Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Just perfect...

Good movie but grossly overrated

The acting in this movie is really good.

Gordon Douglas' "Fort Dobbs" is a sturdy, black & white, Warner Brothers' western that provided Clint Walker with his first starring role. Previously, Walker had appeared in several movies in supporting roles and starred in the television series "Cheyenne." Walker plays a rugged westerner who killed another man for beating up his girlfriend. Gar Davis doesn't know his way around women and he pays the price when he latches onto a no-good dame who plays him for a fool. When our hero is out of town, his darling is loving it up with any man she can attract with her wiles. She is badly beaten up by one man, and Gar goes after him to give him similar treatment. Things get a little out of hand for Gar and he has to kill his adversary after the ruffian tries to kill him with a shotgun. At this point, our hero lights out with a posse pursuing him straight into the desert where the Comanches have decided to hit the war path. The pugnacious Native Americans have killed one man with an arrow in the back. Gar swaps coats and dumps the corpse over a cliff with his coat on so that Largo Sheriff (Russ Conway) and his men initially believe that they have found Gar's corpse. To throw the posse off her trial, Gar lets them take his horse after they find his body. Later that evening, Gar tries to steal a horse from a nearby ranch, but Chad Gray (Richard Eyer of "The Desperate Hours") wounds him with his breechloader. When he recovers, Gar admits to Celia Gray (Virginia Mayo of "Colorado Territory") that he was indeed trying to steal a horse. He has seen the Comanches on the war path and persuades Celia and her son Chad to accompany him to the nearest cavalry fort: Fort Dobbs.Douglas doesn't waste time in this lean 90-minute sagebrusher, and he has a good script by future director Burt Kennedy of "Return of the Seven" and "Red Mountain" scribe George W. George. This represented Kennedy's fifth oater. He penned it between writing assignments for Budd Boetticher. Kennedy wrote "The Tall T" before he inked this screenplay and followed it up with an uncredited rewrite on "Buchanan Rides Alone." The screenplay is as lean and mean as this 90 western. Ace lenser William Clothier captures the west in all of its savage beauty and often relies on perspective shots. Brian Keith plays a sleazy cowboy named Clett who is heading to Santa Fe to sell a bunch of Henry repeating rifles. When he intervenes on Gar's behalf, Clett (Keith) demonstrates the ferocity of the 15 shot repeating rifle. Later, when the townspeople flee Largo, they head to Fort Dobbs, and they are in for a surprise. The last man that Gar expected to see at the outpost was none other than the sheriff of Largo. The ending is interesting. Composer Max Steiner of "King Kong" fame furnishes a robust orchestral score that highlight the dramatic revelations. "Fort Dobbs" is a good western, and Douglas borrows from an earlier western "Only the Valiant."

I think Clint Walker (or his agent) had thoughts of being the next John Wayne. This movie is very similar to "Hondo" 1953 which starred John Wayne. Stranger with a past shows up at a farmhouse occupied by a woman and her son, but the husband is missing. Stranger is attracted to woman and becomes a surrogate dad for the son.The writing in this movie is not as good as in "Hondo", which had moments of pure poetry.There's no romance between Walker and Mayo; Walker doesn't even try. Why, I don't know. Virginia Mayo is a beautiful woman though older than Walker. Walker does take his shirt off, which was probably required in his contract for every movie he ever made. Maybe she should have made a play for him. Other reviewers have said that it might have been unseemly for Walker & Mayo to have a romance, but Wayne got right down to business in "Hondo". He told that woman how she smelled and how he could find her in the dark. And that was before her husband died. Wayne didn't even have to take his shirt off.Ironically, the charismatic bad guy played by Brian Keith, makes a very frank play for Mayo.Finally, the Indians here are not given the depth of characterization they had in "Hondo". They're more like very bad weather.The boy, is well played by Richard Eyer. Unlike most child actors, he's not annoying.This could have been a much better movie. I've seen all the actors do better in other movies, and the director Gordon Douglas, though not a great director, has done better movies. Perhaps if Walker's part had been written with less politeness and more menace, it would have been a more interesting movie.

In the late 1950's, Warner Brothers was the studio responsible for more westerns on television than any other production company in town (the town being Hollywood, of course!) They made stars out Clint Walker, Ty Hardin, James Garner, Jack Kelly and a host of others who appeared in their half hour and then one hour western dramas, which later became parodies of themselves, as the long running Maverick will prove.Here, they rework the "Hondo" plot (lone gunman rescues a woman and her son after finding her husband dead) and spend two thirds of the movie getting themselves to Fort Dobbs. I'll stop there, because actually, under the considered hand of director Gordon Douglas, this is actually an okay film. Walker gives a very quiet performance but it's his character, so you buy it. Virginia Mayo and Richard Eyer give better performances, one scene with the kid especially cool-- and the standard cowboys vs. Indians plot is made a bit more edgy by the presence of Brian Keith as the bad guy. He doesn't show up until the 30 minute mark, but he steals the show and has a great time playing the bad guy.The final scene is laughable ( not in a good way, sorry to say) but prior to that, the action is okay, inter cut with some out takes from "The Searchers", which don't match the Fort Dobbs footage at all.Contains all the usual Warner Brothers sound effects, gun shots and bodies hitting the ground you've heard hundreds of times. Also, the music was by Max Steiner, which notched it up to a 7 for me.If you get a chance, give it a look. VERY LITTLE studio work, a whole lot out OUT DOOR SHOOTING, another high point.

This, the first of three westerns which Clint Walker made with director Gordon Douglas, tried to expand Clint's career beyond his "Cheyenne" TV series. However, box office results indicated no great urge, on the part of audiences, to see in theaters what they could watch for free in their living rooms.In its own modest way, "Fort Dobbs" is a worthy "B" western which tells its story in a competent fashion. The problem lies in the casting of Virginia Mayo as the "damsel in distress." She looks noticeably older than Clint, there's a lack of chemistry between them, and the fact that her husband has just been killed makes any new romance appear "unseemly." Since the relationship between these two leads is the key relationship in the movie, its failure to "work" makes "Fort Dobbs" depend too much on peripheral assets.Although Clint only removes his shirt once in the movie, most of the ads and posters for "Fort Dobbs" spotlighted this prime bit of beefcake, as if the movie had been filmed in "Torso-Scope" or "Pecs-a-rama" or "Chest-o-vision."