As soon as you hear that one of the bad guys in this lightweight B-western is named James Kirk, just try to not mentally shoehorn William Shatner into the proceedings, okay? Just try. I bet you can’t do it. I couldn’t. Had a hack Shatner impression playing in my head for the whole second half of this movie.
SO, here you’ve got your gang of stagecoach robbers in the Old West and you’ve got your trio of lawmen who not only work to stop them, but who also scheme to gain the evidence to put these hoods in jail. If you’ve seen even two B-westerns from this time, you already know exactly what that means. Yes, here it is again, that old formula, as sure as the sun rises in the east. The twist: one of the good guys goes undercover among the bad guys and screws with them from within. John Wayne did it several times, Roy Rogers did it and now the short and virile Bob Steele does it here. And he never once gets his white hat dirty. Steele’s partners are Hoot Gibson and Ken Maynard, two elder statesman whose careers go back to the silent era appearing here on their farewell tours. It’s a Western done the Monogram Pictures way, which means action plus plenty of comic relief and a smidge of romance all in about sixty minutes.