krocheav What the world anyone truly sees in Roger Corman movies is at loss to me. While this one may be part of his early days - he never improved all that much for my tastes - his appeal is surley limited to those who have a bent towards BAD movies. This one offers us a female lead in the lovely and talented Beverly Garland who clearly deserved far better material but, with stinkers like 'Gunslinger' on her résumé she never had a chance. She plays a 'female sheriff' who has to look for her holster each time she puts her gun away - then there's the saloon with all of three small tables and less than a dozen clients who sit around watching all three (3) dance hall gals doing their best to keep in time (in a Randolph Scott Picture, any less than 23 song and dance ladies would have been cheap). John Ireland is OK in his limited way but the script gives him nothing to work with - same goes for the whole cast of a dozen or more. MGM/UA who has given us some fine rare gems - must have far more deserving movies to transfer to DVD than this penny pinching, idea stealing, dog eared oater. For the very easily pleased, if even they want to bother.

Leofwine_draca One of Roger Corman's first films is this lively and involving little western that has a gender role-reversal going on as a grieving widow (Beverly Garland) becomes the marshal of a violent town in which at least one of the inhabitants is going on a murderous rampage of land-grabbing. I was at first surprised to see that this film was in colour given that the rest of Corman's B-movie sci-fi and horror films of the 1950s are in black and white, and then pleased to see that this was just as entertaining as those genre movies.GUNSLINGER is fast-paced and fun, and even the romance scenes don't feel slow or dragged out. Garland makes for an enthusiastic heroine given decent support by John Ireland as a hired gun who has a change of heart. You know it's a Corman movie when you spy Dick Miller in a low down supporting role. GUNSLINGER is no masterpiece, that's for sure, but for a film which must have been made for a fraction of the budget of acclaimed classics like HIGH NOON, it's a nice surprise.

Wizard-8 The idea behind this movie - a woman in the wild west taking on the responsibilities of a marshal - was a promising one. It could have worked both in a realistic light, or one that was aimed more at an exploitation audience. However, the end results will more likely than not be unpleasing to any audience. I could live with the cheap nature of the production, from the tacky sets to the poor color photography. The biggest problem is that the movie is surprisingly boring. It's mostly talk talk talk, and none of the talk is particularly interesting or lively. There seems to be no particular effort to exploit the idea to the maximum potential. I think that audiences even in 1956 would have found the movie to be deadly boring. Even in a modern age of poor remakes, I am sure that a remake of this movie would be much more interesting than this version.

Diana Beverly garland was born in the wrong time. She was an actress ahead of her time, bringing power and grace to even such lame flicks as the Corman films she starred in. In Gunslinger, she's the town sheriff's wife. He gets offed, so she takes over his job to pursue his killers. She's better than the material she's working with, by far. The movie is gray, stilted, and mostly boring. There's some(unintentional)humor with the tire tracks everywhere, people running behind one building to emerge suddenly in front of another (I've heard of false fronts, but this is ridiculous!), and the truly stupid plot line of the newly widowed sheriff falling in love with the guy hired to kill her. Even if she hadn't loved her husband, it had only been something like a week or two since he'd died! And she ends up shooting the guy to death in the end, anyway. No luck with men, this one.The villain of the piece is another woman, the saloon owner. She's scheming to buy up a bunch of land just in case the railroad goes through and makes her rich. Her plan of action if it doesn't is pretty lame-she'll just steal as much from the town as she can and skedaddle. Hell, it's just her and her hired gun at the end against an entire town. Are you telling me these people aren't armed? Look what happened in real towns of the Old West when bank robbers came in to rob the bank, then were cut down in a hail of bullets by the armed and dangerous town folk.There'a a lot of pointless talking and riding around, interspersed with a few lame shoot outs. The ending is as grim as usual in a Corman flick, although thank goodness it lacks the moral proselytizing at the end that was in It Conquered the World. The sheriff turns over her badge to Sam Bass and rides off into the sunset, although the movie was so gray that you never saw the sun.