Category Archives: Film Review

A Loyalty Day Film Review: My Son John (dir by Leo McCarey)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh my God, did you know that it’s Loyalty Day!?

Well, actually, it’s not Loyalty Day for everyone.  In fact, a lot of the world’s citizens are celebrating Communist May Day today.  However, here in the United States, it’s Loyalty Day.  Even if you are an American, it’s possible that you’ve never heard of Loyalty Day.  It was first celebrated in 1921 and it was intended to provide a non-Communist alternative to International Workers Day.  It wasn’t until 1955 that Loyalty Day was officially recognized by Congress.

From Wikipedia:

Loyalty Day is defined as follows in 36 U.S.C. § 115:

  • (a) Designation.— May 1 is Loyalty Day.
  • (b) Purpose.— Loyalty Day is a special day for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.
  • (c) Proclamation.— The President is requested to issue a proclamation—
    • (1) calling on United States Government officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on Loyalty Day; and
    • (2) inviting the people of the United States to observe Loyalty Day with appropriate ceremonies in schools and other suitable places.

Though released before it officially became a holiday, the 1952 film, My Son John, is perfect for Loyalty Day.

The John of the title is John Jefferson (Robert Walker, in his final role), an employee of the State Department.  While his younger brothers (played by Richard Jaeckel and James Young) are two high school football stars who are looking forward to serving their country in Korea, John is an intellectual who considers concepts like patriotism to be simplistic and naive.  While his father (Dean Jagger) sings patriotic songs at the American Legion hall, John rolls his eyes at such middle class activities.  (“If you don’t like your Uncle Sammy,” move to another country, John’s father sings.)  The only person to whom John is especially close is his nervous mother, Lucille (Helen Hayes).

However, John is keeping a secret from even Lucille.  He’s a double agent, working for the communists!  With FBI agent Stedman (Van Heflin) hot on his trail, will John ever be able to see the light about the communists?  And, how will the communists respond to John having doubts about the cause?

My Son John was a dream project for Hollywood director Leo McCarey.  (It’s not a coincidence that the devoutly Catholic McCarey made a film about a devoutly Catholic family who discovers that one of their own has become a communist.)  McCarey carefully supervised every detail of the film and he was even able to talk stage legend Helen Hayes into starring in the film, her first in 14 years.  My Son John is full of scenes of shadowy communists, smug intellectuals, and all-American FBI agents marveling at the strength of Lucille Jefferson’s faith.  Everything that is today often cited as a negative aspect to living in the suburbs is presented as being a positive in My Son John.  The film’s communists come into a world of happy families, big houses, and well-manicured lawns and they set out to make everyone else as miserable as they are.  There’s nothing subtle about either McCarey’s approach or Helen Hayes’s performance but, as is often the case with propaganda, the film is crudely effective.

My Son John was Robert Walker’s final film.  In fact, he died before completing work on the film, leading the ending being rewritten.  (No longer would John personally deliver a commencement address.  Instead, his words come out of a tape player that has been rolled out on stage.  A holy light shines down on the player while The Battle Hymn of the Republic plays in the background.  It’s bizarre but it’s also probably the most memorable part of the movie.)  Scenes from Strangers On A Train were rather awkwardly spliced into final moments of My Son John, never mind the fact that Robert Walker’s gleefully evil performance as Bruno Antony had little in common with his self-tortured performance as John Jefferson.

Surprisingly, considering that My Son John was released at the height of the anti-Communist era, the film was not a success at the box office.  (Audiences seemed to better appreciate low-budget and pulpier anti-communist films, like I Was A Communist For The FBI.)  Still, thanks to the Internet, My Son John is still available to be viewed on this Loyalty Day.

So, remember — if you don’t like your Uncle Sammy …. well, actually, the cool thing about this country is that you don’t have to like your Uncle Sammy.  You have the right to decide for yourself how you feel about old Uncle Sammy.  That’s an idea that is worth being loyal to.

The Films of 2024: Miller’s Girl (dir by Jade Halley Bartlett)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Halfway through Miller’s Girl, I yelled “SHUT UP!” at my television.

I wasn’t shouting at a specific person in the film or because I had heard something that I found to be morally offensive.  I was just shouting at the movie in general.  Miller’s Girl is a film about people who talk nonstop, despite not really having anything interesting or new to say.  It’s a film about smart people but it doesn’t so much capture the way that smart people sound as much as it captures a dumb person’s idea of what it’s like to sound smart.  All of the dialogue is so calculated and so overwritten and so mind-thuddingly obvious, I was tempted to mute the film.  But then I’d just be stuck looking at the images and the images weren’t that interesting either.

The Miller of the title is Jonathan Albert Miller (Martin Freeman), a writer who once published a short story collection called — *snicker* — Apostrophes and Ampersands.  (Again, this is the type of title that someone who has never actually read a book would consider to be clever.)  Miller hasn’t written anything since he married wife, Bitchy McBitchface (played by Dagmara Domińczyk).  Actually, her name is Beatrice and she spends most of her time drinking and reminding Mr. Miller that he’s a failure.

Mr. Miller teaches a creative writing class at a high school in Tennessee.  He enjoys sharing a smoke and a cup of coffee with his best friend, Coach Boris Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin).  Even though Fillmore is a coach, he speaks in the same overwritten and florid dialogue as everyone else in this film because God forbid anyone sound like an individual.  Mr. Miller finds himself becoming obsessed with one of his students, Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega).  But Cairo, it turns out, might just be manipulating Mr. Miller so that she can use her experience of being seduced by a teacher for her admissions essay to Yale.  Meanwhile, Cairo’s friend, Winnie (Gideon Adlon, giving the best performance in the film), longs for Cairo.

The script for this film ended up on the 2016 Black List, which is the annual list of the “best unproduced scripts” in Hollywood.  It’s amazing how many truly mediocre films have first gained attention by having their script included in the Black List.  Cedar Rapids, The Beaver, Broken City, The Promotion, Dracula Untold, St. Vincent, The Judge, Money Monster, Boston Strangler, The Mother, and now Miller’s Girl are all Black List films that went into production.  Perhaps the film’s overwritten and overly arch dialogue seemed brilliant on the page but when it’s actually recited out loud, it just sounds like everyone involved is trying too hard to sound like an intellectual.  Eventually, you find yourself longing to hear just one line that might convey some sort of genuine emotion as opposed to empty posturing.  In a moment of unintentional hilarity, Miller masturbates while reading one of Cairo’s stories.  The film makes the mistakes of including Cairo reading the story in voice-over, revealing that Cairo is not only a terrible writer but that Miller will basically jerk off to anything.

Jade Halley Bartlett not only wrote the script but also makes her directorial debut and gives the film a flat visual style to go along with the intellectual emptiness of it all.  This cast is full of talented people but Jenna Ortega, who has been so good in other movies and shows, is miscast as a femme fatale and Dagmara Dominczyk’s attempt at a Tennessee accent will bring to mind cats mating in an alley.  Gideon Adlon is the only member of the cast who makes you believe that her character has a life outside of the requirements of the script.

I really thought there was no way I would see a film worse than Mea Culpa this year but Miller’s Girl has proven me wrong.

Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club (2008, directed by Ivan Frank)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After being incarcerated for 8 years, G (The Game) is released from prison.  As a condition of his parole, he is told to get a job and not hang out with any of his old criminal associates.

G fails to get a job.

G decides to return to selling drugs with his old criminal associate, Tone (Michael K. Williams).

Soon, G is the third biggest drug dealer in the city.  Corrupt cop Coleman (Ed O’Ross) is working with the Mexican cartel and he wants to take G down.  DEA agent Alexis (Shari Headley) is sent undercover to get evidence on G.  After a montage of the two of them going on romantic walks, having sex, and playing dominoes, they fall in love for real.  Alexis has to decide if she is willing to betray G and G eventually has to decide if he can forgive her for being a cop.

The big problem with this entire scenario is that G is on probation so he could be arrested and sent back to jail at any time, either for not getting a job or for spending all of his time with Tone.  There’s no reason to go through all the trouble of sending in Alexis and having her risk her life to find proof of G’s wrongdoing.  G should have been busted and sent back to jail as soon as he said hello to Tone.  Even if there was some reason why the cops didn’t want to bust him for not getting a job, G is shooting people in the middle of the street.  G is not a master criminal.  He should not be that hard to bust.

The Game is a talented rapper and a terrible actor.  Whatever charisma he has on stage disappears as soon as he gets in front of a camera and tries to show emotion.  The late and much missed Michael K. Williams is better as Tone but he deserved better than supporting roles in straight-to-video shlock like this.  Williams’s Wire co-star, Felecia Pearson, has a pointless cameo.  Ed O’Ross bulges his eyes and gives the type of sweaty performance that feels more appropriate for a silent movie.

As you probably guessed, this film has nothing to do with the original Belly.  There’s a lot of slow motion gunfights and talk about respect and money.  It feels almost like a parody of a hood film, right down to the final act of violence.

The Films of 2024: Mea Culpa (dir by Tyler Perry)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s another year and that means it’s time for another bad melodrama from Tyler Perry.

In Mea Culpa, Kelly Rowland plays Mea Harper, an Atlanta defense attorney who is hired to defend Zyair Malloy (Trevante Rhodes, delivering his lines with all of the passion of a first generation chatbot) against the charge that he murdered one of his many girlfriend.  Zyair is an artist, so he lives in a loft with an open elevator and a lot of mood lighting.  He’s been accused of not only murdering his ex but also using her blood and teeth in one of his paintings.  Protestors gather outside of a gallery showing his work and chant, “We hate Zyair!  We hate Zyair!”

Mea just happens to be the sister-in-law of Ray (Nick Sagar), the assistant district attorney who feels that prosecuting Zyair Malloy will be his ticket to the mayor’s office.  Mea’s entire family tells her that she needs to drop Zyair as a client and support her brother-in-law’s ambitions.  However, Mea doesn’t like her family.  Her cancer-stricken mother-in-law (Kerry O’Malley) is always talking how she wishes her youngest son had married someone else.  Mea’s husband, Kal (Sean Sagar), is a total wimp who doesn’t even have the guts to tell everyone that he lost his job and had to go to drug rehab.

Soon Zyair is hitting on Mea and trying to get her into his bed so that he can paint her.  Mea tries to resist but when she finds evidence that Kal has been going to a hotel with Ray’s wife, she gives in.  Except — uh oh! — it appears that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for the visit to the hotel!

Much like A Fall From Grace, Mea Culpa tries to be enjoyably sordid but it’s actually just dull.  You would think that, after 13 films, Perry would have finally learned something about both pacing and how to direct actors but Mea Culpa moves at a snail’s pace and it features some of the worst acting that I’ve ever seen.  The final third of the film features a few surprise twists but the plot also features so many unbelievable coincidences that even a crazy twist can’t save the film from being forgettable.

Tyler Perry is an interesting figure on the American pop culture landscape.  On the one hand, he’s a talented character actor.  One need only rewatch Gone Girl to see how good an actor Tyler Perry can be when he’s not directing himself.  And, as tempting as it may be, one should not discount the fact that his films and his television series have made a lot of money.  Despite what the critics might say, Tyler Perry does have an audience and apparently, he understands what they want.  Tyler Perry has also provided jobs and opportunities for blacks behind and in front of the camera.  Perry makes films featuring blacks playing something more than just the comedic relief or the best friend of a white person and, again, the importance of that should not be discounted.

On the other hand, Tyler Perry is a not-particularly imaginative director and a heavy-handed writer and Mea Culpa is more evidence of that.  As much as one might want to find something praiseworthy about him as a cinematic artist, the fact of the matter is that even Tyler Perry’s “good” films, like A Jazzman’s Blues, aren’t so much good as they’re just not quite as bad as usual.  Given his success and the struggle that blacks have faced trying to move up in the American film industry, I think that everyone would like for Tyler Perry to be a good director but he’s not.  He’s a good actor and a good businessman but as a director, Mea Culpa is all too typical of his output.

The Lone Hand Texan (1947, directed by Ray Nazarro)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Oil’s been discovered on the Texas frontier and Sam Jason (Fred Sears) has got the rights to several wells.  Someone in town keeps sabotaging his operations and blowing up his oil wells.  Sam sends a telegram to his old friend, Steve Driscoll (Charles Starrett).  Steve shows up in town to help Sam set up his business.  Meanwhile, Steve’s alter ego, the masked Durango Kid, works to discover who has been targeting Sam.

This is actually more of a Smiley Burnette movie than a Durango Kid film.  As always, Smiley is the Kid’s sidekick in the movie.  Smiley owns a general store and he’s the towns postmaster.  Everywhere Smiley goes, he is followed by two musicians, Mustard and Gravy.  Smiley sings even more songs than usual in this movie and he even has a brief romance with the local widow (Mary Newton), who unfortunately is also behind the efforts to drive Sam out of business.  Smiley may be the sidekick but he gets more screentime than the Durango Kid in The Lone Hand Texan and he does a mighty fine job with it.

One of the curious things about The Lone Hand Texan is that one of the bad guys also decides to wear a mask and claim to be The Durango Kid.  I wish the movie has done more with that because I have never really understood why Steve feels like he has to pretend to be Durango in the first place.  It’s not as if it’s difficult to recognize Steve, even when he’s wearing a mask.  I have never understood why no one in his movies ever notices that you never see Steve and the Durango Kid in the same place at the same time.  Even Lois Lane should have been able to figure out Durango’s secret identity.

The Lone Hand Texas is a standard Durango Kid outing, albeit not as dependent on stock footage as some of Durango’s other films.  Smiley gets to do more than usual, which is the only thing that really sets it apart.  As with most of the Durango Kid films, it will be best appreciated by those who are already fans.

Retro Television Review: Shattered Innocence (dir by Sandor Stern)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1988’s Shattered Innocence!  It  can be viewed on YouTube.

Shattered Innocence starts with a young woman shooting herself in a nice bedroom, while someone on the outside bangs on the door.

The rest of the movie shows the events the led up to the suicide of Pauleen Anderson (Jonna Lee).  On the one hand, starting a film with a literal bang is definitely a way to capture the audience’s attention.  On the other hand, letting us know that the story is going to end with a suicide pretty much robs the story of the element of surprise or the ability to take the viewer by surprise.  We know how the story is going to end and it doesn’t take long for us to figure out why it’s going to end that way.

From the minute we see Pauleen as a naive cheerleader with an overprotective family, we know that she’s going to end up hooking up with Cory (Kris Kamm), the local bad boy.  As soon as she graduates from high school and gets a job as a waitress, we know that Pauleen is not going to be staying in Kansas.  As soon as she and Cory end up in California and Cory suggests that Pauleen is pretty enough to be a model, we know that she’s going to end up modeling topless and that she’s going to deal with her nerves and her weight by snorting cocaine.  We also know that she’s going to end up appearing in adult films and that her concerned mother (Melinda Dillon) is constantly going to be begging her to come back home and forget about Los Angeles and its sinful ways.

Apparently based on a true story, there’s not really anything surprising about Shattered Innocence.  It tells a sordid story but, because it was made-for-TV, the scene usually ends right before anything really explicit happens.  (Ironically, by keeping the sordid stuff off-camera, the film invites the audience to imagine scenarios that are probably a hundred times more trashy than anything that could be recreated on film.)  Shattered Innocence gets by on innuendo, with frequent scenes of people saying stuff like, “Did you see the pictures?” or “You may recognize her from her centerfold.”  Nerdy Mel Erman (John Pleshette), who becomes Pauleen’s business partner, first meets her when he asks her to autograph the cover of Penthouse.  Otherwise, this film is actually pretty tame.

In fact, the one scene that really jumped out and made me go “Agck!” was a scene in which Pauleen’s nose suddenly started bleeding as a result of all the cocaine that she had recently done.  That was frightening, just because I’ve always had to deal with nosebleeds due to my allergies.  I hate them and the taste of blood in the back of my throat.  In that scene, I could relate to Pauleen’s shock and embarrassment.

Shattered Innocence tells a story that’s as old as Hollywood itself, which is a bit of a problem.  Too often, the movie just seems to be going through the expected motions.  Jonna Lee was a bit dull in the lead role but Melinda Dillion and John Pleshette both did well as the only two people who seemed to really care about Pauleen.  For the most part, though, Shattered Innocence was sordid without being memorable.

Retro Television Review: For My Daughter’s Honor (dir by Alan Metzger)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1996’s For My Daughter’s Honor (a.k.a. Indecent Seduction)!  It  can be viewed on YouTube, Tubi, and Prime.

Welcome to Tate, Oklahoma.

It’s a nice little town in what is usually referred to as being the heartland of America.  It’s a place where the streets are clean, the people are friendly, and where everyone roots for the local high school football team.  That makes Coach Pete Nash (Gary Cole) a pretty important person in Tate.  At a start-of-the-year pep rally, the football team is introduced as “Oklahoma’s team” and that would make Pete Nash Oklahoma’s coach.  Make no mistake about it, they love football in Oklahoma.  They love it almost as much as we love it in Texas.

Coach Nash also teaches Biology and he’s known for being the cool teacher that all of the students like to hang out with.  Soon, Nash is hanging out with 14 year-old Amy Dustin (Nicholle Tom) and Amy’s friends, Kelly (Allyson Hanigan) and Kimberly (Sara Rue).  With Coach Nash, they all get to drink beer.  They get to break into the school library and have fun with the copy machine.  Coach Nash sends Amy flirty little notes and she writes back.  Nash even encourages his daughter to invite Amy over for a sleepover so that she can lose her virginity.  Yikes!

Amy’s mother (Mary Kay Place) and her father (Mac Davis) both have their concerns about the amount of time that Amy is spending with Coach Nash.  Amy’s father is especially upset when he hears that Coach Nash threw a fit after he saw Amy dancing with a boy her own age.  But everyone in town tells them that they’re being paranoid and that Coach Nash is a good guy who just happens to be very close to his students.  He’s a family man and he’s a good football coach and that’s all that matters.

Though the names and the central location have all been changed, For My Daughter’s Honor is based on a true story.  The actual events took place in Texas and, as happens in the movie, the parents of the victim ended up suing the school district for failing to do anything about the predatory teacher.  The film certainly does capture the feeling of living in a small community where everyone thinks that they know everyone else and where people often choose not to believe what is obviously happening right in front of them.  Coach Nash makes no effort to hide his activities but he gets away with it because no one wants to confront what’s going on.  It’s easier to just say that Coach Nash is a passionate teacher or that he’s someone who lets his emotions get the better of him.  For many in the town, it’s easier to blame Amy and her family than it is to hold Coach Nash responsible for his own actions.

Gary Cole gives a strong performance as Coach Nash and is equally believable whether being blandly affable or obsessively creepy.  One of the reasons why this film works is because everyone has had at least one Coach Nash in their lives, that person who seems friendly but just gives off a strange vibe.  In the end, this is a film that says that it’s okay to be concerned.

Retro Television Review: All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story (dir by Lloyd Kramer)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 2000’s All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story!  It  can be viewed on YouTube.

In 1996, a 34 year-old teacher named Mary Kay Letourneau decided that she had fallen in love with someone who was not her husband.

A 34 year-old deciding that they are no longer happy in their marriage and subsequently deciding that that they’ve found love with someone else is hardly an unusual or even surprising occurrence.  What made Mary Kay Letourneau’s case a national scandal was that the person that she decided that she was in love with was a 12 year-old student named Vili Fualaau.  Mary Kay started her affair with Vili when she was his sixth grade teacher.  When she was arrested and charged with two counts of second-degree rape of a child, Letourneau was pregnant with Vili’s child.  Even after being arrested, Letourneau insisted that she and Vili were soulmates.  After giving birth to Vili’s child, Letourneau was sentenced to six months of prison and somehow managed to avoid having to register as a sex offender.  After serving her sentence, Letourneau was promptly arrested again with Vili and was sent back to jail, where she gave birth to Vili’s second child.

All-American Girl opens with Mary Kay Letourneau (Penelope Ann Miller) in jail, insisting that everything that happened between her and Vili was consensual and that their love is real.  The majority of the film is shown in flashbacks.  Some of those flashbacks deal with Mary Kay, her husband (Greg Spottiswood), and Vili (Omar Anguiano).  Watching the flashbacks, I couldn’t help but notice that the film really did seem to be on Mary Kay’s side, to an almost ludicrous extent.  Her husband is portrayed as being a soulless sociopath, even before Mary Kay starts sneaking around with Vili.  As for Vili, he is presented as being the one who initiated his relationship with Mary Kay, flirting with her in class and comforting her when she starts crying in a school hallway.  The actor playing Vili looked, acted, and sounded considerably older than just 12 years old.  At times, he appeared to be nearly as old as Penelope Ann Miller.  And I’ll admit that it’s totally possible that Vili could have looked older than his age and maybe he did have a surprisingly mature vocabulary.  But still …. he was 12 years old!  Apparently, Letourneau cooperated with the film’s producers and that’s pretty obvious from the first minute we see Vili giving Letourneau a wolfish smile in the 6th grade.

The flashbacks dealing with Letourneau’s childhood are a bit more interesting, if just because Letourneau was the daughter of a congressman who ran for president in 1972.  (One of her brothers served in the first Bush White House.  Another served as an advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign.)  At one point, she taunts a group of protestors that have gathered outside of her family’s home and her father praises her courage.  The film hints that it was the twin traumas of her brother’s death and the discovery that her beloved father had fathered two children with a mistress that led to Letourneau’s subsequent instability.  Perhaps that’s true, though I think the film is a bit too eager to accept that as an all-purpose explanation.

You may have guessed that I had mixed feelings about this film.  Penelope Ann Miller gave an excellent performance as Mary Kay but the film’s attempts to portray May Kay as being even more of a victim that Vili were undeniably icky.  

As for the real Mary Kay, she married Vili four years after being released from prison.  They separated a year before Mary Kay died in 2020.  Their relationship inspired several films, most recently May/December.

Cyclone Fury (1951, directed by Ray Nazarro)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Brock Masters (Mark Roberts) has been awarded a contract to supply the army with horses.  Corrupt businessman Grat Hanlon (Clayton Moore) wants that contract for himself so he sends his henchmen to kill Brock.  Because Brock has no known relatives, Grat believes that both the horses and the contract will soon be his.

However, Brock does have an heir!  He adopted an Indian child named Johnny (Louis Lettieri).  Johnny inherits the contract and both the Durango Kid (Charles Starrett) and Smiley Burnett are going to make sure that Johnny is able to deliver the horses.  Smiley is also going to find some time to sing some songs that have even less to do with the story than usual.

Cyclone Fury was one of the later entries in the Durango Kid series.  By the time it was made, Colombia was no longer willing to spend much money on the series so that majority of the film’s action scenes are lifted from other Durango Kid movies.  If you’ve never seen another Durango Kid movie, the action scenes are exciting and feature some impressive stunts.  If you have seen another Durango Kid movie, this one is going to seem really familiar.

For western fans, the main appeal here will be seeing Clayton Moore playing a bad guy.  Moore had already played The Lone Ranger when he appeared in this movie.  At the time Cyclone Fury was made, Moore had been unceremoniously fired from his most famous role and The Lone Ranger was being played by John Hart.  Hart would only last a season and Moore would subsequently be invited back to play the role that defined his career.  As for Cyclone Fury, Moore is convincing as Grat, though the character himself is just a typical Durango Kid bad guy.  The Durango Kid was always going up against seemingly respectable businessmen who were actually outlaws.

One final note: Moore’s Lone Ranger co-star, Jay Silverheels, appears in this film but only in archival footage from an early adventure of The Durango Kid.

3 Desperate Men (1951, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Tom and Fred Denton (Preston Foster and Jim Davis) are two frontier lawmen who are frustrated with their jobs.  They are both owed backpay.  When they shoot an outlaw, they are expected to pay the $80 burial fee.  Neither Tom nor Fred feels that they are appreciated by banks and the railroads that expect them to risk their lives on a daily basis.

When Tom and Fred are informed that their younger brother, Matt (Kim Spalding), has been convicted of murder and sentenced to hang in another town, they ride off to save him.

Even though Tom and Fred can both provide an alibi for Matt and it is obvious that Matt has been framed by a corrupt railroad agent, the town is still determined to hang him.  Tom and Fred manage to rescue him from the gallows but, in the process, a deputy is killed.  Now wanted by the authorities, the Denton brothers are forced to team up with the same outlaws that they used to hunt.  Soon, the Dentons are robbing banks and trains and their old friend, Pete Coleman (Monte Blue), has been ordered to captured them, dead or alive.

One of the many low budget westerns to be produced by the Lippert Company, Three Desperate Men is a cut above the usual B-western.  None of the Dentons want to be outlaws but they are forced into it by circumstances out of their control.  The real villains of the film are the bankers and the railroad tycoons who hoard the land and the money and who try to cheat men like Tom and Fred out of their rightfully earned wages.  The Denton brothers ultimately decide that their number one loyalty is to each other and that leads to the movie’s fatalistic conclusion, which is surprisingly violent for a 1951 western.  Preston Foster, Jim Davis, and Monte Blue head a cast that is full of tough and authentic western veterans and the action scenes are imaginatively staged by director Sam Newfield.  Three Desperate Men is a B-western that can be enjoyed even by those who don’t like westerns.