Directed by Paul Landres
Produced by Richard E. Lyons
Associate Producer: Maury Dexter
Written by Stephen Kandel
Director of Photography: Walter Strenge, ASC
Art Director: Edward Shiells
Supervising Film Editor: Robert Fritch, ACE
Music Composed by Paul Dunlap
CAST: John Agar (Sheriff Jim Crayle), Joyce Meadows (Peg Barton), Barton MacLane (Simon Crayle), Robert Strauss (Yubo), Lyn Thomas (Kate Durand), James Griffith (Cash Skelton), Morris Ankrum (Andrew Barton), Leslie Bradley (Rev. Jacob Hall), Doodles Weaver (Eph Loveman), Holly Bane (Tanner).
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In the mid-50s, B producer Robert Lippert entered into an arrangement with 20th Century-Fox where his Regal Films, Inc. would produce a series of second features for the studio — two black and white CinemaScope pictures a month. Lippert wanted to combine the economy of black and white with the draw of CinemaScope. They called the process Regalscope.
Regalscope is black and white CinemaScope, nothing more. Lippert made around 50 Regalscope features between 1956 and 1959 — all of them cheap, most of them Westerns. These Westerns feature folks like John Agar, Jim Davis, Beverly Garland and Forrest Tucker. One, Ambush At Cimarron Pass (1958) gave Clint Eastwood an early role. And each picture is a virtual parade of your favorite character actors.
Maury Dexter worked for Lippert during the Regalscope years, making sure they got a feature in the can in just a week. (He gets an associate producer credit on Frontier Gun.)
Maury Dexter: “We were shooting as many as 20 films a year… We had … first-rate production men with years of experience in their field. By name: Frank Parmenter, Herb Mendelshon, Clarence Eurist, Ralph Slosser and more. We hired directors of photography such as Floyd Crosby, Daniel Haller, James Wong Howe, Kenneth Peach, Ed Cronjager and Joe Birocletal – all top-flight cameramen, some Academy Award winners. We were churning out a feature every few weeks that included subjects such as adventures, thrillers, Westerns, Civil War and some science fiction like Kronos (1957) and The Fly (1958).”
Frontier Gun (1958) was produced by Richard Lyons.
Dexter: “[Lyon's] claim to fame, at that time, was that his stepfather was an officer of Leows, Inc. So, Richard came to us as a wanna-be producer… Lippert assigned him to me to teach him the fine points of producing. Richard was an amiable, easygoing person and was eager to learn. He was finally given a project and I physically produced the show, but Richard learned a lot and, naturally, was given screen credit as producer.”
Lyons would eventually produce Ride The High Country (1962) for MGM. We all owe him for that one.
Frontier Gun is yet another town-tamer story. John Agar is Jim Crayle, son of noted lawman Simon Crayle (Barton MacLane). Agar’s given a badge by Honcho’s town council to take on Yubo (Robert Strauss) — one of those saloon owners intent on running the town — so Honcho can become a safe place for decent people to live. Agar’s an expert shot, but an old injury makes him slow on the draw. Eventually, the father rides into town to tell his son he’s not up to the task.
Paul Landres directed. By 1958, he was already a TV veteran, directing episodes of everything from Boston Blackie to The Lone Ranger. He was a dependable journeyman director who made only a handful of features. Here he does an admirable job with the money and schedule he had to work with. It was shot by Walter Strenge, who did a number of the Regalscope films, including Stagecoach To Fury (1956). For Frontier Gun, Landres and Strenge relied on the medium shots and long takes that make early widescreen films so interesting.
Frontier Gun was the second of three pictures Joyce Meadows made with John Agar.
Joyce Meadows: “I grew very attached to John. We worked very well together… I thought he had a very good presence on the screen. He worked hard and was very, very in favor of whomever was working with him, to share the camera.”
Robert Strauss, who usually plays comic badguys, is quite interesting as Yubo. Veteran character actors Doodles Weaver and James Griffith are on hand giving the picture a little extra B Western clout.
Joyce Meadows: “Morris Ankrum was also in that film. What a great character actor he was, and I enjoyed studying him when he performed.”
You have to cut the Regalscope pictures some slack. They’re a bit talky, and the lack of money and time can be quite obvious. But they have great casts, especially the Westerns, and the scripts usually play well. Frontier Gun is one of the better ones. It’s a real shame they’re so hard to track down, especially in some semblance of widescreen — because once you get into them, you really want to see them all. Anybody out there got a widescreen Stagecoach To Fury?
An interesting, and disturbing, bit of trivia: the 35mm print archived at UCLA is missing a couple reels.
SOURCE: Maury Dexter’s Highway To Hollywood; Ladies Of The Western by Michael Fitzgerald and Boyd Magers; Scream Sirens Scream! by Paul Parla and Charles P. Mitchell.
STAGECOACH TO FURY (Bill Claxton) and APACHE WARRIOR
(Elmo Williams) I recall being the very best Regalscope Westerns.
The Charles Marquis Warren titles I remember as being pretty dreadful.
As I have not seen any of these films since the early Sixties its pretty
hard to judge now.
STORM RIDER (Edward Bernds) I remember as being pretty good too!
THE FLY made an absolute mint for Fox. Kurt Neumann cranked the
whole thing out in the time it took George Stevens to do one scene
for THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK. Stevens film was a huge critical
success but bombed at the box office.The only thing that held up
production on THE FLY was when Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall
got a fit of the giggles filming the infamous “Help Me!…Help Me! scene.
Neumann had to resort to several takes!
Sadly Neumanhn died before THE FLY was released so he never
lived to witness his greatest hit.
I cannot wait for Olive Films to release SHOWDOWN AT BOOT HILL
and AMBUSH AT CIMARRON PASS like many people I would love
to get decent scope prints of these little epics.
I do not know how those two titles ended up with Paramount/Republic;
who I wonder owns the other titles?
THE FLY of course was not a Regalscope film but was all part of the Lippert
Fox deal;as was CHINA GATE (also forthcoming from Olive)SIERRA
BARON,CATTLE EMPIRE and so on.
I’ve tried to get some concrete info from Olive on the Regals, but nothing so far. I’ll keep trying.
Have a 16mm adapted Scope print of Escape From Red Rock (1957) that I’ve yet to run all the way through. It’s one of Bernds’ Regals, and I’ve never seen it. As much as they spread things out in the Scope frame, I’m expecting to be somewhat disappointed by this adapted print — but I’m really excited about the picture itself.
The Regal chapter of my book has been one of the most fun to work on — and I still haven’t settled on which film to cover!
Wouldn’t a book on the Lippert empire be a great read?
Toby;I should have mentioned what a brilliant Regalscope article;
Its great to know other people love these films too!The behind the scenes
stuff is most welcome.
Olive Films are also going to release two more Regalscope titles
PLUNDER ROAD which I have never seen but is reputed to be the
Citizen Kane of Regalscope films. Also SHE DEVIL which I have seen
and its pretty good Sci-Fi.Again Kurt Neumann proves that he was a director
who can do a lot with very little;ROCKETSHIP XM and KRONOS are
brilliant and have stood the test of time!
I wonder how David (40 takes) Fincher would have fared working for Lippert!
Cannot wait to read the Regalscope chapter in your book;their poster art
was pretty cool too!
There’s a nice documentary about Robert Lippert on the “Mystery Science Theatre 3000 XXIII” box set. It’s titled “The Incredible Mr. Lippert” and is an extra on the disc of “King Dinosaur”.
Another Kurt Neumann film that was released as a CinemaScope film (in De Luxe Color) by Fox was 1957′s “The Deerslayer”, starring Lex Barker and Rita Moreno and based on the James Fenimore Cooper novel. I was besotted with this film as a boy and thought that the attack on the floating fort in the middle of Lake Otsego by a Huron war party was exciting and very well done. Nice on location scenery and a really good Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter score were also highlights. Sadly, this 76 minutes long feature has only ever been released to the domestic market on a badly panned and scanned VHS video…which I have in my collection…but it really needs a proper 2.35:1 wide screen DVD release.
I ran the Regalscope Western “The Storm Rider”, starring Scott Brady and Mala Powers, decades ago during my time as a cinema projectionist and the one thing I remember about it was that the theme music was, of all things, “Greensleeves”.
If I remember rightly, there was another Regalscope Western made at around the same time entitled “Copper Sky”, starring Jeff Morrow and Colleen Gray.
David,
I think THE DEERSLAYER has been released in widescreen in
Germany but the audio is German,with no English version.
I stumbled across your Flickr site recently (I was looking for info on the
Allied Artists Western OREGON PASSAGE). I must say it was a wonderful
nostalgia trawl through my childhood; I had many of those comics and
annuals featured on your site. (I am also from the UK.) What I really loved
were those wonderful cinema flyers;such fantastic double bills.
Those were the days!
Went through your stuff, too. David. Terrific.
I think it’s important nowadays to understand the context these films existed in — double bills, second features, Saturday matinees, etc.
The moviegoing experience has changed so much, with the shift from picture palace to multiplex being just one.
Now I want to see The Deerslayer really bad.
Glad you find my flickr uploads interesting, John and Toby. I’ve got a huge collection of films and stills, only a fraction of which I’ve uploaded onto flickr. But I will be uploading some more Western stills in a week or so. I don’t fancy seeing “The Deerslayer” all dubbed in German, but if it’s a good, clear transfer, I suppose it would be okay for capturing frames off it.
I have a complete Front-of-House set of eight colour stills from both “The Deerslayer” and “Oregon Passage”, and I have a pan and scan DVD-R of “Oregon Passage” that I bought off an eBay seller a few years ago. It’s a really clear transfer with very clear sound, but, like all Scope films that are panned and scanned, it looks very cropped at the sides.
Yes, I had the best years where the cinema was concerned. It’s all gone down the pan now, with mostly junk films for mostly jink audiences and now, after 120 years, 35mm celluloid film is being phased out in favour of the far less expensive digital projection. I’ve not been to the cinema for 30 years, but I’m told that digital isn’t anywhere near as good as 35mm. And, of course, the quality of the films has gone down the pan since I was in the trade. I also read in a UK newspaper, that after December, 2012, the film distributors will no longer be sending 35mm prints to the cinemas. So those cinemas that can’t afford to convert to digital at the cost of £70,000 ($120,000) per screen, will have to close, as they won’t be able to show anything. The end of an era. Such a terrible shame.
P.S. I’ve just ordered the widescreen DVD of “The Deerslayer” off amazon Germany. Quite cheap, too, only £8 or so in British money. I hope it’s at least got the original music score on it. It should be here in a week or so. It says it’s 2.35:1 and 16 x 9 enhanced. So it should look far better than my old pan and scan VHS video.
David,
I would be most interested to get some feedback on the German DVD
THE DEERSLAYER.
I recently got a very nice looking pan & scan of another rare Allied
Artists Western GUNSMOKE IN TUSCON. Of course when the Warner
Archive finally decide to issue this one in Scope it will be a completely
different film.I could not agree more regarding cinema audiences
(in the UK at least) multiplexes are crammed with sub-moronic cretins
who cannot be without their mobile phones for 2 hours.If they are not
busy texting people they are feeding their faces with bucket sized portions
of popcorn and nachos and the like.
I will keep visiting your Flickr site and would love to see more of those
wonderful cinema flyers.
Hi, John,
Yes, someone told me a while ago that I wouldn’t like the cinema the way it’s gone in recent years, especially with what I was used to in my youth when I was trained in showmanship to show films in proper single screen cinemas. I’ll never go to a multiplex. I would probably get very upset at the way things have gone down the pan.
I have been busy using Alta Vista to translate into English the German comments on amazon Germany about the new DVD of “The Deerslayer”. The translations are far from perfect, but were enough to read that one customer was complaining that the DVD is a mixture of scenes from “The Deerslayer” and some other “Winnetou the Warrior” type film with Lex Barker from the mid 1960′s, films that are set 100 years after the setting of “The Deerslayer”, with Lex using a flintlock musket amd powder horn in one scene and then a Winchster 73 in the next. I hope this isn’t the case, but I’ll know sometime this week as the DVD has already been posted to me from Germany. It must be considered however that amazon always lump all reviews for different DVD and video versions of a film together and that the complaint may not even be about the DVD I’ve ordered at all. I will keep you posted as soon as it arrives.
I haven’t seen “Gunsmoke in Tucson” for decades. Warner Archive seems to have stopped releasing old Allied Artists Western. I’ve bought all they had, including “Wichita”; “The First Texan”; “Canyon River”; “The Oklahoman” and “Quantrill’s Raiders”. I don’t think there have been any more titles.
I’ll be putting some more film stills up on my flickr photostream…including some Westerns…in the next few days, so I hope you find them interesting.
I hear a third volume of Monogram Westerns is on the way from Warner Archive. They pre-date Allied Artists, but who’s complaining.
Looking forward to more stuff on your Flickr page. One day I’ll have to figure out a way to highlight them on the blog.
I would have thought, Toby, that you’d just have to copy and paste the images.
David.
That’ll work, but I thought it’d be neat to do something to highlight the batch of them and give people a link.
P.S. I also have the Warner Archive releases of “King of the Wild Stallions”; “The Plunderers” and “The Man From God’s Country”.
Hi David,
You are right Warner Archive seem to have stopped releasing Allied
Artists Westerns.Sadly they no longer hold the rights to JACK SLADE
but they DO hold the rights to GUNSMOKE IN TUSCON,COLE YOUNGER
GUNFIGHTER and SON OF BELLE STARR.The next Monogram set is
I believe all Johnny Mack Brown.I am not sure if Warners hold the rights
to OREGON PASSAGE but I sure hope that they do.
Another Kurt Neumann film I would love to see is WATUSI (MGM 1959)
with George Montgomery. I understand that the film was an excuse to
use lots of leftover footage from KING SOLOMONS MINES.
In any case Mr Montgomery in a jungle picture makes this a must see
for me.I hope that Warners finally get round to releasing some of
the Wild Bill Elliott and Wayne Morris Monograms.
Those Monogram Elliotts are great little films. Not sure what the rights situation is with those, but VCI put out a nice copy of The Longhorn.
I posted on it a while back:
http://fiftieswesterns.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/dvd-review-the-longhorn-1951/
The VCI link is in there if you want one. Wouldn’t s set of all six be terrific?
THE DEERSLAYER DVD arrived today from Germany and here’s the lowdown on it. The whole DVD runs 72 minutes. It starts off with ten minutes from some unidentified 1965 Winnetou the Warrior film, then this cuts to ten minutes from the 1957 The Deerslayer film, then another ten minutes from the Winnetou film and then the last forty minutes or so is all The Deerslayer. What an odd way to make a DVD. All dubbed in German and The Deerslayer is minus its opening and closing titles and all the spectacular music score by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter has been removed and replaced with an electric guitar background that has nothing to do with what’s happening on the screen. The Deerslayer ran 76 minutes at the cinema, so that’s 73 minutes at PAL running speed. As all of The Deerslayer on this DVD runs about 50 minutes, it’s obvious that a third of the film isn’t on the DVD. Now the good news. This is a beautifully clear 2.35:1 transfer of an absolutely pristine Scope print, enhanced for 16 x 9, with not a mark on it. So, as far as what there is of the film is concerned, some marvelous frame captures can be made from it. When I get around to The Deerslayer on my flickr photostream, I’ll upload a frame capture from this DVD.
The Verdict: It sounds terrible and looks wonderful. Dear 20th Century-Fox: Can we please have the original 1957 English language version of the full length film of The Deerslayer?
David.
P.S. There is also a glossy eight page booklet included in the DVD case containing around fifteen black and white stills from The Deerslayer, mostly as montages and a write up about the film all in German.
David, Many thanks for you feedback on the DVD;what a bizzare way to
present a film.I DO wish that Fox had a MOD series so we could see some
of these obscure titles.I do not see why some of this stuff cannot surface
on the MGM Limited edition MOD series which is owned by Fox and
is mainly United Artists and American International titles;so a few Fox
films would not seem out of place here.
I was most upset with the Spanish release of a great little Fox Western
SIERRA BARON a few years ago. Its a horrid pan & scan version
and the color is dreadful.This film was a childhood favourite of mine.
Its good to know a decent scope print of THE DEERSLAYER does
seem to exist.
Lex Barker seems to be very popular in Germany.I cannot believe that
Koch have not released THE YELLOW MOUNTAIN with Barker,
Mala Powers and Howard Duff.Sadly the next titles on the Koch schedule
are THE TEXAS RANGERS (1936 version) and THE LAST SUNSET
which are widely available elsewhere.The quality of the Koch DVDs are
second to none and the new packaging on their Western series is
brilliant.I do wish they would concentrate on titles that have never
appeared on DVD before.It would be wonderful if they issued the complete
version of THE DEERSLAYER (sans Winnetou!)