SPRINGFIELD RIFLE  is but one of forty westerns Gary Cooper graced between 1925 and 1959.  Alas, it’s not one of the better ones, but just a pokey, confusing Civil War espionage yawn about a Union officer infiltrating a Reb horse-theft ring out in Colorado.  Stifle your excitement.  I was pretty undemanding as a kid watching this, and it bored me then.

Reviews were phooey, but in 1952 it did generate $4,900,000 to place #36 in the release roster.  Cooper goes through the motions with little zip, but could take solace from the same year’s High Noon.  This turkey’s tagline was “The right man…for the right gun.”  There’s some standard, competent Warner Brothers action, and it looks decent, shot in the mountain scenery near Lone Pine, California. A Max Steiner music score helps when it can.
Glenn Erickson, master reviewer at CineSavant, posits this as a ‘Cold War western’, using the genre as a veiled vehicle to push acceptance of government spying, let alone the extolling lethal hardware. Nefarious softening up the kids for polishing off the Godless?  Perhaps, since the Korean War and McCarthyism were raging.  ’52 witnessed hysterical agitprop via The Atomic City, Big Jim McLain, My Son John, Invasion USA, Red Planet Mars (really going the extra mile). That was just the Home Front, as there were Commie-combat movies mixed in via Retreat Hell!, One Minute To Zero, Battle Zone and Flat Top.  Of those nine there’s one decent entry, Retreat Hell!   Yikes–there was another ‘salute to a gun’ movie, too, Carbine Williams, with James Stewart inventing new automatic rifle technology, while in prison—for murder.

None of this was banging around in my impressionable noggin when I patiently sat through this as a kid, watching rainy Saturday afternoons go by in the vanished innocence of early 60’s Bellevue. * Leaving conspiracy out of it, if you want a good western revolving around a rifle, aim at Winchester ’73.

Directed by Andre De Toth, snoring past at 93 minutes, with dependable if undemanding work from Phyllis Thaxter, David Brian (as bad guy ‘Austin McCool’), Paul Kelly, Philip Carey, Lon Chaney Jr., James Millican, Guinn Williams, Alan Hale Jr., Martin Milner and Fess Parker.

* The town, not the hospital.

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