everyone will go on his merry way. Whaaaat?? Make a deal with the guy you left hog-tied to a fence, and then suddenly give up your yen for the genteel southern belle you’ve always dreamed you’d settle down with, and gone to so much trouble to get? Just like that? And what about Jess? Does he really think he can get back in the gang and get his share of the loot, after Phil was so ticked off at him that he left him for dead, hog-tied to a fence? It’s obvious Slayton only wants to get Jess out in the open so he can plug him. How stupid is Jess to think it’s possible to make a deal like that? What kind of crazy deal is this anyway?

“Gun Fury” was not only directed by the legendary Raoul Walsh, who made many great films, the screenplay was written by two well-known pros—Irving Wallace and Roy Huggins. Are you telling me that these three couldn’t have come up with a more believable finish to this sagebrush potboiler? Couldn’t they see, when they got to shoot the final scenes, that the story was going off the rails? Couldn’t one of them have come up a more believable finish than the laughable prisoner exchange at the end? Hard to believe. But they totally wrecked what could have been a good action western. Was cocaine already that big a problem in Hollywood in 1953?