"Blasting wide open the toughest town of the west!"19 January 1940Western56 mins
West of Carson City remains one of the best of Johnny Mack Brown's Universal westerns. The story takes place in a gold-rush community where the locals are taken to the cleaners by duplicitious Eastern gamblers. When it becomes obvious that the local constabulary has been "bought off" by the crooks, two-fisted cattleman Jim Bannister (Brown) swings into action. The film's highlight is an outsized fistic brawl between the hero and secondary villain Breed, played by loose-limbed comic stuntman Frank Mitchell.
The Mesquiteers capture a horse thief who escapes justice through a crooked judge. They gather signatures urging the governor to investigate but a friend with the petition is murdered.
At the beginning of the 1913 Mexican Revolution, greedy bandit Juan Miranda and idealist John H. Mallory, an Irish Republican Army explosives expert on the lam from the British, fall in with a band of revolutionaries plotting to strike a national bank.
Marshall Jed Cooper survives a hanging, vowing revenge on the lynch mob that left him dangling. To carry out his oath for vengeance, he returns to his former job as a lawman.
Outlaw and self-appointed lawmaker Judge Roy Bean rules over an empty stretch of the West that gradually grows, under his iron fist, into a thriving town, while dispensing his his own quirky brand of frontier justice upon strangers passing by.
Judge Curry is selling Austin's land to nesters and his men are rustling his cattle to provide beef. When the Sheriff accuses butcher Gore of possessing stolen beef, Gore kills him.
Capitalizing on the famous radio 'feud' between comedians Jack Benny and Fred Allen. The two stars play versions of themselves, constantly at each other's throats due to real and imagined slights.
