Barton Maclane used to own all the land around, but he sold off a lot of it to build a town, and is having a railroad built to it. But wile he's been working on that, saloon owner Bruce Cabot and his pals have taken over the town, installing a corrupt judge and marshal. So Maclane hires retired town tamer Dana Andrews to come in and settle things down. Andrews is agreeable, but what he wants is to kill the man who hired a killer to kill him, and who killed his wife by accident. That man is Cabot.
But the honest folks in town aren't lined up neatly behind Maclane. Some of them want to form a vigilante group, and Maclane and Andrews know that's a cure that can be worse than the disease.
It's a fine and intelligently written script by Frank Gruber, with many moving parts. The story is that Gary Cooper owned it, but he died several years earlier, and A. C. Lyles produced this version as one of the "geezer westerns" he did for Paramount at the time, with a lot of old-line talent, including Terry Moore, Pat O'Brien, Lon Chaney Jr., Richard Arlen, and DeForest Kelly. Lesley Selander, no stranger to the B western, directs efficiently, but the good script and practiced performers come through.
