I Killed Wild Bill Hickok – Told in flashback, this is the story of the man that shot Wild Bill Hickok.
I Killed Wild Bill Hickok (1956)
Director: Richard Talmadge
Writer: Johnny Carpenter
Stars: Johnny Carpenter, Helen Westcott, Tom Brown
Genre: Western
Country: USA
Language: English
Filming Location: Iverson Ranch – 1 Iverson Lane, Chatsworth, Los Angeles, California, USA
Reviews:
"Reformed outlaw John Carpenter (not that one) gets embroiled in the usual drama between some good-hearted ranchers and a ruthless horse trader who employs the titular legendary gunslinger as his muscle. Guess what happens to Mr. Hickok?
This is yet another very basic Western programmer, but it’s a perfectly pleasant one. Director and stuntman Richard Talmadge really knows how to put together an action sequence — he went on to be stunt coordinator for high-profile movies like How the West Was Won and North to Alaska — which helps to cover for the plot deficiencies. I’m not sure whether this screenplay was hard to follow or just didn’t hold my attention very well, but there’s enough well-staged action to keep it watchable even if you drift away from time to time. It also helps that the cast is a solid roster of genre players. Denver Pyle is the best-known name, with Helen Westcott giving the most memorable performance as a brassy cowgirl.
Not a bad little bit of Western fluff on the whole, but what grabs me about this one are its exploitation bona fides. Playing fast and loose with the historical record is par for the course with cheap Westerns, but this one just wholesale slaps the name of a marketable real-life gunslinger onto an otherwise generic villain and tosses it up on the marquee. The Hickok character bears zero resemblance to his nonfictional namesake and isn’t even the lead antagonist! That’s some real chutzpah, but it tracks with the rest of leading man John Carpenter’s (aka Johnny Carpenter, aka John Forbes) story.
Looking through his filmography, he was a stuntman and supporting player in a bunch of Westerns throughout the ’40s, usually playing uncredited roles as henchmen and ranch hands. He coincidentally graduated to lead roles riiiight about the same time he started writing and producing his own movies. He put out one "written by and starring" movie a year from 1953 to 1956, then settled back into supporting parts on Western TV shows. I love that kind of thing — maybe he never broke big in Hollywood, but by god, he made himself into a Western hero for four more movies than most people can claim!
One more fun postscript: one of Carpenter’s final credits before he made his foray into writing his own vehicles is an early TV Western called "Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok," on which he played four separate small parts. I’d like to think this movie’s naked Hickoksploitation was intended as a subtle farewell to those kinds of parts. (Not a successful one, sadly, as this was the final entry in Carpenter’s string of self-made movies.)"
written by "Ira Brooker" on letterboxd.com
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