Don Reynolds | Through the Shattered Lens

A young Indian brave named Little Hawk (Don Reynolds) runs across the countryside, hoping to run into the Durango Kid. Instead, he runs into Steve Reynolds (Charles Starrett), who listens as Little Hawk explains that the Indians and the white men are about to go to war. Steve promises to deliver the message to Durango. That will be easy for Steve because he is Durango!

White bandits are disguising themselves as Native Americans and attacking stagecoaches. The local townspeople are getting riled up. Meanwhile, businessmen Jim Haverly (Monte Blu) is running a trading post and secretly selling weapons to the Indians. Jim is hoping to profit from the upcoming war. Jim is also the uncle to Little Hawk’s best friend, Billy (Tommy Ivo). When Durango and his sidekick Smiley Burnette show up, they team up with Billy and Little Hawk and try to stop the war before it happens.

This is one of the many B-westerns that featured Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid. The Durango Kid was always an agent of the federal government but he pretended to be an outlaw to make it easier for him to get information. Sometimes, it really didn’t make sense for Steve to pretend to be the Durango Kid, like in this movie. I guess no one wanted to give up the gimmick, just like no one wanted to give up Smiley Burnette’s musical comedy.

This one has all of the horse-riding and gun-shooting that fans of the genre would expect from a Charles Starrett western. It also has a lot of stock footage that appeared in a countless number of other B-westerns. Starrett is a convincing cowboy and Monte Blue is a good villain, as always. The child actors can sometimes be difficult to tolerate but I imagine the kids in the audience preferred watching them to sitting through the romantic subplots that these films usually had. Fans of the gerne will enjoy the film, if just on a nostalgic level. Those who are not into westerns will still not be into them after watching.

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.