Jim Corey | Through the Shattered Lens

Rancher Jeff Reynolds (Frank LaRue) used to be one of the good guys on the frontier but he’s recently changed. He fired all of his loyal ranch hands and instead hired a motely crew of outlaws. He’s buying up land and evicting the squatters who have been living there. About the only good thing he does is hire Lon Cardigan (Johnny Mack Brown) to be his new herd boss. Lon is engaged to Reynolds’s daughter, Bobbie (Claire Rochelle). With the help of Bobbie and comic relief cook Calico Haynes (Horace Murphy), Lon tries to figure out why Reynolds is now doing the bidding of the evil John Porter (Ed Cassidy).

The title is the most exciting thing about this movie, which is one of those old B-movies that puts the “creak” in creaky. There’s surprisingly little gunplay but there is a lot of horse riding. For a film that runs less than an hour, a surprising amount of it is just shots of people riding from one location to another. The horses’ hooves sound impressive on the soundtrack but it’s not exactly exciting. As always, Johnny Mack Brown is a convincing cowboy. It’s a good thing he looks like he knows what he’s doing when he’s riding a horse! The plot was standard B-western fluff. Johnny Mack Brown appeared in a ton of westerns and almost all of them seemed to feature the same range war. There are better Johnny Mack Brown movies out there. This one is for completists only.

In Mexico, two American cowboys, Johnny Darrel (Johnny Mack Brown) and Dick Martin (Julian Madison) join a poker game to try to win some money and help out their buddy, Oscar (Sid Saylor). When they discover that cantina owner Manuel Mendez (Ted Adams) has rigged the game, a fight breaks out. The lights turn off. In the darkness, several guns are fired. When the lights come back up, Dick is dead. Mendez convinces Johnny that he accidentally shot his friend in the fight. Guilt-stricken, Johnny tosses aside his guns and returns to Texas.

Johnny has sworn that he will never shoot another gun but when he’s hired to work at a ranch owned by Joan Williams (Claire Rochelle), he finds himself in the middle of a range war between Joan and Brace Stevens (Dick Curtis), with Mendez also making an unwelcome return to Johnny’s life. Even after Johnny discovers the truth about what happened that night at the cantina, he doesn’t pick up a gun. Instead, Johnny fights the bad guys with lassos and plates.

Guns In The Dark is only 54 minutes long and it features actors who will be familiar to any fan of the old B-westerns. Sidekcick Sid Saylor’s stuttering schtick gets old quickly but Johnny Mack Brown is as likable as always in Guns In The Dark and he comes across as being an authentic cowboy even when he’s not carrying a gun Given that this film features even more horse chases than the typical Johnny Mack Brown b-western, it’s good that Brown is so convincing. What isn’t convincing is how stupid Johnny Darrel is required to be in order for him to fall for Mendez’s lie in the first place. I appreciated the change of pace from Brown just using a gun to stop the bad guys but I wish the reason behind it had been more convincing. This isn’t one of Johnny Mack Brown’s more memorable westerns though, as always, it’s easy to see why he was one of the early stars of the genre.