Five Guns West (USA, 1955) 79 min color DIR-PROD: Roger Corman. SCR: R. Wright Campbell. MUSIC: Buddy Bregman. DOP: Floyd Crosby. CAST: John Lund, Dorothy Malone, Mike Connors, R. Wright Campbell, Jonathan Haze, Paul Birch. (American Releasing Corporation)
After producing Monster from the Ocean Floor and The Fast and the Furious, Roger Corman made his directorial debut with this uninspired colour western. Budgeted at $60,000.00 (positively lavish compared to the $12,000.00 spent on Monster) and shot in nine days, Five Guns West tells the story of five criminals during the Civil War who are pardoned and sworn into the Confederate army on the condition that they intercept a Union gold shipment and bring it back to the South. This alliance crumbles soon after they arrive at a ghost town, occupied only by a hot lady and her drunken father. As the five leads compete for the lady’s affection, tensions arise.
As a movie, Five Guns West is unremarkable. The leads (among them future Corman regulars Jonathan Haze, Mike ‘Touch’ Connors, and Dorothy Malone) perform serviceably, and their characters, despite being clichéd, are relatively engaging. The scenic photography is also occasionally nice, and there are fewer technical flaws than one might expect – although it’s pretty glaring when Paul Birch’s shadow can be seen on the painted backdrop as he mounts his horse. The problem is the lack of thrills. Five Guns West is strictly no-frills, with only the bare minimum of gunfights and action. The climactic gunfight between John Lund and Mike ‘Touch’ Connors is relatively suspenseful, but considering the boredom that precedes it, it comes across as too little too late.
While forgettable on its own, Five Guns West is important as Roger Corman’s initiation into film direction. As Corman wrote in his autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, it was “A breakthrough for me. With almost no training or preparation whatsoever, I was literally learning how to direct motion pictures on the job…While the mistakes [film school graduates] make in student films are usually lost forever, mine were immortalized.”
Originally published in The Roger Corman Scrapbook.
Will Sloan
Will Sloan first encountered ESR at Word on the Street circa 2004 (age: 15) and started contributing not long after. He is now a fully-grown writer and raconteur, and hosts two film-related podcasts: The Important Cinema Club and Michael & Us. You can follow him @WillSloanEsq on Twitter and at willsloanesq.wordpress.com.