Robert Horton plays the title role in The Dangerous Days Of Kiowa Jones and in the film has his life changed with a chance encounter with a US Marshal and his prisoners.
It's just one of those days where Horton rides up on a ramshackle prairie house and finds Sal Mineo and Nehemiah Persoff shacked to the frames of a barn and a dead man of Mexican descent at their feet. He's died of a fever and Marshal Gary Merrill makes an appearance then and it's plain he's got that same fever. Before he dies Merrill deputizes Jones and essentially shames him into taking his prisoners for the duly appointed date with the hangman at Fort Smith.
Along the way the three of them pick up Diane Baker who is made up to be a plain jane school teacher which in real life she sure isn't. I'm not quite clear how Baker through in with them even after watching the film. What is clear is that she and Horton get some chemistry percolating.
Horton came along way too late to have been a cowboy hero. On Wagon Train he was one as scout Flint McCullough. But westerns were going out of style when Horton left Wagon Train. Ten years earlier he would have made a fine big screen cowboy hero.
Persoff and Mineo are an interesting contrast. Persoff is a fatalistic gypsy who believes in what the tarot cards are dealt for him. Mineo is a stone cold punk killer in a throwback to the kind of roles that made him a star in the late Fifties.
The Dangerous Days Of Kiowa Jones is an OK made for TV movie that western fans should be pleased with.
It's just one of those days where Horton rides up on a ramshackle prairie house and finds Sal Mineo and Nehemiah Persoff shacked to the frames of a barn and a dead man of Mexican descent at their feet. He's died of a fever and Marshal Gary Merrill makes an appearance then and it's plain he's got that same fever. Before he dies Merrill deputizes Jones and essentially shames him into taking his prisoners for the duly appointed date with the hangman at Fort Smith.
Along the way the three of them pick up Diane Baker who is made up to be a plain jane school teacher which in real life she sure isn't. I'm not quite clear how Baker through in with them even after watching the film. What is clear is that she and Horton get some chemistry percolating.
Horton came along way too late to have been a cowboy hero. On Wagon Train he was one as scout Flint McCullough. But westerns were going out of style when Horton left Wagon Train. Ten years earlier he would have made a fine big screen cowboy hero.
Persoff and Mineo are an interesting contrast. Persoff is a fatalistic gypsy who believes in what the tarot cards are dealt for him. Mineo is a stone cold punk killer in a throwback to the kind of roles that made him a star in the late Fifties.
The Dangerous Days Of Kiowa Jones is an OK made for TV movie that western fans should be pleased with.
