Ride a Violent Mile
Cast & Crew
Charles Marquis Warren
John Agar
Penny Edwards
John Pickard
Bing Russell
Richard Shannon
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
In a small Western town during the Civil War, a rock comes hurling through the window of dance hall girl Susan Crowley's room. Susan calmly proceeds to the street, where she is accosted by Dory and Sam, two cowhands. As the two men restrain Susan, Jeff Donner, a stranger in town, notices that she is being coerced and comes to her rescue. While talking to Susan, Jeff turns to loosen his horse's saddle strap, and when he turns back around, he finds she has vanished. Jeff then enters the local saloon, where Dory and Sam provoke a fight with him, which is broken up by James Thorne, the newly appointed marshal. As Thorne lectures the three about the virtues of law and order, Susan beckons to Jeff and directs him to meet her at her room later. Although Jeff is wary, he goes to the rendezvous and there finds a man named Edwards stabbed and near death. With his dying breath, Edwards gasps the cryptic phrase "a gallon and a pint and second day." When Thorne finds Jeff standing over Edwards' lifeless body, he arrests him for murder, but Jeff escapes and is met in a back alley by Susan, who has brought his horse. As the two gallop out of town, Thorne recruits Dory and Sam to form a posse to track the fugitives. Susan leads Jeff into the rocky hills, where they engage in a standoff with Thorne and his men. Although grazed by a bullet in the crossfire, Susan quickly recovers and then explains that Edwards, whom she had met only once before, signaled the meeting that night by throwing a rock through her window, but Dory and Sam delayed her. Jeff is incredulous when Susan then confides that she is a Union undercover agent to whom Edwards was to deliver a critical message, but he nevertheless repeats Edwards' last words to her. Susan then asks for Jeff's help in reaching Lt. George Merrick, the Union Information Officer who will able to decipher the message. After losing the fugitives' trail, Dory and Sam return to town while Thorne continues his quest. Upon reaching Merrick's shack, Susan enters alone and comes face to face with a man who claims to be Merrick. Although Susan has never met Merrick, she challenges his identity, and the man then shows her the real Merrick's body, dangling from a noose. As the man, Norman, threatens to kill Susan unless she relays Edwards' message, Jeff sneaks in and jumps him, but Norman overpowers Jeff and knocks him unconscious. Just as Norman puts his hands around Susan's neck to strangle her, Jeff awakens and shoots him. Combing through a pile of shell casings, Susan finds a secret communication from Merrick, reading "Long Knife Colinas," but she decides to withhold the information from Jeff. While Jeff buries Merrick, Norman, who only suffered a flesh wound, rides off, and soon after, Susan also disappears. Back inside the shack, Jeff discovers Merrick's discarded message just as Sam and Dory arrive and demand to know where Susan is. When a beating fails to elicit the information, Sam and Dory trick Jeff by pretending to get drunk. Jeff seizes the opportunity to escape, and Sam and Dory follow him to Long's gun shop in Colinas. Upon entering the shop, Jeff is stunned to see Norman, who knocks him unconscious and locks him in a room with Susan, whom he has also captured. Soon after, Sam, Dory and Thorne enter the room and when Jeff tries to enlist the marshal's aid, Thorne reveals that he is a Confederate major posing as a marshal to intercept Edwards' message. Thorne then introduces Dory, Norman and Sam as his fellow agents. After ordering Norman to eliminate Jeff and Susan, Thorne and the others ride off to complete their mission. As Norman steels himself to commit murder, Susan distracts him and Jeff grabs his gun. In the ensuing struggle, the weapon fires, killing Norman. Following Thorne's trail to a beef packing plant, Jeff and Susan find Jonathan Long, the gun shop owner, beaten and near death. When Susan repeats Edwards' message to Long, Long tells them that the Confederates are staging a cattle drive across the Rio Grande into Mexico to finance the purchase of seacoast land that will give them a strategic advantage in winning the war. The drive is to occur the following day, and Jeff determines to disrupt it by stampeding the cattle and scattering them to the winds. At Long's urgings, Susan and Jeff leave him to ride to the Rio Grande. When Thorne sees Jeff, he fires, thus startling the cattle into a stampede. Dropping to the ground, Jeff pulls his gun and shoots Thorne, finally thwarting the Confederate plot.
Director
Charles Marquis Warren
Cast
John Agar
Penny Edwards
John Pickard
Bing Russell
Richard Shannon
Charles [h.] Gray
Sheb Wooley
Rush Williams
Richard Gilden
Rocky Shahan
Helen Wallace
Patrick O'moore
Roberto Contreras
Eve Novak
Mary Townsend
Dorothy Schuyler
Crew
Jack Babin
Brydon Baker
Nathan R. Barragar
Nathan R. Barragar
Fred W. Berger
Raymond Boltz Jr.
Tom Coleman
Louis Dewitt
Mai Dietrich
Joseph Dimmitt
Jack Dusick
Joe Edmondson
Bert French
Vou Lee Giokaris
Raoul Kraushaar
Eric Norden
Robert Stabler
James W. Sullivan
Leslie Vidor
Charles Marquis Warren
Charles Marquis Warren
Film Details
Technical Specs
Articles
TCM Remembers - John Agar
Popular b-movie actor John Agar died April 7th at the age of 81. Agar is probably best known as the actor that married Shirley Temple in 1945 but he also appeared alongside John Wayne in several films. Agar soon became a fixture in such films as Tarantula (1955) and The Mole People (1956) and was a cult favorite ever since, something he took in good spirits and seemed to enjoy. In 1972, for instance, the fan magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland mistakenly ran his obituary, a piece that Agar would later happily autograph.
Agar was born January 31, 1921 in Chicago. He had been a sergeant in the Army Air Corps working as a physical trainer when he was hired in 1945 to escort 16-year-old Shirley Temple to a Hollywood party. Agar apparently knew Temple earlier since his sister was a classmate of Temple's. Despite the objections of Temple's mother the two became a couple and were married shortly after. Temple's producer David Selznick asked Agar if he wanted to act but he reportedly replied that one actor in the family was enough. Nevertheless, Selznick paid for acting lessons and signed Agar to a contract.
Agar's first film was the John Ford-directed Fort Apache (1948) also starring Temple. Agar and Temple also both appeared in Adventure in Baltimore (1949) and had a daughter in 1948 but were divorced the following year. Agar married again in 1951 which lasted until his wife's death in 2000. Agar worked in a string of Westerns and war films such as Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Breakthrough (1950) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Later when pressed for money he began making the films that would establish his reputation beyond the gossip columns: Revenge of the Creature (1955), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), Invisible Invaders (1959) and the mind-boggling Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1966). The roles became progressively smaller so Agar sold insurance and real estate on the side. When he appeared in the 1988 film Miracle Mile his dialogue supposedly included obscenities which Agar had always refused to use. He showed the director a way to do the scene without that language and that's how it was filmed.
By Lang Thompson
DUDLEY MOORE, 1935-2002
Award-winning actor, comedian and musician Dudley Moore died on March 27th at the age of 66. Moore first gained notice in his native England for ground-breaking stage and TV comedy before later building a Hollywood career. Like many of his peers, he had an amiable, open appeal that was balanced against a sharply satiric edge. Moore could play the confused innocent as well as the crafty schemer and tended to command attention wherever he appeared. Among his four marriages were two actresses: Tuesday Weld and Suzy Kendall.
Moore was born April 19, 1935 in London. As a child, he had a club foot later corrected by years of surgery that often left him recuperating in the hospital alongside critically wounded soldiers. Moore attended Oxford where he earned a degree in musical composition and met future collaborators Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. The four formed the landmark comedy ensemble Beyond the Fringe. Though often merely labelled as a precursor to Monty Python's Flying Circus, Beyond the Fringe was instrumental in the marriage of the piercing, highly educated sense of humor cultivated by Oxbridge graduates to the modern mass media. In this case it was the revue stage and television where Beyond the Fringe first assaulted the astonished minds of Britons. Moore supplied the music and such songs as "The Sadder and Wiser Beaver," "Man Bites God" and "One Leg Too Few." (You can pick up a CD set with much of the stage show. Unfortunately for future historians the BBC commonly erased tapes at this period - why? - so many of the TV episodes are apparently gone forever.)
Moore's first feature film was the 1966 farce The Wrong Box (a Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation) but it was his collaboration with Peter Cook on Bedazzled (1967) that's endured. Unlike its tepid 2000 remake, the original Bedazzled is a wolverine-tough satire of mid-60s culture that hasn't aged a bit: viewers are still as likely to be appalled and entertained at the same time. Moore not only co-wrote the story with Cook but composed the score. Moore appeared in a few more films until starring in 10 (1979). Written and directed by Blake Edwards, this amiable comedy featured Moore (a last-minute replacement for George Segal) caught in a middle-aged crisis and proved popular with both audiences and critics. Moore's career took another turn when his role as a wealthy alcoholic who falls for the proverbial shop girl in Arthur (1981) snagged him an Oscar nomination as Best Actor and a Golden Globe win.
However Moore was never able to build on these successes. He starred in a passable remake of Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours (1984), did another Blake Edwards romantic comedy of moderate interest called Micki + Maude (1984, also a Golden Globe winner for Moore), a misfired sequel to Arthur in 1988 and a few other little-seen films. The highlight of this period must certainly be the 1991 series Orchestra where Moore spars with the wonderfully crusty conductor Georg Solti and leads an orchestra of students in what's certainly some of the most delightful television ever made.
By Lang Thompson
TCM Remembers - John Agar
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
In the film's credits, Nathan R. Barragar's credit reads "Production manager and assistant director." A June 1957 Hollywood Reporter news item notes that the film was shot in Kanab, UT. Modern sources add Norman B. Cram and Karl R. MacDonald to the cast.