You won't be disappointed!

Brilliant and touching

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

I like Ronnie Reagan, but this is not one of his better films. Dorothy Malone is a lightweight actress, but I don't think any female lead would have made much difference to the outcome. Preston Foster is the only authentic A actor in the film, although I did enjoy seeing the professor from Gilligan's Island as the judge.The plot is mundane and full of cliches, but the actors try to do the best with the hands they are dealt. The fascination of watching an American president acting in a film is always an extra added attraction. The end result is an amazingly average Western; watchable, but not notable. The doctor in the town is Holliday; sound familiar? Spare us.

A town that couldn't be tamed until Ronald Reagan institutes strict gun control. "But what if there's gun play?" someone asks. "Then it's a matter of law and order," replies our hero. "A town with no guns? Why, we'll be laughed out of the West," observes a grizzled bystander. Ironically, this oater documents what actually did happen in the Old West: the very first laws passed in the cities were gun control laws - because they worked. A fact the elder Mr. Reagan and his posse later chose to forget. There's little else of interest in this routine Western. Except you get to see the Professor - of Gilligan's Island - shoot down Chester - of Gunsmoke.

It would be easy to poke fun at a Western that features the red-white-and blue tie President Reagan and the Gilligan's Island Professor, Russell Johnson, but both men turn in believable and thought-provoking performances.The Johnson brothers (Reagan, Johnson, and Alex Nicol) move to a town, appropriately named "Contention" (love that name!), as retired lawmen tired of shooting it out with bad guys and hoping for a peaceful existence. As is customary in Westerns, evil runs the town, and guess who eventually has to wield a 6-gun to clean things up. The positive ethics of supporting law and order with a non-violent approach serves Reagan surprisingly well; he plays the role with earnest conviction. Johnson, as his brazen and impulsive younger brother, is a polar opposite and good balance to study the nature of both men. When the latter involves himself with the sister of the head honcho bad guy, the stage is set for good and evil to encounter one another in classic Western tradition.A better than average horse opera with a well presented message. Good for Saturday afternoon viewing.

This is resoundingly bad. The script and supporting cast are plainly stupid - this in isolation could be tolerated; but the stupidity extends to the inability to tell much of a story through visual perspective, so both of its legs are shot out from under it.There's no attempt to break new ground, it's all about affirming the "men are men, women are sex objects" motif.Reagan himself actually does the best work here -- knowing he has to play it straight, but he always manages to slip in his trademark wink at the audience.Foster's prosthetic hand would later be recycled for Nicholas Cage in "Moonstruck".The fistfight at the end between Reagan and Foster is well composed, using a vocabulary heavily borrowed from in later action films, notably the image of the hero who's about to have his face impaled on a prong ("Cobra", among many others).