Cripple Creek takes place against the backdrop of the Colorado gold rush of 1892 and is a genre movie with an unusual slant, a western with a secret sauce.
It’s introduced by a stern voiceover giving us chapter and verse on gold reserves in the USA, and how smugglers are undermining the American economy by spiriting bullion out of the country.
Patriotic essentials duly established, the voice retreats after we’ve been introduced to Bret Ivers (George Montgomery) and Larry Galland (Jerome Courtland), a pair of secret service agents posing as gold thieves.
Ivers and Galland arrive in a one horse town they reckon is at the centre of a smuggling operation and have soon zeroed in on slick saloon owner Silver Kirby (William Bishop), thanks to information supplied by inside man (and Larry’s brother) Strap Galland (Richard Egan). Kirby seems to be the obvious villain here so for the undercover guys it’s not a question of who but how – how is Kirby getting the gold out of town, and how he’s reprocessing it so it can be shipped without the federal government working out what it is.
That they go about this in a remarkably reckless manner is one of the film’s little joys. They’re not very good at this spying thing, Bret and Larry, but they have grit and and smarts and think nothing of walking into trouble without a backward glance.
The film runs 78 minutes and is clearly a B movie – the name Resolute Pictures in the opening credits tells us that, as well as Montgomery’s name as star. But it has Ray Nazarro as director. A veteran of countless westerns, he knows how to shoot them so the story keeps moving.
Nazarro’s DP is William V Skall, who lit Hitchcock’s Rope and (some of) widescreen epic Quo Vadis and he delivers desaturated Technicolor images that resemble a colourised black and white movie. Visually, they slot in alongside the rest of the movie – this is a cheap production with obvious painted backdrops, speeded up film for the horse chases and many of the usual cliches in play in its depiction of the West.
The film’s strongest suit is its plot and the way it’s efficiently meted out. This is an incident-rich affair with a lot of characters kept in play (for the most part) by Richard Shayer’s screenplay. Shayer wrote the original 1930 Frankenstein, plus The Mummy, another monster smash for Universal, then set about turning out westerns at a prolific rate.
There is talent on board, and though Montgomery – king of the bad reaction shot – can’t be bracketed alongside the technical guys, he passes muster. Less obviously necessary is Courtland’s sidekick Larry, who has barely anything at all to do for most of the movie’s running time, though he is given a few scenes towards the end as if his complaints have finally been heard.
Montgomery and Courtland interact like husband and husband at a gay wedding, grinning, staring into each other’s eyes and holding the look too long. This is possibly their attempt to suggest men who are not who they say they are. Or put another way – it’s bad acting.
With the gold in question ultimately bound for China, it turns out, we get a touch of backward-looking racism – yellow gold meets yellow peril – but the movie is in some respects quite ahead of its time. It’s Goldfinger, more or less, with Silver Kirby as a diabolical master villain surrounded by henchmen, and Bret and Larry as a quipping brace of secret service guys warming up many of the tropes for James Bond.
Not all of this movie is good, by any means, but the good stuff is better than you might expect.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
