SYNOPSICS
Showdown (1963) is a English movie. R.G. Springsteen has directed this movie. Audie Murphy,Kathleen Crowley,Charles Drake,Harold J. Stone are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1963. Showdown (1963) is considered one of the best Western movie in India and around the world.
Chris Foster and Bert Pickett are two drifters who are passing through the border town of Adonde. There, a drunken Bert gets into a brawl at a card game and punches the town sheriff.Chris tries to help Bert get away but the sheriff arrests both men.The town doesn't have a jail and the sheriff usually chains the prisoners by the neck to a wooden post in the town square.Bert and Chris, wearing iron collars around their necks, are chained to the post. Also chained to the same post are the town drunk and the violent gang of famous wanted outlaw Lavalle. The outlaws have more to lose than Bert and Chris who only have to serve a few days chained to the post.Therefore, Lavalle and his men start digging around the post to free themselves.Unfortunatelly, they also force Bert and Chris to participate in the escape attempt.
More
Showdown (1963) Reviews
They should have invested in a jail
Showdown finds Audie Murphy and Charles Drake who did a few films with Murphy as a pair of cowboy drifters coming to the town of Adonde to sell of the horse herd they've captured and for a little R&R. Drake gets in a poker game, gets drunk and stupid, and both wind up chained to a town may pole like post in the middle of the town main street. Also chained there is the town drunk Strother Martin and Harold J. Stone and his outlaw gang. The town has no jail and the pole is like the stocks in the village square in the colonial times. Adonde wishes that they did invest in a jail after Stone breaks out taking Murphy and Drake with him and some money that the light fingered Drake lifted from the Express office. $12,000.00 in negotiable bonds. But he hides them and then it becomes a chess game between Murphy and Drake and Stone. I won't go on with the plot, but it soon becomes apparent that the man Murphy's been riding with has a lot less character than he gave him credit for. In fact Drake's character is not unlike the one he played in the classic James Stewart western Winchester 73. Furthermore the girl he's been seeing Kathleen Crowley is not unlike Shelley Winters from that same film. In fact this could have been a classic had Universal invested a little more money in script and direction. But at that time Audie Murphy's films were normally at the bottom of double bills in that last decade of them and Murphy was just serving out his contract. Still the film has some grit to it with Murphy playing the only one in the film with any real character.
A Mixed but interesting bag
Being shot in black and white does not hurt this film. Actually it makes it more striking, not the usual post card color we're used to seeing in films shot in these familiar locations. It has a number of actors who while familiar also do rather good work. Even the quintessential New Yorker Harold J. Stone comes across as a rather threatening outlaw, especially when his face is half in shadow and Strother Martin does quite a nice bit as a town drunk. Audie and his frequent co-star, Charles Drake, are a couple of roving cow hands who fall in with bad company and pay a harsh price for it. In some senses this seems like a throw back to some of the hard edged Westerns of the 1940's. Audie's character at times seems like the one honorable fellow in the story. All the other characters have weaknesses and flaws, but even Audie at a couple points commits less than honorable acts - shooting a horse in one scene and in another I think he shoots a bad guy in the back. Overall this is interesting and even a little thought provoking. Glad I found it.
Below-average Audie Murphy western--in black-and-white
SHOWDOWN (1963) has extensive location shooting around Lone Pine, California at the foot of the Sierras. Because it was shot in black-and-white, however, ostensibly to save money, the picturesque locations are not seen to their best advantage the way they are in Murphy's color westerns from that era (e.g. HELL BENT FOR LEATHER and SEVEN WAYS FROM SUNDOWN, both 1960). Color cinematography would have given us something interesting to look at during the labored proceedings. It's a low-budget affair with a contrived script provided by "Bronson Howitzer," a curious pseudonym for Ric Hardman, a writer of TV westerns. The plot is one of those routine potboilers about a group of outlaws holding the hero and various people hostage in hopes of a big payoff. At too many points in the script, people engage in uncharacteristic behavior in order to keep the basic situation intact. Two innocent cowboys, Chris (Audie Murphy) and Bert (Charles Drake), are detained after a drunken saloon fight and chained to an outdoor post alongside desperate outlaws in a town that doesn't have a jail. When the outlaws break free, the two friends inexplicably flee instead of staying and trying to explain their situation. Bert (Charles Drake) even steals some banknotes, which he then uses to bargain for his and Chris's life after the outlaws grab them. Each subsequent chain of events arises from the outlaw boss (Harold J. Stone) letting one friend or the other go off on his own on a mission involving the money, even though no self-respecting gang leader would place such trust in his hostages or let them go off on their own so easily. These outlaws are neither very tough nor very smart. Things get more complicated when Bert's purported girl, a saloon singer named Estelle, enters the picture. She has a couple of dramatic scenes, including an extended monologue, that must have made the actress (Kathleen Crowley) quite happy but tend to slow the movie down. Only when Chris is on his own against the remaining gang members in rugged terrain does the picture get interesting. Unfortunately, there are not enough of these scenes to save the movie. Murphy's very good in a patented role as a decent ordinary guy caught up in the machinations of lawbreakers, but he would have been better in color and with a more thought-out script. There's a sense here that the production was just a bit on the hurried side. Strother Martin plays a town drunk and L.Q. Jones plays a silent member of the gang. Both are among the town's prisoners chained to the same post early in the film. They're seen in shots together but don't interact. These two actors would make a memorable team six years later as the squabbling "gutter trash" bounty hunters Coffer and T.C. in Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH. According to "No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy," by Don Graham, Murphy was quite upset when he learned that SHOWDOWN was being filmed in black-and-white and almost stopped working. "I'm not gonna act," is how he put it. The producer eventually talked him into finishing the movie, but Murphy vowed, "This is the last picture I'm gonna do in black and white." It was. (Regarding the filming of Lone Pine locations cited in the first paragraph, I should stress that those landscapes can look absolutely breathtaking in black-and-white when captured by a master cinematographer. Just look at classic movies like LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER (1935), CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (1936) and HIGH SIERRA (1941), to name three. But we're simply not going to see images like that in the kind of rush job we get in SHOWDOWN.)
Grim western but surprisingly entertaining
I loved this movie. Having watched so many old westerns recently that lacked much realism, I found this to be quite a hard edged and grim atmospheric piece that I really enjoyed. Audie Murphy with his baby face can be very convincing and was perhaps a better actor than I previously remembered from when I was young, and I'm constantly having to remind myself that he was the most decorated American soldier of World War II. Kathleen Crowley,who I had forgotten about, was quite sexy in a mature way, and I grew to like her as her part went on. There's a great cast of old character actors who never fail to please in old westerns, Harold J. Stone, Skip Homier, L. Q. Jones, Strother Martin and Charles Drake. There's not a lot to not like I thought, although I kept thinking this would have been so much better in colour and wide screen which let it down just a little bit. I thought it was quite tense throughout, mainly brought about by the fact that Murphy is chased (and I love chase pictures) throughout the film by various characters and for the most part he has to outsmart his opponents and overcome them in spite of the fact that he rarely has the chance of acquiring a weapon. Very well made on what appears to be a low budget.
Actual locations help!
SYNOPSIS: Mistakenly shackled to a chain gang in the border town of Adonde, Chris and Bert are forced to steal securities and escape with a bandit named Lavalle who holds Chris hostage whilst Bert converts the securities into cash. COMMENT: Could be improved by trimming. 79 minutes is too long for a "B" anyway and Showdown will cut down to around 64 minutes with ease. Getting rid of a lot of that dull dialogue - all directed in an extremely dull fashion, mainly in close-ups - not only improves the pace but focuses attention on the movie's best features: namely, its smartly handled action spots (all set against striking natural terrain), its tightly edited shoot-outs and whip-cracking special effects. The basic plot is overly familiar, but it's laced with enough action to please the fans. All of it freshly staged too, - no stock material. Acting just gets by. No performances stand out, and alas, Miss Crowley (in a key role) is unable to make her abrupt change of character convincing. Characterizations tend to be one-dimensional anyway, though the script does try to fill in a bit of background for Drake and Crowley. But the subsidiary people are very sketchily treated indeed. Production values benefit from a good deal of actual location lensing. Technical credits are slick, if undistinguished. However, unlike Universal's previous Audie Murphy releases, Showdown was photographed in black-and-white. It's possible - as Variety's critic observed - that "color could have made a stronger impact."