But gorgeous it is, and for that reason alone Olive Films' Blu-ray is worth getting. The image is so startlingly good at times it's easy to give the bad script a pass to some extent, sit back, and instead take in all the pretty scenery and colorful studio backlots.

During the Civil War, ranching partners Kip Davis (McCrea), Charlie Burns (Zachary Scott), and Lee Price (Douglas Kennedy) find their Three Bell Ranch plundered and burned to the ground by notorious guerilla raider Luke Cottrell (Victor Jory), a southern mercenary working with the Union Army.

The three head to the Union-occupied Texas border town of Edenton and find Cottrell, whom Kip beats to a pulp. This impresses saloon singer Rouge de Lisle (Alexis Smith), who hires Kip to transport her wagon of "imported furniture," which Kip assumes is actually loaded with hidden contraband. Kip nonetheless accepts Rouge's offer, jumps onto the buckboard and rides all of 20 feet before his wagon collides with a U.S. Army vehicle, turns over and box loads of rifles spill out for all to see. Incredibly, threatened with the hangman's noose, Kip quite inexplicably remains loyal to Rogue, refusing to identify her as the person who hired him.

Lucky for Kip, Rouge and Charlie ambush the stage shipping Kip's butt off to prison. They join forces for a new dicey venture, smuggling guns for the Confederacy from Matamoros, Mexico across the border into Brownsville, Texas.

The crux of the story has Kip itching to reunite with Lee (who has gone off and joined the Confederate Army) so that the threesome can restart their ranch as soon as he's earned a big enough stake via the gunrunning. Charlie, however, finds his new job far more lucrative and personally rewarding while Lee, a loyal Reb through and through, has no interest in returning to Three Bell until the South emerges victorious.

For this reason Kip comes off as incredibly blind if not flat-out stupid for most of the film. Though Lee is out of the picture much of the time, Kip fails to recognize Charlie has transformed into a morally repugnant mercenary, one even willing to murder Confederate troops that get in his way. Kip also fails to grasp the pleas of his devoted fiancée, Deb Miller (Dorothy Malone), who would rather stay at her post as a Confederate Army nurse than listen to Kip's pipe dream about restarting the ranch when he's obviously clinging to a past that's gone with the wind. So deaf is Kip that she gradually falls in love with Lee, toward which Kip can feel only resentment. Rouge, for her part, all but throws herself at clueless Kip, who again fails to take the none-too-subtle hint. Not a bright hero, this.

South of St. Louis has a lot of action, but too often Kip is unable to control Charlie or his duplicitous lieutenant, Slim (Bob Steele). One such scene has Kip and his band, disguised as Union soldiers, stupidly wearing their stolen uniforms even while riding back in Confederate territory where, understandably, they're mistaken for the enemy. The only time when Kip takes the bull by the horns is that early scene when he beats up Cottrell, but even that is spoiled by sloppy stunt work. The man doubling Victory Jory doesn't even have the same hair color. Another problem is Max Steiner's score (and Smith's songs, dubbed by Bonnie Lou Williams), overrun as it is with 19th century standards ("Yankee Doodle," "Dixie," etc.).

On the plus side are a few of the supporting performances. It's nice to see small, wiry Bob Steele playing a good role in such a major film; steely-eyed Steele usually toiled away in B-Westerns. Jory, playing a character apparently modeled after William Quantrill (but on the wrong side), is appropriately threatening and as authentic-looking as Smith is not. She's much too glamorous for the Old West, with elaborate costume changes every two minutes. Alan Hale (Sr.) has some funny business as a saloonkeeper, and both Al Bridge and Holmes Hebert have nice if small parts.

The film has a handful of good ideas, like the little bells the three men wear on their spurs, used to good effect in the film's climactic shootout. But even this visually arresting sequence is squandered by a completely unbelievable character transformation that comes out of nowhere.

Video & Audio

Despite some (mostly red) speckling here and there, South of St. Louis, filmed in three-strip Technicolor, looks outstanding, so rich its colors and sharp its image that one can count the freckles on both Dorothy Malone and Alexis Smith. The image is likewise so clean and nearly perfect it almost, as the saying goes, looks like it could have been shot yesterday. The mono audio (English only, no subtitles) is also well above average. No Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

Though handsome, South of St. Louis's screenplay is so poor it's surprising a star of the caliber of Joel McCrea didn't insist on major changes before agreeing to make it. The Blu-ray is beautiful but, as Westerns go, this is no classic. Nonetheless, for genre fans and because of the high-grade transfer, this just barely qualifies as Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.