6 Black Horses, 1962

This western based on a Burt Kennedy script is a gem. A perfect vehicle for Audie Murphy. He gets to play a decent man, a cowpuncher down on his luck, who gets involved in a desert quest with a trail partner (Dan Duryea) and a blonde with money (Joan O’Brien).

Plot. O’Brien offers to pay the two men a grand each to take her across Apache territory to her husband in a border town. Much of the film is just the three of them riding together, two men and a woman. And Kennedy is a master at drawing out the sexual tensions that lurk under the surface in such a situation.

With Murphy as the point of view character, there are only hints that Duryea and O’Brien are not quite what they claim to be. For one thing, Duryea cannot get his mind off her gender. As she bathes in a mountain lake, he stands watch over her under things and observes that she gives him a “low down shiver.” Turning in for the evening, he offers to “spread her blankets.”

On the set of 6 Black Horses, Murphy, Duryea, O'Brien

For her part, she suggests to Murphy that if he had both his and Duryea’s share of the money he could buy the ranch in Montana he wants. She seems to want Duryea done in. However, besides being too honorable to betray a friend, Murphy in fact owes Duryea for his life.

Meanwhile, there’s the threat posed by the Apaches. Like many novel twists of plot, Kennedy introduces the film’s Indians in an unconventional way. When a small band of them rides up to the three whites, it turns out that one of them wants to trade a horse for O’Brien. Murphy takes a careful look at the horse and then says, “No deal,” before the three of them race off.

No spoilers here, so no more of the plot. For the first-time viewer, the multi-layered suspense builds nicely, and it’s a pleasure being surprised by the well-paced revelations as they come.

Blackridge Wilderness, Utah

Added value. There are the usual fistfights, ambushes, gunfire, chases, and a final gun duel. But it’s the many unexpected elements and the sharp dialogue that are evidence of an intelligent mind at work in the script. Right from the start, instead of the standard western opening of a lone horseman crossing a vast landscape, the film begins with a man on foot, carrying a saddle and blanket.

A closer shot reveals it is Murphy, his face damp with sweat as he stops to survey the desert terrain. After roping and saddling a beautiful black horse, he’s taken by some cowhands who accuse him of being a horse thief. They throw up a wagon tongue and set about hanging him.

Before progressing to the deed, one of them asks if he’ll “will” his gun belt and gun to one of them. It will prevent a dispute after he’s dead. It doesn’t much matter to Murphy, but he decides he’d like them to go to the youngest of the cowboys. “Thanks,” the cowboy says, surprised and pleased.

When Duryea frees Murphy at gunpoint, and he gets back his gun belt, the young man is sorely disappointed. In scene after scene, the film has moments like this, when Kennedy takes the situation in some direction you haven’t seen before in a western.

No Name on the Bullet (1959)

One of the returning soldiers from WWII was the much-decorated Audie Murphy. His wartime experience “to hell and back” contributed to a Hollywood career that included over 30 westerns. In this one, he puts on a black hat to play a gunman, with mixed results.

Right off, I’ll say that I like Audie Murphy. He is so improbably short and boyish-looking for a western hero. You root for him, even when he’s cast as a bad guy in this film.

The set-up is simple. Audie’s reputation as a hired gunman precedes him to a western town, where his presence makes most everybody nervous. His M.O. is to accept a contract on a man and then provoke him into drawing first. Killing him then is always self-defense. We get a similar situation in Shane where Jack Palance fatally provokes a homesteader into pulling his revolver.

The film is a cross between a bounty-hunter story and a who-dun-it. There’s more than one man in town feeling guilty about something, and we have to wait until the end to find out which one Audie’s been paid to bump off. It’s a telling detail that there’s no particular honor in killing any of the potential candidates. This must have been a tough script to make work.

No Name on the Bullet is a Cinemascope, color picture, but after the opening scene in which Audie rides across a handsome western landscape (like the opening of Shane), most of the film takes place in town and indoors. There seems not to have been much budget for dressing the sets either. The interiors are brightly lighted, as if the film was intended for TV, and most seem almost empty of furnishings.