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14 year old T.J. (Clay O'Brien) has just been released from juvenile
detention, and he's pretty much caught shoplifting by drifter Mackintosh
(Roy Rogers) right away - but Mackintosh figures the boy deserves a
chance, so he provides him with an alibi and offers him a ride. Soon the
two part ways again, but when Mackintosh has to save T.J. from a bunch of
fists of a couple of bulles, he figures it best to take the boy under his
wing for the time being ... Soon enough, Mackintosh finds a job at
Webster's (Walter Barnes) ranch, and because he seemingly is able to do
anything thrown at him, Webster likes him and even lets him and the boy
have a cabin on his premises. Of course, soon enough, Webster's other
employees get a little jealous of the young (well, retirement age,
actually) upstart Mackintosh, especially Jenkins (Billy Green Bush), who
doesn't like it that Mackintosh gets a bit friendly (in the true and only
sense of the word) with his wife (Joan Hackett), so soon enough the two
duke it out in public, and once separated threaten each other's lives -
nothing to be taken too seriously in the heat of the fight, actually ...
until Jenkins winds up dead, killed in a fight. Webster's men, mostly
friends of Jenkins now set out to lynch Mackintosh, who actually had
nothing to do with it, it was a ranchhand named Phipps (Andrew Robinson)
who lusted after Jenkins' wife ... but Mackintosh's hide is only saved in
the very last second when it's learned that Phipps has hanged himself but
confessed to everything in his farewell letter... The very last
feature film starring vintage cowboy hero Roy Rogers (he did a few
TV-appearances after that though), and in a way his role seems to be
tailor-made for him: He's the infallible do-gooder in the beginning who
turns out the infallible do-gooder in the end, and still, against all
odds, he has done good during the progress of the movie. Now this concept
worked in the 1940's and 50's respectively, when Rogers was a big
B-Western hero and later TV cowboy, but the concept as such was already a
little antiquated in 1975 ... and yet, this is not the main problem of Mackintosh
and T.J., the main problem quite simply is that for the longest time,
the film simply refuses to tell a story, any kind of narrative conflict
seems to be totally absent from the script that seems to be focused solely
on presenting Mackintosh as a simply great and infallible man you would
simply love to look after a teenage runaway ... or your teenage kids in
fact, runaways or not. Anyways, this character of a virtual saint really
stands in the way of any kind of narrative development, and when in the
last 15 (!) minutes of the movie the whole murder story is finally
launched under great narrative stress, it seems as far-fetched as it
probably was when writing this, and is definitely one of these
too-little-too-late moments. Now Roy Rogers and his die-hard fans might
probably have liked this as a swan-song entirely in his favour in a time
when the world of the Western genre has long moved on (and I won't judge
if it was for better or worse here), but for everyone else, this simply
wasn't a good movie ...
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