Wayne Morris is Johnny Yorke. As a young boy, his father is killed by three bandits; the leader wears a ring on a stub finger and has a nasty laugh.
Orphaned, Johnny joins a traveling minstril show run by Thad Kring. He and Sam Cooper take young Johnny under their wings, but Johnny can’t shake the memories of his dad’s death.
Cooper is the show’s star attraction, quick with a gun, able to hit the smallest targets. Johnny begins to mold himself after kind-hearted Sam, less to take his place in the show than to be prepared for the day when he encounters that laughing bandit.
Along their travels, the troupe picks up a new star in Ann Walker (Lola Albright), a saloon singer who thinks she’d enjoy working for Kring better. They take her on under one condition — that she help look after Johnny, too.
It’s a frustrating job, because Johnny refuses to get involved with any girl, even one as lovely as Ann, while his dad’s killers are still free men. When Sam is wounded in a barroom brawl and forced into retirement, Johnny becomes the show’s shooting star, but that doesn’t keep him from wandering off on occasion, searching for the laughing bandit.
Review:
Pretty dreadful. Wooden performances by Morris and Albright don’t help. Poor Lola has some awful lines. At one point, Johnny is shooting targets from her mouth. She faints. Upon waking, she says: “I was just sleepy.”
Alan Hale Jr. plays the villain with the menacing laugh that haunts Johnny Yorke, only the laugh isn’t as maniacal as it is silly. Hale was 29 at the time, already had several movies to his credit and was still 14 years removed from the Gilligan’s Island role that would make him famous.
Directed by:
Frank McDonald
Cast:
Wayne Morris … Johnny Yorke
Lola Albright … Ann Walker
Lloyd Corrigan … Thad Kring
Alan Hale Jr. … Yance Carter
Roland Winters … Sam Cooper
Billy Gray … Young Johnny
Paul McGuire … Andy
Richard Karlan … Bart
George Eldredge … Sheriff
Sam Flint … Jim
Paul Bryer … Bartender
Runtime: 81 min.
Memorable lines:
Johnny to Sam, who’s bleeding with a bullet through his shoulder: “How bad is it?”
Sam: “It’s no toothache, son.”
Ann: “Do you have to hate everything in the world because you hate one man?”
Johnny, about his quest for revenge: “You don’t understand. Your ears don’t ring with things you don’t want to hear and you don’t wake up in the middle of the night staring at something you’d give anything in the world to forget.
Ann: “No I don’t because I learned a long time ago how to grow up.”
Johnny: “You mean I haven’t?”
Ann: “Can’t you tell where a hurt, angry little boy ends and a man begins.”
Yance Carter: “If our young friend catches up with us, I hope somebody knows how to spell his last name. I sure hate to bury a man without a headstone.”
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