Whispering Smith Reviews

A big box-office success for Ladd, WHISPERING SMITH was billed by Paramount as his first western and his first picture in color. He was cast as a real-life, gun-toting railroad detective whose low voice and quiet demeanor earned him the monicker "Whispering Smith." The film opens with a spectacular credit sequence over a great western panorama--green valleys, rolling hills, snow-capped mountains, and a powerful blue sky--into which Ladd rides. A gun enters the frame, takes aim at Ladd, and shoots his horse out from under him. We then learn from a group of railroad men of the legend of "Whispering Smith," the detective in charge of investigating a recent rash of train robberies. Ladd hops a train. Before long, bandits strike. He is wounded in the battle that ensues and is knocked from the train, landing unconscious on the ground. He is found by Marshall, who brings him home to her ranch where she tends to his wounds. It turns out that she is a past love of Ladd, a secret which they both keep from her husband, Preston, a railway employee who keeps bad company. Preston offers to let Ladd stay on as ranch foreman, but Ladd declines. Instead, he begins investigating Preston, who suspiciously lives a comfortable ranch life on a meager railway salary. Before long, Preston is caught looting a wrecked railway car and is fired from his job, turning to a full-time life of crime as a member of the train-robbing Rebstock gang led by Crisp. Preston gets deeper in trouble when one of Crisp's gang, the devilish Faylen, murders a postal employee and then kills Crisp. Ladd tracks Preston back to the ranch, where they exchange gunfire. Ladd fills Preston with lead and is about to tend to the wound when the dying man pulls a concealed gun. Before he can squeeze the trigger, however, he collapses and dies, leaving Ladd to resume his past romance with Marshall. Predating Ladd's quintessential western hero, SHANE, by five years, WHISPERING SMITH is strikingly similar with his calm but dangerous demeanor, his devotion to friends, and his gentleness with women and children. While this was Ladd's first color feature, as Paramount boasted, it was not his first western. Ladd had appeared eight years earlier as a bit player in LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS and IN OLD MISSOURI. A number of the characters in this film are based on real people. Ladd's is drawn from lawman Joe Lefors, while Preston's loosely parallels that of notorious badman Butch Cassidy, and Faylen, playing the albino, Whitey DuSang, is re-creating one of the worst killers of the Old West, Harvey Logan, who followed Cassidy in a series of spectacular train and bank holdups committed by the infamous Wild Bunch.