YELLOWSTONE KELLY *

You might be forgiven for thinking you were about to watch a 1959 version of "Brokeback Mountain" as Edd Byrnes eyes up Clint Walker's trapper on a riverboat before delivering his chat-up line. Of course, I'm reading a subtext here that obviously doesn't exist. In this thoroughly innocent Boy's Own western from director Gordon Douglas, Walker, built like a brick shithouse, is "Yellowstone Kelly" and Byrne is the boy who has taken a fancy to him, (a thoroughly innocent fancy, I might add). They team up, setting up house together in Indian territory, where they run up against John Russell's somewhat wooden, effete Indian chief and his hot-headed nephew, (a very unlikely Ray Danton).

This is a good old-fashioned film, if a little top-heavy in male bonding with too many actors who are fundamentally nothing but eye-candy and it's beautifully shot in some pretty spectacular scenery. There's not much in the way of plot and the script, by Burt Kennedy, no less, has every cliche in the book but it's never less than entertaining in a mindless sort of way.