Hostile Country (1950)
In this remake of No Man's Range (1935), Shamrock travels to the ranch of his stepfather who he has never met and finds himself caught in the middle of a range war.
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As Good As It Gets
I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.
It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.
Hostile Country was the first film of an ensemble western stock company that Lippert Pictures assembled. A studio that did mostly modern stories, I'm guessing Robert Lippert thought he needed a cowboy hero or two for a wider audience. He found them in James Ellison and Russell Hayden who played young sidekicks to Hopalong Cassidy in their salad days.But he did more than that. In the six pictures that Ellison and Hayden did they had the same set of familiar western players. After watching and reviewing three subsequent features that cast was starting to get a familiar look. Go down the list of cast members on the subsequent films and see what I mean.In this inaugural film Ellison hears from a man who married his mother after he left home who wants help on his ranch. So he and partner Hayden go to the ranch and before long find themselves in the middle of a range war with pretty Julie Adams who owns the neighboring spread.I have to say the ones working for the stepfather have cooked up quite a scheme and I dare not say more.It's a Lippert film so you know it's going to be on the pinch penny side. Still not a bad story.