Tommy Ivo | Through the Shattered Lens

On the frontier, everyone has gold fever. People are trying to find gold and steal gold and it falls to brave Treasury agents like Steve Ellison (Charles Starrett) and Smiley Burnette (played by Smiley Burnette) to keep things safe. When Steve needs to find out who is trying steal gold, he puts on his mask and assumes the identity of The Durango Kid.

Near Laredo, a shipment of government gold has been stolen. Dan Parks (Jim Bannon) is arrested after the gold is found in his wagon but Steve knows that the Durango Kid earlier warned Dan about traveling with gold. Durango and Smiley set out to prove that Dan was set up by his business partner, Fenton (Hugh Prosser).

This yet another Durango Kid movie where Steve gets a job working for the bad guy while Durango works to thwart his plans. (Remarkably, no one ever puts two and two together and notices that Steve, Smiley, and Durango always seem to show up in town at the same time.) Fenton is just one of a long line of corrupt businessmen and land barons that Durango has had to deal with. Fenton is not above threatening Dan’s young son (Tommy Ivo) to get Dan to do what he wants. Given that Dan is just trying to make a good life for his family in a rough world, it’s satisfying when Fenton gets his comeuppance.

Almost every Durango Kid film featured at least one good fight scene. In Trail to Laredo, the big fight takes place in a saloon and it’s pretty exciting. Not only does the saloon get trashed but there’s a moment where one of the bad guys actually seem to fly through the air. Even Virginia Maxey, playing Classy the saloon singer, gets in on it.

Both Virginia Maxey and Smiley Burnette get to sing a few songs. As always, there enough gunfights and horse chases to keep fans of the genre happy. Charles Starrett was a great cowboy.

Steve Holden (Charles Starrett) is hired by an old friend, Jack Mahoney (played by Jock Mahoney), to serve as the sheriff of a frontier town. Steve soon discovers that his old friend has been corrupted by power and is plotting to cheat the locals out of their land and the gold that the land holds. Despite their friendship, Steve knows that Jack has to be stopped and made to see the errors of his way. It’s a good thing that Steve is secretly the Durango Kid and that his old sidekick, Smiley Burnette, is the town’s police chief. But even if Jack Mahoney does eventually see the error of his ways, will it be soon enough to stop his out-of-control henchmen?

This was one of the last of the Durango Kid films and it’s heavy on stock footage and Smiley Burnette musical numbers. It has all of the usual horse chases and gunfights but making the villain an old friend of the Durango Kid adds a little more emotional weight to this entry than some of the other Durango Kid films. As always, Charles Starrett is a strong western hero and Smiley Burnette’s antics are nowhere nearly as annoying as the antics of some of the other western sidekicks who were populating matinee movie screens in 1952. Western fans should enjoy this fast-paced and undemanding film.

This is not the first time that Jock Mahoney played a friend of the Durango Kid who is named Jack Mahoney, though I think the Jack Mahoney who appeared in Pecos River, Junction City, Smokey Canyon, The Hawk of Wild River, and The Kid From Broken Gun was meant to be a different character than the one who appeared in The Rough, Tough West. If Smiley Burnette could have a rotating cast of musicians who followed him from town-to-town, then the Durango Kid could very well have known multiple Jack Mahoneys.