The Marshal’s Daughter

Produced by Ken Murray strictly as a vehicle for Laurie Anders, his curvy protégé from his television show and billed above the title and first billed in the cast as Laurie (“I-like-the-wide-open-spaces”) Anders, which was her catch-line phrase and how she was introduced and known. This is neither a comedy, satire or parody—missing badly on all attempts at such—and isn’t much of a western either, even by bottom-of-the-barrel B-standards. The plot by veteran B-western villain player Bob Duncan, who did manage to write himself the best role in the movie, relative to there being no good roles in this movie, has town banker Anderson, the secret head of an outlaw gang, trying to organize a Cattleman’s Association and not getting any takers. He sends for Trigger Gans to act as a persuader. But a mysterious, masked rider known as El Coyote begins to resist. El Coyote is of course Laurie Dawson, daughter of retired Marshal and rancher Ben Dawson, and her El Coyote role ensured that whoever stunt-doubled her would wear pads where no stunt man ever wore them, with the possible later exception of Dean Smith doubling Maureen O’Hara in “McLintock.” The heroines that Dave Sharpe doubled in Republic serials weren’t built like Laurie Anders. Producer Ken Murray, as a riverboat gambler named Sliding Bill Murray, rolls into town on the same stage as Trigger Gans, and then promptly engages Preston Foster, Johnny Mack Brown, Jimmy Wakely and Buddy Baer (in cameo roles) in a blackout-skit poker game written by himself, which had to have been even more painful for the participants than the viewers. Ralph Staub used to get better stuff than this in his “Screen Snapshots” just roaming around Columbia’s backlot and interviewing Smiley Burnette and Ringeye.