"The Badlands Echo With Six-Gun Action!"14 September 1950Western55 mins
Charles Starrett once more hits the trail as "The Durango Kid" in Columbia's Across the Badlands. By now, the formula was a well-oiled machine: Starrett becomes a lawman, is challenged by the local criminal element, and ultimately goes beyond the law as the masked Durango.
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It's 1873 and the disbanded Texas Rangers have been replaced by the corrupt Texas State Police.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 plays lawman Steve Forsythe in Ridin' the Outlaw Trail. Somewhere along the line, of course, Steve is obliged to don the mask of The Durango Kid, mysterious righter of wrongs.
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.
Popular movie trailers from 1950
These some of the most viewed trailers for movies released in 1950:
Driving safety film sponsored as a public service by oil companies. Of five drivers who leave home in the morning, only four return, and we wait to learn who the victim is.
An elderly lady, who has lost her only son in the war, turns her house into a pension. It is also the custody of a mysterious document that his son entrusted to him, and which is coveted by many people .
Young swain Toto Esposito tries to abduct his beloved to marry her, but he makes a mistake: he kidnaps an ugly woman named Carmela, who loves him--and chases him when he escapes.
Envoi de Fleurs is based on incidents in the life of French composer Paul Delmet. Played by popular French singing star Tino Rossi, Delmet is depicted as a man all too willing to give up personal happiness in favor of blind ambition.
I'll Get By is an updated remake of the 1940 20th Century-Fox musical Tin Pan Alley. William Lundigan and Dennis Day play William Spencer and Freddie Lee respectively, successful song publishers who make hits out of such numbers as "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo", "Deep in the Heart of Texas", "You Make Me Feel So Young", "There Will Never Be Another You", and other favorites (the rights to all of these songs were conveniently held by 20th Century-Fox).
