The Cimarron Kid

• Directed by Budd Boetticher
• January 13, 1952

Wrongly accused of robbing a train he was riding home on, a man hooks up with his old gang and participates in other robberies. Quite a train of logic there!

Audie Murphy stars in The Cimarron Kid as Bill Doolin who is not a bad egg but rather runs with the wrong crowd. Everybody from local law enforcement to his prison warden think highly of him so his flip to crime after indeterminate years of spotless behavior seems incongruous. They talk like they’re sending a beloved son or relative into the world. This ignores that the real Bill Doolin formed the Wild Bunch gang. Not exactly a nice guy.

Marshal John Sutton (Leif Erickson) looks out for the somewhat ambiguous character of Doolin going so far as to convey a message to the man when he is certain Doolin is within earshot but done in a way that avoids direct inference of aid.

After the confusion of the robbery, he falls back in with the Dalton Gang but not that Dalton Gang though given some of the names used it could be that Dalton Gang. Noah Beery Jr. as Bob Dalton looks decidedly older than the real Bob Dalton did but then again you could (and still can) find movies with Billy the Kid where he is played by a man pushing 40.

If there’s a message here (and I think there is) it is to be good or you’ll keep going to jail. The thing is he was good and that’s what got him out of jail, but because people always saw him as a criminal he was forced into his criminal ways. Confusingly Doolin was an anti-murder Western bank robbing outlaw.

Doolin is a hardheaded tough guy. But he’s also a good guy who just needs reformed. How many times he’s been in and out of jail I don’t know but it is implied a final stint in jail will fix things. Huh? Then again he flirts with one woman while being portrayed as dedicated to Carrie Roberts (Beverly Tyler) whose reformed father Pat (Roy Roberts) owns a ranch.

Most of the gang are not portrayed as distinctly evil despite planning bank robberies where they felt okay shooting people. More often they are portrayed as conflicted. They’re decent people mostly. Bitter Creek Dalton (James Best) is shown as not too bad despite in real-life dating 14-year-old Rose Dunn (Yvette Duguay) though here she is about 20 so he is not a pedo in Kid. Most of them just know no other way than to be bad.

The action is well staged and the movie is generally fun and exciting. It is not a factual biography of the Dalton Gang. It is an adventure Western likely aimed at the family audience of the time using an alternate history take to tell its story which is only helped if you lack knowledge of history. As with many Westerns it romanticized the criminals and general killers of the storied time in a way no longer done.

As a story it is efficient and compact moving at a rapid pace. A lot happens in the 84 minutes of director Budd Boetticher’s first Western. Despite being populated largely by notable character actors, the film suffers from weak characterization because there are too many people present in the story. Entertaining? Yes. A strong outing? It gets to ‘good’ only because of Murphy.

The Cimarron Kid is not one of Murphy’s strongest outings but it’s a good outing. It’s an entertaining Western with a bit of an overt message.