This might have made it under the wire as a passable comedy in 1950 but seen today (yesterday, in fact, on British TV) it is just this side of dire. Husband and wife team Richard Sale and Mary Loos (neice of Anita) came up with one of those 'train in trouble' plots that enjoyed a mini vogue in the fifties (see: It Happened To Jane) that runs out of steam (pun intended) long before halfway. There's no real chemistry between Dan Dailey and Ann Baxter and Rory Calhoun who usually played the good guy phoned it in as the heavy attempting to prevent the inaugural run of a train in Colarado. In 1950, of course, no one noticed Marilyn Monroe (or Jack Elam, for that matter) but now they're using her name to promote this piece of cheese. As one of Connie Gilchrist's 'ladies' she just about registers. Will Wright (coincidentally featured on the same channel two days earlier in the same slot as the killer in The Blue Dahlia) is lumbered with a cross between a tough sheriff and a would-be comedian and fails to make a decent fist of either. Ironically Richard Sale went on to write a half-decent novel, The Oscar, an expose of the manipulations surrounding the annual Academy Award but this entry wouldn't have got within sniffing distance of a gong.
Review of A Ticket to Tomahawk
