Tony Mastroianni Review Collection
Jim Brown Scores in Hollywood Game
Cleveland Press March 27, 1964
"Guns of the Rio Conchos," 20th-Century Fox's high budget western, will be completed in a few weeks but will be released in August.
Studio officials admit that there's more than coincidence involved in releasing the film at the outset of the pro football season.
This is the movie in which Jim Brown, fullback with the Cleveland Browns, costars with Stuart Whitman, Richard Boone and Tony Franciosa.
All of them are on location right now in Moab, Utah. They arrived there last Friday for 20 days of filming. After that there will be another 20 days of studio work before their chores are finished.
PRODUCER DAVID WEISBART says that Brown is potentially a fine actor. His part is more than a walk-on, the usual procedure for sports celebrities appearing in movies.
Brown is on camera for practically the entire movie. He portrays a sergeant in the U. S. cavalry. Whitman is his commanding officer and the pair is trying to intercept a load of rifles that was hijacked from the Army and is being smuggled to the Apaches.
BOONE HAS THE ROLE of an ex-Confederate soldier whose family was wiped out by Indians and is now a psychopathic Indian killer. Franciosa is a Mexican renegade who provides both comedy and romance in the movie.
The four pose as renegades with gunpowder to sell to the Indians. Brown, in addition to having a hefty share of the script, also figures in a good deal of the action.
There's a fight with Mexican and Indian bandits, another with the Apaches, and a thunderous conclusion in which he and Whitman ride a wagon load of gunpowder into the Apache cache of rifles.
