Cliff Taylor | Through the Shattered Lens

Tioga City has a problem. A masked outlaw known as El Azote keeps holding up James Kerrigan’s (Jack Holt) bank. Because El Azote carries a bullwhip, the case is assigned to Marshal Lash LaRue (Humphrey Bogart lookalike Lash La Rue) and his loyal sidekick, Fuzzy Q. Jones (Al St. John). Lash also always carries a bullwhip and because no one in town knows that Lash is actually a marshal, they all assume that he must be El Azote. Shady bar owner Benson (Tom Neal) offers to make a deal with Lash and Fuzzy but then he betrays them the first chance that he gets.

This is one of Lash La Rue’s better movies, which may sound like faint praise when you consider the quality of the typical La Rue film but this is actually a fairly engrossing production. Running under an hour, this Poverty Row western tells its story quickly and it ends with a genuinely exciting bullwhip battle. La Rue may not have been the best actor amongst the B-western stars of the era but he knew how to whip it and to whip it good.

The main attraction here is Tom Neal, playing another shady character. Tom Neal was a tough character both off-screen and on and he brings an authentic edginess to his character, one that was missing from most Poverty Row westerns. Tom Neal is best-known for starring in Detour. A former amateur boxer who hung out with gangsters and dated their girlfriends, Neal was an up-and-coming star until one day in 1951, when he beat up actor Franchot Tone so severely that Tone spent weeks in the hospital with a concussion. Neal’s career never recovered from the notoriety and he quit acting to become a landscaper. In 1965, he was back in the headlines after he was charged with murdering his wife. Convicted of involuntary manslaughter, he served six years in prison and died shortly after he was paroled. He was 58 years old.

Finally, King of the Bullwhip was directed by Ron Ormond, who will always be best known for films such as Mesa Of Lost Women and the infamous If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? It takes all types to make a B-western.

Jim Thornton (Britt Wood) has discovered a gold mine so he writes to his old friends, Lash LaRue (Lash La Rue) and Fuzzy (Al St. John), asking them to come help him guard it. When Lash and Fuzzy arrive, Jim is nowhere to be found. With the help of Jim’s niece (Peggy Stewart), they discover that Jim’s been murdered. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the murder was carried out by Conway (Jason Cason) and his men and that’s a good thing because a genius is something you will never find in a Lash La Rue western. However, Lash suspects that Conway was following someone else’s orders. He and Fuzzy set up a trap to reveal the true identity of the mastermind.

Lash dresses in all black and often uses a whip instead of a gun but this is still a standard B-western. Historically, it’s important because it was the first movie that La Rue made with producer Ron Ormond. Ormond later went from producing Lash La Rue films to directing them and Lash’s career never really recovered. (Ormond, whose non-Lash LaRue films included Mesa of Lost Women and If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, was never much of a director.) Fortunately, Dead Man’s Gold was directed by the dependable Ray Taylor, who keeps the action moving and crafts an adequate if not exactly memorable western.

There is one cool scene in Dead Man’s Gold, in which Lash uses his whip to knock a shot glass out of a bad guy’s hand. Let’s see The Lone Ranger do that!