Want to win a bet with your know it all movie buff buddies? ask them in which film does Charlton Heston play a swaggering gun-nut who has violent and voluble exchanges with Michael Moore, but actually comes off the better! The answer is PONY EXPRESS, a rip-roaring Technicolor western made in 1953. Heston plays Buffalo Bill and Michael Moore, a 1950's second feature actor, is Rance Hastings who plans to split California from the Union and sabotage the newly formed Overland Pony Express mail route. After winning a battle with some Indian braves, Heston even gives us a precursor to his "Cold dead hands" NRA salute, as he taunts the very caucasian-looking Indians. Jerry Hopper, the director, later directed a few episodes of the TV hit "The Rifleman", which starred another Chuck with a gun, Chuck Connors. PONY EXPRESS, like SECRET OF THE INCAS, Hopper's next feature film, also includes a bath tub scene involving the red-headed leading lady who is engaged in dialogue about her different culture/background with the second female lead. The final few moments of PONY EXPRESS are great fun, the express riders gallop from post to post in frenzied fashion, Heston has the obligatory gun fight, and then rides off into the sunset, to a rousing musical score. A perfect mythical ending to a tongue-in-cheek western that upholds the legend of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickock. The movie finishes with the words of Abraham Lincoln, "A grateful people acknowledges with pride it's debt to the riders of the Pony Express. Their unfailing courage, their matchless stamina knitted together the ragged edges of a rising nation. Their achievements can only be equalled ... never excelled."
Review of Pony Express
