White hot paranoia in the Old West. As sci-fi films of the 1950s dealt metaphorically with the atomic bomb and Russian spies, some western films dealt with Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts. High Noon is the most famous one, Johnny Guitar is the weird one, and the low-budget B-movie Silver Lode is the simplest and most explicit one. If its spartan plot of a trusted local man (John Payne) who becomes a pariah when he’s wrongfully accused of crimes by a shady US Marshal (a great and hateful Dan Duryea) isn’t quite enough to put its anti-McCarthy message across, how about the fact the Marshal is named McCarty? And how about the fact that the film is set on the 4th of July so that the whole town is festooned in patriotic banners? There’s an American flag on display somewhere in nearly every single exterior shot. Director Allan Dwan beats you black and blue with the red, white and blue. This is not just a story about the Old West, he wants you to know—it’s a story about America. By the end of the movie, even the local prostitute wears a gown made up of the colors of the flag. 
At about eighty minutes, Silver Lode wastes no time. It’s one of best works from Allan Dwan, who’d been making efficient low-budget films for over forty years at this point. The story starts moving immediately after the opening credits and then flies by like a charging horse, its message and its action never getting in the way of each other.