Best movie of this year hands down!

Simply A Masterpiece

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

***SPOILERS*** Having hist fill of fighting and killing Confederate soldier Jefferson Waring, John Ireland, decides to turn over a new leaf and start a new life in the territory of Missouri as a farmer only to run into a gang of bushwhackers who plan to take over land that's to have a rail line go through it. The gang lead by the blind and crippled Artemis Taylor, Lon Cheney, plans to run out those living on the land by burning them out and killing them if they resist. Waring who takes the settlers side at first is totally against using armed forced against Taylor's toughs but after himself almost being killed by them he suddenly changes his mind. That after earlier he was worked over at a local bar by Sam Tobin, Lawrence Tierney, Taylor's top hit man when he refused a drink he offered him by insisting on him paying for one himself!Back at independence-the future home of Pres. Harry "S" for nothing Truman-Waring gets real friendly with newspaper editor Peter Sharpe, Frank Marlow, and even friendlier with his hot looking and gun toting daughter Cathy, Dorothy Malone,who caught him sleeping in her boudoir-bedroom-after a hard days work at her father's office setting type for the morning bulldog edition. Cathy soon realizes that Waring is an OK guy by him throwing in his lot with the settlers whom her dad is in fully support of.***SPOILERS*** It's Taylor's hot headed daughter Norah, Myrna Dell, who plans to escalate the situation by rustling up some two dozen bushwhackers and drive the settlers off their land in order to claim it and make a killing on it when the railroad is built over it. This has Waring with a number of settlers counter-attack and ambush the bushwhackers having their leader Norah flee the scene. This while her dad Artemis Taylor drops dead of a sudden heart attack due to all of the action and excitement going on in the movie. Norah planning to skip town with some $50,000.00 in cash is confronted by bank president Justin Stone, Charles Trowbridge, who won't let her take the money until the bank opens! That leads to a wild shoot out between the two with both ending up dead.

Ah, The Bushwhackers, also known as The Rebel, a Western packed to the rafters with ever watchable actors, but unfurled like an amateur homage to Oaters a decade or so before.Co-written and directed by Rod Amateau, and starring John Ireland, Dorothy Malone, Lawrence Tierney, Lon Chaney Junior, Myrna Dell, Wayne Morris and Jack Elam, film finds Ireland as Civil War veteran Jefferson Waring, who has vowed to never pick up a gun in anger again. However, upon wandering into the town of Independence, Missouri, he finds a town awash with sinister rumblings as Lon Chaney's Don Vito Corleone figure - backed by Dell's nefarious daughter - is plotting to own all the local land because the Railroad is coming and there's going to be a high premium placed on said land.Cue Waring being pulled from emotional pillar to emotional post, with Malone batting her eyelids amidst a strong portrayal of feisty sexuality, until he takes up the good fight for the greater good in readiness for the finale that holds no surprises. There's a mean spirited edge to the plot which keeps things interesting and spicy, and although they are under used, having Tierney and Elam as thugs for hire is always a good thing, but it's directed and edited in such a cack - handed way there's little to no flow to the picture. Making it practically impossible to invest in the characterisations.Unfortunately the DVD print provided by Elstree Hill is a disgrace, not even up to the standard of a VHS copy of a copy! A shame because through the gloom and scrambled fuzz of the transfer, you can see Joseph Biroc's noirish photography trying to break out. The actors make it worth a watch, in that Western fans can tick it off their lists, but nobody should be fooled into thinking there's an exciting picture here, or that it has observational intelligence about a scarred war veteran, because it has neither and Amateau's subsequent "non" career in film after this tells you all you need to know. 5/10

Ex-Confederate John Ireland flees reconstruction and it's test of his vow of non-violence. Heading west, he winds up in a town under the thumb of powerful land baron Lon Chaney and his sadistic enforcer Lawrence Tierney, who are killing stealing land in anticipation of the railroad. Trying to leave, Ireland is only pulled in deeper.Another hard-boiled, low-budget 1950's western noir, The Bushwhackers is vivid and fairly violent entertainment that's definitely worth checking out. Like nearly all good westerns, it does a great job of manipulating the viewer, building up to the moment when all bets are off and the hero straps on his six-gun to take care of business.Here, Ireland and Tierney are fantastic. It's too bad that these two great actors were pretty much relegated to minor films (Tierney especially) due their alleged drunken exploits.The rest of the cast, Wayne Morris, Dorothy Malone (who's beautiful), and Jack Elam, are all great too.

Some films, like Citizen Kane, still look actual even though it was made in 1941. Others, like The Bushwhackers from 1952, seem older than those talkies of the early thirties. The reason? A very, very low budget and a director that really belonged to TV. The actors are excellent, and it is surprising to see them together in a western were obviously lowering the cost was so crucial. John Ireland is Jefferson Waring a man that after the civil war is over goes west because he does not want to use guns anymore. There he meets Dorothy Malone and her father, who print the newspaper and also Wayne Morris, the marshal. There is also a bad guy, Lon Chaney and his mean daughter Myrna Dell, not counting the notorious always mean Jack Elam. A very similar story made an excellent western some years later, "The Violent Men". I enjoyed "The Bushwhackers" because of the actors and also the amusing primitive, low quality type of film making, something rare in the westerns of the fifties.