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Because mineowner Stooglehammer's (Dick Elliott) silvermines way out West
are continuously robbed by the mysterious Silver Bandit, & Stooglehammer
thinks the bandit is just a myth, he sends his nerdy bookkeeper Spade Cooley
out to the West to investigate. Of course at first the Western folks at
first think very little of the city boy & call him - rather pejoratively -
fancy pants, but when he shows he can play a mean violine (in real life, Cooley
was a popular Country-&-Western bandleader/violinist), he wins some of
their respect, & the attentions of Molly (Virginia Jackson), sister of the
mine's foreman Frank (Clyde Jackman) ... much to the dismay of one of the
mine's employees, Sam (Bob Gilbert), who has designs on Molly himself &
desperately tries to shed suspicion on Spade, to a point where you might want
to ask "is it possible that Sam is the Silver Bandit ?" ... to cut a
long story short, yup, possible. 'In the meantime though Spade finds a cave
full of silver, but fails to make the connections between the silver & the
bandit, rather believing it is the treasure of the Spanish conquistadores from
some 400 years ago ... Then Stooglehammer himself shows up - rather
inexplicably - fires Frank - rather inexplicably - & makes Spade the new
foreman of the mine ... which somewhat spoils Spade's chances with Molly ... Spade
however thinks this a good time to rebel against his boss & to show off
with his tresasre of the conquistadores ... even if his lofty dreams are
somewhat smashed when the treasure is identified as the bandit's loot. But
once all the stolen silver is found, nobody seems to be in too much of a hurry
to secure it, so soon the Silver Bandit loads it all onto his wagon & tries
to make a getaway, but rather by chance, Spade Cooley stops him, unmasks
him to be Sam, arrests him, &
gets the girl in the end, too, along with a handsome reward. Spade
Cooley, a popular bandleader of his time, had had small parts in many (musical)
B-Westerns in the 40's, most often playing the bandleader, but by the end of
the 1940's, the B-Western was pretty much in rapid decline ... which was when
Cooley (rather inexplicably) decided to take center stage & play the lead
in a trio of Westerns, Silver Bandit, The Kid from Gower Gulch
& Border Outlaws (all released 1950, but several sources claim their
date of production might be 1947). Neither of these films was a success, &
they were quickly forgotten, even though Cooley was a star in the musical
arena. Later Cooley would gain another sort of notoriety, when he killed his
wife before the eyes of his 14-year old daughter, in 1961. Silver Bandit itself
is a cheap piece of Western cinema with an incoherent storyline & a
deficite of action or excitement ... but then again, it was done as a comedy,
with Cooley doing an ironic take on the Western hero. This sort-of parody does
of course not make Silver Bandit a good film, but it makes it watchable,
even mildly amusing at times.
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