The blog of a Western fan, for other Western fans

Gunfire (Lippert, 1950)

 

Don ‘Red’ Barry is Frank

 

When minor movie studio Lippert had a (for them) big hit in 1949 with I Shot Jesse James, starring John Ireland as Bob Ford, they of course wanted to milk it for all they were worth, and the year after they came out with I Shot Billy the Kid, with Don ‘Red’ Barry and Robert Lowery, released in July, and the same team made another post-Jesse story, Gunfire, also known as Frank James Rides Again, in August, then they brought Ireland back for the sequel The Return of Jesse James in September. They couldn’t use the title The Return of Frank James because Fox had snaffled that in 1940 for their sequel to their Technicolor Jesse James in 1939.
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None of these Lippert sequels was a patch on the original I Shot Jesse James, which had been written and directed by Samuel Fuller and was, though pulp fiction, then clutched to the bosom of East- and West-Coast intelligentsias and French cinéphiles. The Lippert follow-ups were just cheap exploitative rip-offs designed to make a buck or two in low-rent Mid-West theaters. But they weren’t Z-movies. They all had something, some limited something, about them. They are no great Westerns, far from it, but they are just about watchable.

 

The idea behind Gunfire is that after the assassination of Jesse, a certain outlaw, Bat Fenton (Barry) is a “dead ringer” for Frank James (Barry), and decides to use that happenstance to pretend to be Frank, robbing banks, stages and trains and striking terror into the hearts of the citizens of Colorado (the story centers around Creede). The James gang rides again. This was of course exactly the plot of The Return of Jesse James.

 

Barry was a bit of a sad case, really. Born Donald Barry de Acosta, or possibly Milton Poimboeuf, in 1912, he reached his peak of Western stardom, such as it was, in the early 1940s.

 

 

Don ‘Red’ Barry

 

His first Western appearances were in two of Republic’s Roy Rogers/Gabby Hayes oaters of 1939, when he was 27. In between these two he was fourth-billed, after John Wayne, Ray Corrigan and Raymond Hatton, in a Republic Three Mesquiteers film, as the eponymous Wyoming Outlaw.

 

But his real breakthrough came in 1940 when he starred as Red Ryder. Though Red Ryder was tall in the comic strip and Barry was only five foot four (1.64m), luckily he had a boy sidekick who was even shorter.

 

 

Don as Red Ryder

 

You’d have to be quite elderly now (even older than I am) to have grown up with Red Ryder. The comic strip created by Stephen Slesinger and artist Fred Harman began in November 1938 and moved to radio in 1942. Despite two pilots, it never made the vital leap to television and was therefore doomed to perdition. However, as a juvenile twelve-chapter Republic movie serial The Adventures of Red Ryder it was enormously successful. There followed no fewer than 27 Red Ryder feature films between 1944 and 50, but not with Barry. Wild Bill Elliott, then Allan ‘Rocky’ Lane and finally Jim Bannon played Red. The 1940 hit had been enough, however, to give Donald Barry his nickname, and he was forever after Don ‘Red’ Barry – to his eternal regret.

 

It was downhill from there on, though. He launched his own production company (Gunfire is announced as A Donald Barry Production) but erratic and difficult behavior made film roles increasingly rare. In 1954 he took the lead in a shockingly bad picture released by United Artists, Jesse James’ Women, which he co-produced, co-wrote and directed. He was second-billed to the ‘comic’ Judy Canova at Republic again in Untamed Heiress. He got smaller and smaller parts. Ego, bad temper and alcohol-fueled domestic disputes combined with lack of work and pushed him into depression, and in 1980 Don ‘Red’ Barry committed suicide. It was a tragic story, really.

 

As for Robert Lowery, he was Batman in 1949 but he did quite a lot of Westerns, starting with small parts in A-movies, in John Ford’s Drums along the Mohawk and in the Tyrone Power The Mark of Zorro, but after that it was pretty well low-budget Westerns all the way. He co-starred with Don Barry in The Dalton Gang in ’49, then Border Rangers and these two pictures, I Shot Billy the Kid (in which he played Pat Garrett) and Gunfire, in 1950.

 

 

Lowery is the lawman who gets Bob Ford

 

In The Return he is ‘John Kelly’, the fellow who shot Bob Ford in Creede. We see the Main Street showdown in which Ford (Roger Anderson) draws on Kelly but Kelly gets him with a shotgun. Much of the plot and even some of the characters (with different actors) were taken from I Shot Jesse James, so Lowery is the law in Creede (the real assassin of Ford, Kelley, or O’Kelley, wasn’t, of course) and we also get the fictional character Cynthy, whose favors both Bob Ford and John Kelly solicit. In I Shot Jesse James Cynthy was played by Barbara Britton; this time Pamela Blake does the honors.

 

The epic was produced, written and directed by William Berke (so there aren’t many others to blame). Berke (who also did Border Rangers), director Richard Fleischer recalled, “was known as King of the B’s. For years and years he had made nothing but pictures with ten or twelve day shooting schedules, minuscule budgets of about $100,000 and no stars. Without bothering with editing or any postproduction chores and with short shooting schedules, he was able to squeeze in eight or ten pictures a year. And he was going nuts”.

 

 

Wm. Berke

 

We open with an outlaw Matt Riley (Steve Conte) visiting Frank James (Barry). Frank is very respectable and the movie perpetuates the myth that Frank James got religion. Barry’s Frank is reading scripture. “Holy Bible, huh?” says Riley. And Frank quotes it to all and sundry, using the “vengeance is mine” bit to justify his not going after the Fords with a gun. He has an apple-pie wife and two perfect kids, to enhance the ‘perfect family man’ image. Actually, his wife, Emily (in fact it was Annie) is played by Barbara Woodell. Now Ms Woodell was a serial Mrs James because she played Jesse’s wife in both I Shot Jesse James and The Great Jesse James Raid in ’53. Frank’s young son lies to Sheriff Kelly to give his dad an (unnecessary) alibi and Frank takes off his belt in order to beat the child, to teach him not to lie. This is meant to indicate Frank’s decency and probity to the audience. I don’t think it would these days.

 

There has to be some comic relief so we get a vaudeville turn from Wally Vernon as Clem, a drunk in the saloon whom Sheriff Kelly takes on as a deputy to reform him (he sobers up and shapes up). Vernon was a New Yorker with quick-fire Runyonesque diction and a fish out of water here but he did a dozen oaters with Barry.

 

 

The ensemble: left to right, Mrs. Frank James, Frank, Cynthy, Kelly, the two James children, with Clem indisposed, front on couch

 

Frank does go after Charlie Ford, though, despite the strictures of scripture and the pleading of his spouse. He has a consumptive cough as he rides along. Meanwhile, the faux Frank James, outlaw Fenton (Barry, also), is robbin’ banks and stages and trains with gusto, showing his face and having his accomplices call him ‘Frank’ so that everyone now thinks Frank James is back on the owl hoot trail.

 

There’s a crooked saloon owner (obviously), Simons (Leonard Penn) who has a saloon gal named Flo (probably short for Floozy) played by Jan Sterling. He gives the gang the lowdown info. It will not end well for him.

 

Despite the minimal budget there are a few exterior location shots (Iverson Ranch, it looked like) but of course the majority is done with cheap interiors, with the characters explaining the plot to each other. The quality of the image on the DVD isn’t bad, though. It’s black & white, of course, and comes in at only 59 minutes, so it was almost certainly designed as a second feature.

 

 

 

It’s no worse than many a low-budget Western, I suppose, though not much better either. Still, you could watch it, especially if you are a Frank & Jesse fan.

 

 

5 Responses

  1. Jeff, another good write-up of a B-Western. Again, I don't think I have ever seen GUNFIRE(1950). I like to see Don "Red" Barry in Westerns and he was one of those faces that you would see a lot and could count on for a pretty good performance. He did have quite a sad ending. His first wife actress Peggy Stewart died last month, a week shy of 97. Stewart was in a lot of B-Westerns, also.

    As we know, there have been many Jesse and Frank James imposters over the years. There are people that actually believe that their kinfolk were actually the real Jesse and Frank James. In 1980, while doing some War of the Rebellion(Civil War) research on Union soldiers from Arkansas, my path crossed with a man named Columbus Vaughn, who believed that his grandfather was the real Missouri outlaw Frank James. There is a tombstone in Snow Cemetery in Wayton, Newton County, Arkansas with the name Frank James Alias Joe Vaughn 1844-1926 transcribed on it. Joe Vaughn told his children in the last few years before his death that when he died he wanted his "real" name put on his tombstone. When the children asked what name that would be, if Joe Vaughn wasn't the right one, Joe replied that he wanted "Frank James" on his stone. Vaughn left a 134 page book titled THE ONLY TRUE HISTORY OF THE LIFE OF FRANK JAMES WRITTEN BY HIMSELF, which was published after his death in 1926. The book detailed his life as the infamous outlaw and brother of Jesse James. His family believed he was telling the truth. Joe Vaughn's daughter Sarah Vaughn Snow set out to prove that her father was the real Frank James and collaborated with her nephew Columbus Vaughn on a book titled THIS WAS FRANK JAMES(1969), based on the story that Joe Vaughan told.

    My friend, Western Historian and Folklorist Phillip W. Steele, told me that he laid out all the documented information proving that Columbus' grandfather wasn't the real Frank James, but he still firmly believed his grandfather was the real Frank James. Columbus Vaughn died in 1984.

    At the time of my written correspondence with Columbus Vaughn, I didn't know that he believed that his grandfather was the real Frank James. I wish I had known this, because my Great-Great Grandfather Walter Canard knew the real Frank James.

    1. Many of these B-Westerns died a death at the time in rural theaters and most people never saw them – or if they did, they promptly forgot them. It's only now, thanks to DVDs and YouTube, that we get to see these 'great epics'. With many, it was clear that we didn't miss much, but now and then a little gem turns up.
      Frank James seems by all accounts to have been a most unsympathetic character. It is generally accepted that he died in Clay County, MO in 1915, aged 72, but who knows? Other Western figures supposedly lived on – one thinks of Brushy Bill Roberts claiming to be Billy the Kid and stories of Butch Cassidy surviving that South American shoot-out.
      Jeff

  2. Over the years Don had strong supporting parts in quite a few A level pictures , including, but not limited to Duke of West Point, Only Angels Have Wings, I'll Cry Tomorrow, and a famous off screen romance with Susan Hayward, Walk On The Wild Side, in which he was extremely effective, and perhaps another one or two.

  3. Jeff ,you didn’t mention that Barry’s main claim to fame is the thirty fairly sturdy ‘B’ westerns he starred in for Republic from the early to mid forties.

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