AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?

Bill Mayhew (John Payne) is a good, decent man but he's got a problem - he is constantly having to deal with the fallout caused by his hot headed younger brother, Sam (Skip Homeier). After a series of incidents forces him to break Sam loose from a Texas jail, he decides enough is enough and tells Sam they must go their separate ways. Payne heads towards Denver to make a new life for himself and sets up in Central City, where he lands a job (and soon to be partnership) with kindly gent John Sutton (Ray Middleton). He also starts to fall for Sutton's pretty daughter Elizabeth (Mona Freeman). Things seem to be going pretty well, until it soon becomes apparent that the town's money-hungry crook, Jim Donovan (Lee J. Cobb), has issues with Sutton's dealings. And wouldn't you know it, the scheming Donovan has just hired a newly-arrived tough guy to deal with these sort of things - GUESS WHO? The stage is set for a showdown between the two brothers via action-packed gunsligning wild west action!

Simple and executed with class & style, The Road To Denver is a hugely enjoyable Western! Directed by genre-specialist Joe Kane and staring the reliable John Payne, this undervalued film boasts a great cast consisting of Mona Freeman, Lee J. Cobb, Ray Middleton, Skip Homeier & Lee Van Cleef. The tale of sibling rivalry amongst the fabulous Snow Canyon location is highly watchable stuff, where even though the sense of the inevitable is hard to get away from, a number of sequences delight and fully form the story. Homeier is particularly good at playing the loose cannon role of Sam, and the best scenes tend to land with him, but Lee J Cobb is always a solid performer (boy do I miss seeing him pop up everywhere in movies and television), and when given a bad guy role such as here, he positively delivers with his trademark sneer in full effect.