"Starrett's a two-gun terror! Smiley's a hit tune riot!"08 August 1949Western54 mins
When Steve Downey arrives to reopen his brother-in-law's gold mine, he finds a war between the ranchers and the miners. Ashton has had the water poisoned killing cattle. When Ashton's men find Steve's hat, they kill Tom Tavish and frame Steve for the murder. Escaping jail the Durango Kid goes into action.
Federal agent Steve Lawton works undercover with his assistant, Smiley Burnette, to track down an outlaw gang that is raiding government gold shipments bound for Fort Navajo.
Filmed at the Providencia Ranch (today's Forrest Lawn in Burbank, CA), this typical "Durango Kid" Western featured the Cass County Boys performing "Go West Young Lady" by Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, in addition to series regular Smiley Burnette singing his own "It's My Turn" and "The Yodeler.
It's 1873 and the disbanded Texas Rangers have been replaced by the corrupt Texas State Police. Steve Lanning arrives posing as a wanted outlaw to get in with them in his attempt to have them replaced.
Charles Starrett returns as the Durango Kid in Columbia's Rough, Tough, West. For most of the film, however, Starrett is known as "Steve Holden," a former Texas Ranger who comes to a wide-open mining town to visit an old friend (Jack -- later Jock -- Mahoney).
Using marked bills, Steve is looking for the supposedly dead Henry Hardison. Coming to Bonanza Town he gets a job with the town boss Crag Bozeman and gets paid with marked bills.
Charles Starrett makes his final appearance as The Durango Kid, this time as Steve Reynolds, a postal inspector who has gone underground to catch the bad guys.
A bizarre mechanic tells a traveler the story of a bank employee, Peppino Biancaneve, who with the help of a disc is trying to put together the words he would like to use to ask for the hand of the daughter of the jeweler Carlo Casertoni, but while he mulls over the sentences he should pronounce to his future father-in-law he comes across a strange individual who could be a bringer of bad luck: a jettatore.
A film director, in bad standing with his studio, tries to turn a local carnival dancer into a "French" movie star and pass her off as his big new discovery.
Jack Garrett interrupts a stagecoach holdup where he meets Fuzzy (The town's stagecoach driver, station agent, baggage agent, and sheriff) and banker Jim Thorn.
The fox and crow are sharing grapes while the crow reads a book about a similar fox and crow sharing grapes who eventually fought it out for the last one.
Familiar radio voice Ben Grauer leads the viewer on a behind the scenes tour of the National Broadcasting Company studios -- both radio and television -- in Rockefeller Center and Hollywood.
Riders of the Dusk is another of Monogram's formula Whip Wilson westerns. Since the studio couldn't build an entire film around Wilson's bullwhip prowess, a plot was called for.
