Riding Shotgun 1954

Larry Delong Randolph Scott has spent three years tracking the outlaw Dan Marady James Millican, the man who killed his sister and nephew in a devastating stagecoach holdup. He rides shotgun on a stage in the hopes of finally meeting Marady face to face and ending the years of pursuit with a lethal confrontation. At a rest stop, Delong is lured away and ambushed by some of Marady’s men, and he learns that the gang plans to rob the Bank Club, the casino in the town of Deepwater, using a staging of the town’s life as a trap to draw the sheriff and his men out of town.

Delong escapes, but he is too late to stop the staged holdup, and when he returns to Deepwater he finds that nearly everyone believes he participated in the crime. His warnings about the casino robbery go unheeded, leaving him isolated and angry. With danger closing in, he’s forced to seek refuge in a cantina, where the crowd’s mood shifts toward lynching and the only thing keeping the mob at bay is fear of his deadly accuracy with a gun. The town’s fair-minded deputy Tub Murphy works to maintain order, underscoring Delong’s belief that the townspeople are—despite their fear—basically innocent and deserving of a chance to avoid needless bloodshed.

Delong’s instincts prove right when he spots one of Marady’s men, Pinto Charles Bronson, and realizes the casino robbery is already underway. He makes a desperate move, escaping through an attic to reach the heart of the confrontation. From his hidden vantage, he disrupts the robbery, and the fleeing gang members are quickly rounded up by the townspeople, partly because Delong had tampered with their saddlery earlier to throw the robbers off balance. In the final gunplay, Marady misreads the situation and believes Delong is out of bullets, a fatal miscalculation that seals his downfall.