It don't mean a Jing
When Parson Endicott (Arch Johnson) is shot and the saloon ends up on fire, Marshal Jim Crown (Stuart Whitman) goes after the guilty man, Jing McQueen (Tim O'Kelly) who readily admits to having done wrong and is too dumb to realise how much trouble he is in. But Jing is the son of local rancher Mike McQueen (Pat Hingle) and when the Parson recovers he decides he isn't going to press charges. It leads to the saloon owner and some angry people setting up a lynching party. And then there is the arrival of Wiley Harpe (Steve Forrest) in town, and old friend of Crown's who needs work and thought he was getting the marshal's job.
So here we go with another episode from "Cimarron Strip" which now tends to be broken up and shown as movie shorts here in the UK. And "Broken Wing" comes early on in the first series as Jim Crown has not been Marshal for long and Wiley Harpe arrives in town believing he was going to be made Marshal and seems ready to stir things up. There is more going on in "Broken Wing" than that as we also have Endicott refusing to press charges whilst Jing is bullied by his father but the basics of the movie are local businessman Kilgallen stirring up trouble for Marshal Crown who has to be on his game to outsmart them.
Beyond that, well in truth there isn't a great deal which considering this was I believe episode 3 in the "Cimarron Strip" series seems rather strange. I expected more character building than what is presented and whilst it doesn't make it weak it does make it ordinary. It is the same when it comes to what action there is as whilst Whitman plays Crown as the confident law abiding marshal and does so in a nicely heroic way the scenes of gun play and so on kind of let it down in how ordinary they are.
What this all boils down to is that "Broken Wing" is another okay western distraction for those who enjoy the westerns of yesteryear even if it was originally an episode of a TV series. But it all kind of feels routine as if it is just another version of a story which was done 30 years earlier.
