Dick Rush | Through the Shattered Lens

Steve Landry (Charles Starrett) rides into another town and is once again named the new sheriff. Luckily, Steve’s old friend Smiley Burnette is working as the town’s blacksmith. Steve makes Smiley his deputy and then sets about trying to break up a gang of cattle rustlers. When Steve learns that his jurisdiction does not extend beyond the city limits, he dons the disguise of his alter ego, The Durango Kid, to go after the outlaws.

Has Steve met his match in Belle (Phyllis Adair), the saloon owner who is the secret leader of the outlaws? She notices that The Durango Kid’s boot tracks are the same as Steve’s boot tracks. I’m surprised that no one has ever noticed that before. Steve went through a lot of trouble to disguise himself as Durango but he never bothered to change his boots.

This entry in the Durango Kid series features a lot of Smiley Burnette so your enjoyment on the film will depend on how much tolerance you have for Smiley’s songs and his style of humor. Each film featured Smiley being followed around by a different group of musicians. In this one, Smiley is accompanied by The Trailsman. When Smiley accidentally locks himself in a jail cell, the Trailsman stand on the other side of the bars and sing a song about how Smiley can’t get out of the cell. Smiley does eventually get out but, later on, he’s knocked out cold during an attempted jail break. Smiley’s not much of a help in this one.

This has all of the typical Durango Kid elements, including the stock footage of the stampeding cattle that appeared in nearly all of his films. There’s another saloon fight and a gunfight towards the end. Durango rides out of town alone, leaving Smiley behind, but we know they’ll soon be reunited in another adventure.

Years ago, Bill Donner (George Cheseboro) double-crossed the other members of the Selby Gang and ran off with all of their stolen gold. Now, Donner is blind and half-crazy. When he says that he hid the gold in the ghost town of Shadeville, the Durango Kid (Charles Starrett), Smiley Burnette, and Sheriff Dodge (Stanley Andrews) ride off to find it.

Shadeville is long abandoned and, as the three men spend the night in a deserted saloon, Smiley is worried about ghosts. The Durango Kid tells the story of the first time he met the Selby Gang. The next morning, they discover that they are not the only ones who have come to Shadeville to look for the gold.

Like many of the later Durango Kid movies, Streets of Ghost Town is mostly made up of stock footage to Starrett’s earlier films. This was a cost-cutting technique on the part of Columbia Pictures but it actually works because the flashbacks were always to the horse chases and the gunfights that the audience came to see in the first place. In the days before home video and cable, those scenes were probably still new to many of the people sitting in the theater.

Starrett always made for a good hero and Smiley Burnett’s comic relief never took away from the films’s storylines. This outing features a great scene where Durango shoots a skull in the dark just to let anyone watching him know that he’s a good shot. I also enjoyed George Cheseboro’s manic performance as a man who really loves his gold. Despite all of the stock footage, Streets of Ghost Town is still an above average Durango Kid film, predictable but entertaining if you’re a fan of the genre.