Blazing Across the Pecos

If you had seen as many Durango Kid westerns as you said you did, you should have realized that these were designed for kids some sixty years ago. Barry Shipman who wrote several of the screenplays admitted that they were written to a formula and as such the plots did tend to become a bit stereotyped. Frankly, we didn't care. We were there for a afternoon of fun and excitement where we could scream and yell to our hearts content without too much adult supervision. Obviously if you had been in the audience as an adult, we would have thought it was a little strange. The reason that the print quality is so bad is that Columbia cranked these things out on a budget. They were not meant to last several decades and in fact, many have disintegrated through the years because of poor storage. What I can't understand is if you were bored by the film, why didn't you turn it off. That way, you could have spent the rest of your hour more constructively. Incidentally, Charles Starrett hails from Athol, Massachusetts, whose family owned a machine tool business.