The characters in this Western will be old friends to those familiar with John Wayne's work in his last 20 years. The hardened gunfighter (Wayne), the kid (usually a pop star, and in this case Bobby Vinton), the co-star (here Rod Taylor) and the veteran (Ben Johnson) against a mob of gunmen who far outnumber them. Burt Kennedy's script contains some amusing exchanges of dialogue (and a running joke that parallels the one in Big Jake, where everyone tells Wayne they thought he was dead). But his direction, although pitching one nicely into the core of the action, asks little more of the star than that he be John Wayne, which is rather a pity, as Don Siegel's The Shootist later showed.

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