The Ghost of Tom Mix

Producer J.D. Shaw wants to bring old Joshua Johnson out of retirement to star in a Western. Johnson, once a man who walked tall through Tombstone, now walks with a slight stoop through the corridors of an actors’ retirement home. Physically, he’s fine; it’s just his soul that’s heading for the last round-up.

On location, a hundred miles from the nearest town, the unit has set up in an ecological disaster area. The collection of trucks and trailers looks as out of place as a space capsule on the moon.

Shaw had hoped the whole thing could be shot in six weeks, but things have gone wrong. The heat is debilitating, and the old Indian wrangler, Horse-in-Clouds, is a disaster—a full-blooded Kiowa who has been shot off more horses than he has had sober mornings. And Josh is slowly losing it. Sometimes he stops halfway through a sentence and stares blankly ahead. It could be the heat, or maybe it’s just the contradiction between the West Josh helped to create and the modern Western, with its slow-motion violence and explicit sex scenes featuring the Italian leading lady, fresh from a bit part in Roman Games.

“It ain’t like the old days,” pleads Josh to the glowing spectre of Tom Mix. “I want to live by the code, but they want me to curse and shoot fellas in the back.”

But Tom just frowns in disappointment. “A man’s got to make a stand for what he believes in, Josh.”

Before he can answer, Tom fades away—only to return to haunt the old cowpoke.

“It is only when a man is confronted with violence that you see his true worth,” justifies the director as he defends the film’s gratuitous violence. But those words return to haunt him when Josh finally flips, becoming an avenging angel, firing real bullets, and reliving his 1947 hit Badmen’s Spurs. He wreaks havoc on the crew and challenges the producer to the final shootout. 

They draw…