Tonight I dove back into my William Castle collection for another Western. I figured that whichever of the seven remaining movies I chose would likely be better than last night's Single Thumber, "Jesse James vs. The Daltons", which didn't even have Jesse James.
"Uranium Boom" (1956) sounded like a good title, so I popped it in the player and sat down to give Castle a second chance as a director of Westerns. Right from the get go, he didn't disappoint.
A car drives down a two lane road lined with eucalyptus trees and turns onto a boulevard that appears to be the center of town. The driver pulls over and parks. The town isn't big, there is only a cafe, a hotel a barbershop and an assessors' office. This is a mining town, we are in the flats of the Colorado Rocky Mountains and........wait a minute.
No we aren't. Lemme rewind to the beginning.....
Okay, I just rewound the dvd. I think about a minute and a half had elapsed, but let's look at it again, because the setting looked familiar. Okay, here again is the car driving down the eucalyptus lined road. Here he is turning and parking. The camera is panning across the intersection as the driver crosses the street, and.......there it is! A brief shot of the old Chatsworth Elementary School sign. We have seen that sign, and this location - complete with the same cafe - in an episode of "Highway Patrol", starring Broderick Crawford. If you were to take his name and play it in a round of "Combination Celebrities", a game I invented many years ago, you would wind up with Matthew Broderick Crawford. But he would make a wimpy star for "Highway Patrol", so forget it.
Just for the record, though, the best Combo Celeb I ever came up with was Bob Dylan McDermot Mulroney. Yeah, I know there's two "T"s for Dylan McDermott and only one in Dermot Mulroney, but I think you can cut me some slack there. Right? The game began in the late 1980s, partially out of an obscuration and resultant blending of two popular television actors, due mainly to corresponding looks and hairstyles but also because of a similarity in names. First there was a guy named Jameson Parker, who co-starred in "Simon And Simon", and then there was his "co-opposite", Parker Stevenson, who didn't have a hit show per se, but was all over the place on network TV at the time. Jameson Parker had good looks, blond blow dried hair in a shag cut, and was of medium stature. Parker Stevenson on the other hand had good looks, brown blow dried hair in the same shag cut, and was of taller stature. They looked the same, in contrasting ways, but the important point was that they shared the name "Parker" as a connector. Thus the first Combination Celebrity was born, circa 1988 : "Jameson Parker Stevenson".
It was no joke, because these two guys were interchangeable, even though one was tall and dark, the other short and blonde. Over the years I occasionally tried to create other Combo Celebs, though none were ever again so indistinguishable from one another as the original. I then went by names alone, and Bob Dylan McDermot Mulroney was the largest element I was able to complete, as long as you are willing to spot me that extra "T" we talked about earlier. Anyhow, try to do some Combination Celebrities if you have the time, because it could be important in the future.
And now back to "Uranium Boom".
As the driver steps onto the sidewalk, the camera finishes it's pan and we see another brief shot of a street sign in the background. Press "pause"! Now get up close to the screen and look closely to make sure. Yep, it says "Devonshire St". We are not in Colorado but in Chatsworth, California, at the intersection of Devonshire and Topanga Canyon, just a couple hundred yards from where the entrance to Chatsworth Park is now located. The elementary school sign is a marker, because though the frame is now slightly different, it still looks basically the same and is set in it's original angle. And Devonshire St., now a major business and residential thoroughfare, was once a country road lined with eucalyptus trees. Man, I love to see how things looked in the old days, so in "Uranium Boom" William Castle has me hooked from the opening scene. :)
This time we have recognizable actors, too. Dennis Morgan and William Talman ("The Hitch Hiker"!) co-star as two hopefuls who have arrived at the uranium boomtown simultaneously. Hotel rooms are in short supply at Devonshire and Topanga, so they fist fight it out to see who gets the one available room, which, as the script would have it, they end up sharing as pals and mining partners.
The movie takes place in the present time of 1956, when the development of atomic energy systems was at a high point. Uranium was the "gold" of the moment. Lots of men set out to stake claims, at least according to the movie. At any rate, the partnership of Morgan and Talman sets out to find a mother lode of yellow dirt. Along the highway they pick up an Indian who swears he knows where the Uranium vein is located. The trio has to fend off other miners to claim it, but they eventually do after some mishaps.
Soon they are all very rich. But something happens while Dennis Morgan (the handsome one) is down at the assessor's office establishing their claim. He meets Talman's girl, the beautiful Patricia Medina, and before you know it he has married her. There goes the mining partnership. Now the men are enemies.
Fast forward a few months and Dennis Morgan is filthy rich, living in an amazing wood and glass rectangular Mid Century Modern with his stolen wife. He now runs all of the mines on the mountainside and is looking to expand.
But soon his karma will kick in, and that is all I will tell you.
At a mere 68 minutes, "Uranium Boom" has all the story that last night's movie lacked. It also has great locations. Besides the central Chatsworth town, you also have a desert mountain campground in Cantil, California doubling as the Rocky Mountains. I had never heard of Cantil, so I Googled it and it is located just north of Edwards Air Force Base, off the 14 Highway. Man, I would love to drive up there and will do so one day.
All in all, a very solid effort from William Castle on the second try. You can only consider it a Western in the modern sense because it takes place in 1956 and has Jeeps instead of horses and uranium instead of gold, but it does have a lot of great desert scenery that looks great in black and white.
Two Thumbs Up this time, with extra special bonus points for using the Devonshire/Topanga location.
Man I wish the Valley was still semi-rural. It hasn't been for about 50 years now, I know, but it sure was awesome when it was. You can still see small pockets of the past if you look hard enough, though, mostly by paying attention to the older trees you notice as you drive around.
That's all for tonight. See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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