It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This film show us a war that is supposedly over but some non conformed rebels are still using their uniforms and becoming bandits to survive. When a misunderstanding happens and a boy is killed there seems to be no way out for them. The importance of a woman, Nora (Ruth Roman), who even though her son is dead, makes all efforts for a peaceful solution, is the remarkable aspect of this western. What looks like a plain B movie at the beginning gradually becomes more meaningful, directed by Alfred Werker (Three Hours to Kill, The Last Posse). John Payne (Willoughby) and John Carrol Naish (Mason) are the heads of family and Ben Cooper (Gray Mason) is excellent as the son with good feelings. The tragedy of the film is caused by a boy using toy guns. In the fifties toy guns used to be popular, probably even more in the years before. Good thing you do not see them anymore.

Hollywood made a slew of so called "B" westerns during the 1950s, mainly black and white 80 minutes jobs meant to fill a second feature at the local theatre.....when I saw the top notch actors in this film I figured it would be worth watching and it was very good....John Payne, J. Carrol Nash, John Smith, Ben Johnson and Ruth Roman round out a very solid cast.....in a lot of these so called B westerns there were a lot of films about confederate soldiers on the run rummaging and pillaging so the plot was somewhat familiar....what set the tone for this film was the slaying of a young boy who was gunned down by a rebel coward, who thought that a cap gun going off was the real thing and he turned around in an instant and shot the kid dead...what follows are real character studies of the rebel family and their self righteousness about how a member of their family killed a little boy and the intense manhunt led by John Payne, the boy's father....Ruth Roman plays a very compassionate, caring mother while grieving for her dead son and tries to instill logic and a level head into her husband Payne who starts to lose his cool nearly every moment in the film.....Strange part to the movie when one of the rebel band is rounded up by Payne and brought to his house not knowing he was one of the rebel band....questions follow and soon Payne realizes his "guest" is part of the family that killed his son....a mob scene follows as usual and soon law and order is restored....in the end Payne nails the real killer (John Smith) in a knife fight in a barn as he tries to escape town....his father, J. Carrol Nash forgives Payne in the end for his son's cowardice..... Payne is reunited with his wife who was at the breaking point with her husband's blood thirst for revenge.....a solid, very worthwhile western, considering it was made rather cheaply by a small studio Bel Air productions..but released by United Artists.....

Rebel In Town is set in the post Civil War west where the surrender at Appomattox hasn't ended conflict in the minds of some. One of those is John Payne who was a Union Army major in the war, but now has settled back on his ranch with wife Ruth Roman and son Bobby Clark. Payne feels we've got a big law and order problem with a lot of former Confederates turning outlaws to survive and is the first to volunteer for any posse to track them down.But when the Mason family, J. Carrol Naish and his four sons come riding into town for supplies it's a recipe for trouble. When little Bobby Clark shoots at the family from behind with a cap pistol, one of the Masons turns and returns fire killing the kid instantly. The Masons beat it out of town.The rest of Rebel In Town concerns the actions of Payne and the rest of the town in apprehending the criminals and the Mason family who are torn with what to do.The Masons are a whole lot like the Hannesseys in The Big Country. The budget for the B western Rebel In Town is a fraction of what The Big Country was, yet William Wyler seems to have been influenced by the relationship of family patriarch Naish with the most reckless of his sons John Smith in creating the characters that Burl Ives and Chuck Connors played in The Big Country.As for Payne, he's in his vengeance quest persona, something not seen in him since his highly rated performance in the noir classic Kansas City Confidential.Rebel In Town is no frills B western with some nice performances from the cast. John Payne's fans will like his work here.

Most Westerns use one of a limited number of standard plots, but it's hard to categorize this movie. Its setting -- a small frontier town -- merely serves as a background for a drama of revenge and reconciliation which could easily be recast as a Greek tragedy. Its central question certainly rises above the usual concerns of Westerns: can the sacrifice of one man's guilty son make up for the death of another man's innocent son?Or, as J. Carroll Naish puts it in the last scene: "What the sons of some men do to the sons of others ... there's a tragedy of the world."John Payne, (sporting a mustache), gets top billing here but his character is absent from many of the movie's key scenes. Ben Cooper actually plays the main character as his feelings of guilt over the death of an innocent boy propels most of the plot. Ruth Roman seems miscast as a frontier wife and mother. The less said about the two juvenile performers, (Bobby Clark and Mimi Gibson), the better.There's a vivid flogging scene in the movie's second half in which J. Carroll Naish takes a whip to the back of his son, John Smith, who's tied shirtless to a tree. This may be the American cinema's only major whipping in which a father strikes his own son.