The man who financed this picture was born Krekor Ohanian to Armenian immigrant parents in Fresno, raised the entire $117,000 budget by going to friends in the Armenian-American community, and billed himself “Touch Connors” because his agent thought it suited the era better than his given name. He plays the villain. Eleven years later, as Mike Connors, he’d become Joe Mannix — eight seasons, six straight Golden Globe nominations, one of the defining detective roles of 1970s television. In 1956 he was a 31-year-old actor convincing his Armenian community in Fresno to bankroll a western so he could get his own production credit, and the result is the film you’re looking at now.
The script was written, in the words of its author, “very quickly” — Charles B. Griffith grew up in a radio family and never learned that screenplays were supposed to take a long time. Within five years he’d write A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) for Roger Corman and become, by several critics’ accounts, the father of American black comedy. In 1956 he was co-writing a $117,000 revenge western for American International Pictures, the studio that put out almost everything he touched in this period.
And the lead, John Agar, was eight years removed from being introduced to America as Shirley Temple’s husband — a 24-year-old Army Air Corps sergeant who married America’s favorite child star in 1945, lost her in a bitter 1949 divorce shaped by his drinking, and spent the years since rebuilding an entire career inside the B-picture genre system: science fiction, horror, and westerns, one after another, with John Wayne occasionally throwing him a supporting role out of old loyalty. Flesh and the Spur sits in the thick of that rebuilding — a 78-minute revenge western, originally titled Dead Man’s Gun, about a cowboy chasing the killer of his twin brother using nothing but a stolen gun as a clue.
Flesh and the Spur 1957 — Movie Overview Table
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | Flesh and the Spur |
| Original Title | Dead Man’s Gun |
| Release Date | September 25, 1956 |
| Country | United States |
| Runtime | 78 minutes |
| Genre | Western, Revenge Drama |
| Language | English |
| Format | Black & White, Sound |
| Director | Edward L. Cahn |
| Screenplay | Charles B. Griffith, Mark Hanna; additional dialogue by Lou Rusoff and Edward L. Cahn |
| Story | Charles B. Griffith, Mark Hanna |
| Producer | Alex Gordon |
| Executive Producer | Touch Connors (Mike Connors), with Charles “Johnny” Lyons Jr. |
| Cinematography | Frederick E. West |
| Editor | Robert S. Eisen |
| Music | Ronald Stein |
| Production Company | Hy Productions |
| Distributor | American International Pictures |
| Budget | $117,000 (raised in part from Connors’s Armenian-American community contacts) |
| Released As | Double feature with Naked Paradise (1957) |
| IMDb Rating | 4.6/10 |
| Public Domain | Yes — freely available to stream and download |
Full Cast — Flesh and the Spur (1957)
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| John Agar | Luke Random / Matthew Random (twin brothers) |
| Marla English | Willow (“Wild Willow”) |
| Touch Connors (Mike Connors) | Stacey Doggett / Stacy Tanner |
| Raymond Hatton | Windy |
| Maria Monay | Lola |
| Joyce Meadows | Rena |
| Kenne Duncan | Cale Tanner |
| Frank Lackteen | Indian Chief |
| Mel Gaines | Blackie |
| Michael Harris | Deputy Marshal |
| Eddie Kafafian | Bud |
| Kermit Maynard | Outlaw |
Touch Connors Bets His Own Money on Himself
Mike Connors’s path to Flesh and the Spur ran through Fresno, the University of California at Los Angeles on a basketball scholarship under coach John Wooden, and a nickname — “Touch” — earned on the court, which agent Henry Wilson decided suited the era better than Krekor Ohanian. Director William Wellman spotted him at a UCLA game and considered his features “expressive” enough to put on screen. By 1952 he’d made his debut, billed as Touch Connors, in the RKO release Sudden Fear.
What he did differently with Flesh and the Spur was take control of the money. Connors served as executive producer and, alongside Charles “Johnny” Lyons Jr., personally raised the film’s $117,000 budget from contacts in the Armenian-American community — the same community he’d later represent publicly through documentary work and fundraising efforts for Armenian causes throughout his life, and whose discrimination he’d faced growing up in Fresno. This wasn’t a star using his leverage to get a producer credit on a studio picture. This was an actor with no leverage yet, building the financing himself, betting that a B-western with him in a supporting villain role would be worth more to his career than waiting for someone else to cast him.
It worked, eventually, though not immediately. Connors spent the rest of the 1950s and much of the 1960s in supporting parts and occasional leads — including an Amalekite herder in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), still billed as Touch Connors, the same year as this film — before Mannix premiered in 1967 and made him one of television’s most recognized faces for the next eight years. He was a cousin of the singer Charles Aznavour. He stayed married to his wife Mary Lou for 67 years. He died in 2017 at 91, having gone from financing his own B-western with Armenian community money to a Golden Globe-winning, four-time-Emmy-nominated television career that none of his collaborators on this picture could have confidently predicted.
Charles B. Griffith — Five Years From Becoming the Father of American Black Comedy
Charles B. Griffith came from a radio family — his grandmother Myrtle Vail created and starred in the soap opera Myrt and Marge, and his mother Donna Damerel appeared on it alongside her. Griffith absorbed the medium’s specific rhythm: write fast, write tight, don’t take the long, deliberative approach that prestige screenwriting was supposed to require. “I got into the habit of writing very quickly without realising it,” he said, “because I was raised in a radio family, I didn’t know that you were supposed to take a long time to write a film script.”
By the time he co-wrote Flesh and the Spur with his regular collaborator Mark Hanna, Griffith was already Roger Corman’s most consistent screenwriter, having received his first credit on Gunslinger (1955) and worked through a string of westerns and quickly-shot genre pictures for Corman and AIP. He hadn’t yet written the two films that would secure his reputation — A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), the latter shot in roughly two days and one night, a production legend that Corman’s own biographer later disputed but that captures the basic spirit of how Griffith and Corman worked. Griffith would go on to be cited by multiple critics as the father of American black comedy. Flesh and the Spur predates that reputation by exactly the amount of time it took him to find the right collaborator and the right premise — a man-eating plant, a hapless loser, and a willingness to make horror genuinely funny without undercutting either element.
Full Plot Summary — Flesh and the Spur (1957)
Stacy Tanner (Touch Connors) is a desperate prisoner who escapes from jail and, almost immediately, murders an innocent farmer named Matthew Random. He steals Random’s horse and his gun — one half of a unique matched pair that Matthew owned jointly with his twin brother Luke — and rides off. When Luke Random (John Agar) finds his twin brother’s body, he doesn’t know who killed him, but he knows two things: the killer is connected to a violent outfit called the Checker Gang, and the killer is now carrying the second half of the brothers’ matched gun set, which makes him identifiable to anyone who knows what to look for.
The Search, Wild Willow, and the Checker Gang
Luke sets off on a revenge mission with the specific kind of obsessive narrowness the genre depends on: he doesn’t need a description of the killer, doesn’t need a name, just needs to find the gun. His path crosses with Willow (Marla English) — known regionally as “Wild Willow,” a character whose own entanglement with the Checker Gang’s territory and operations puts her in a position to either help or complicate Luke’s search, depending on which way her loyalties eventually settle.
As Luke gets closer to the Checker Gang’s actual operation, the film escalates the personal stakes alongside the structural ones — the matched-gun device works as a clean piece of revenge-plot mechanics, giving the audience a concrete, visual marker to track across a film that otherwise relies on the genre’s familiar beats: betrayal, double-crossing within the outlaw ranks, and a final reckoning between Luke and the man holding his brother’s stolen weapon. The resolution arrives once Luke identifies Tanner by the gun itself — the same piece of evidence that opened the investigation closes it.
John Agar — Rebuilding a Career After Shirley Temple
John Agar’s introduction to Hollywood came entirely through Shirley Temple. A friend arranged for the 24-year-old Army Air Corps sergeant to escort the 16-year-old Temple to a Beverly Hills party in 1944; they married in 1945. The marriage put Agar into a five-year acting contract with producer David O. Selznick and a film debut alongside his wife in John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), with John Wayne and Henry Fonda. It also, by most accounts including Temple’s own memoir, put Agar under a level of public scrutiny and personal pressure that contributed directly to a drinking problem severe enough to include a drunk-driving arrest.
Temple filed for divorce in 1949 on grounds of mental cruelty. Selznick dropped Agar from his contract in 1952. What followed was not the end of Agar’s career but a complete relocation of it — into the B-picture genre system, where he became a reliable, recognisable lead across science fiction (Tarantula!, 1955; The Mole People, 1956; Revenge of the Creature, 1955), horror, and westerns like this one. He remarried in 1951, to model Loretta Combs, in a marriage that lasted until her death in 2000. John Wayne — his old Fort Apache co-star — gave him supporting roles in The Undefeated (1969) and Big Jake (1971) decades later, the kind of loyalty gesture that genre actors of Agar’s generation depended on from the stars who’d known them when their names still meant something different.
Flesh and the Spur sits squarely inside that rebuilding period — Agar playing dual roles as both murder victim and avenging twin, in a film whose entire dramatic engine depends on his face being recognisable enough that the audience accepts both halves of the device without confusion. It’s a small, technical demand on an actor, and Agar — eight years and one difficult marriage removed from being introduced to America as someone else’s husband — meets it without visible strain.
Edward L. Cahn — The Editor Who Became Poverty Row’s Most Reliable Director
Edward L. Cahn kind of worked his way into directing via the cutting room. He showed up at Universal as an editor alongside his brother Philip, and then you know, gradually became one of the studio’s top editors. Supposedly he took care of those last minute re-cuts on All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which is a pretty big deal for a young editor to drag along into a directing career. After that, he slid into the director’s chair in 1931, then spent years knocking out low cost crime melodramas and comedies, and by the late 1930s and 1940s he was basically a steady fixture in MGM’s shorts unit, yet somehow stayed largely ignored by film history, even if the output stayed reliable and steady.
Then in the 1950s his directing work really picked up. That’s when he became one of those most dependable hands in the whole B picture system, turning out genre films across science fiction, horror, and westerns at a pace that kept up with the demand for double feature lineups. In the same year as Flesh and the Spur, Cahn also directed The She-Creature (1956). He reused Paul Blaisdell’s monster suit from earlier efforts, and he again teamed up with Alex Gordon and AIP. Across this whole stretch, Cahn’s filmography according to his own biographers, “from the sublime to the absurd”, really fits. Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) folds mobsters, Nazis, zombies, and atomic power into one roughly 70 minute show, while It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) is now sometimes treated by critics as a sort of direct structural fore-runner to Alien (1979).
What Cahn brought to a film like Flesh and the Spur wasn’t visual distinction — nobody hired him for that — but speed, reliability, and an editor’s instinct for keeping a 78-minute revenge plot moving without wasted footage. He shares additional dialogue credit on the screenplay alongside Lou Rusoff, suggesting his hand went beyond just staging Griffith and Hanna’s script. He died in 1963, having directed dozens of pictures that mostly went unreviewed in their own moment and have since become, collectively, a fairly complete map of 1950s American B-picture genre cinema.
Where to Watch Flesh and the Spur (1957) Free Online
Flesh and the Spur is in the public domain and legally available across multiple platforms at no cost. Print quality varies across uploads.
| Platform | Format | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Internet Archive | Stream + Download (multiple formats) | Free |
| YouTube | Stream (multiple uploads; quality varies) | Free |
| Tubi | Stream (with ads) | Free |
| Public Domain Movies | Stream | Free |
Flesh and the Spur (1957) on Internet Archive:
Is Flesh and the Spur (1957) in the Public Domain?
Yes. Flesh and the Spur is in the public domain in the United States. The copyright was not renewed, making the film freely available to stream, download, share, and screen without restriction or payment. It circulates under its release title and occasionally surfaces alongside reference to its working title, Dead Man’s Gun. The Internet Archive carries a complete version for downloading and reuse.
Critical Reception — Then and Now
The film holds a modest 4.6 out of 10 on IMDb, which reflects what it honestly is: a $117,000 American International Pictures western, made quickly, released as the bottom half of a double feature with Naked Paradise, and built around a functional but unremarkable revenge plot. Nobody involved in its making — Cahn, Griffith, Gordon, Connors — was working at the top of their eventual range here. The film exists in the category of pictures that mattered more for what they let their collaborators do next than for what they accomplished on their own terms.
That’s not a dismissal so much as an accurate description of how the B-picture system functioned. A 78-minute revenge western with a recognisable lead, a clean plot device, and a fast shooting schedule did exactly the job AIP needed it to do in 1956 — fill a double bill, turn a modest profit on a modest budget, and keep its collaborators working. What makes it worth revisiting in 2026 isn’t the film’s own ambitions, which were modest and fully met, but the unlikely density of subsequent careers packed into its credits: a future Mannix who financed it himself, a future father of American black comedy who wrote it in a hurry, and a former Mr. Shirley Temple rebuilding his name one B-picture at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions — Flesh and the Spur (1957)
Q: What is Flesh and the Spur (1957) about?
An escaped prisoner murders an innocent farmer, Matthew Random, and steals his horse and gun — one of a unique matched pair the farmer owned jointly with his twin brother, Luke. When Luke discovers his brother’s body, he sets out to find the killer using the only clue available: the stolen gun, which links the murderer to a criminal outfit called the Checker Gang.
Q: Is Flesh and the Spur in the public domain?
Yes. Flesh and the Spur is in the public domain in the United States. The copyright was not renewed, making the film freely available to stream, download, and share. The Internet Archive, YouTube, Tubi, and Public Domain Movies all carry it at no cost.
Q: What was the film’s original title?
The film was originally titled Dead Man’s Gun before its release as Flesh and the Spur. It was distributed by American International Pictures as a double feature alongside Naked Paradise (1957).
Q: Who financed Flesh and the Spur?
Touch Connors (later known as Mike Connors of Mannix) served as executive producer and personally raised the film’s $117,000 budget alongside Charles ‘Johnny’ Lyons Jr., drawing on contacts within the Armenian-American community in California. Connors was of Armenian descent, born Krekor Ohanian in Fresno.
Q: Who wrote the screenplay for Flesh and the Spur?
Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna wrote the story and screenplay, with additional dialogue by Lou Rusoff and director Edward L. Cahn. Griffith would go on to write A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) for Roger Corman and is widely credited as a foundational figure in American black comedy.
Q: Who directed Flesh and the Spur?
Edward L. Cahn directed the film for producer Alex Gordon. Cahn began his career as a film editor at Universal before moving into directing in 1931, and became one of the most prolific and reliable directors of 1950s B-picture genre cinema, working across westerns, science fiction, and horror for American International Pictures and similar studios.
Q: What is Mike Connors’s connection to this film?
Mike Connors, billed here as Touch Connors, plays the villain Stacey Tanner and also served as the film’s executive producer, personally financing it. He would later achieve major television stardom playing private detective Joe Mannix in the CBS series Mannix (1967-1975), earning a Golden Globe and four Emmy nominations.
Q: What happened to John Agar’s career before this film?
John Agar married child star Shirley Temple in 1945, which launched his acting career, but the marriage ended in a 1949 divorce shaped in part by Agar’s struggles with alcohol. Producer David O. Selznick dropped him from contract in 1952. Agar rebuilt his career through the 1950s and 1960s as a reliable lead in low-budget science fiction, horror, and western films, including Tarantula! (1955) and The Mole People (1956).
Q: Does John Agar play more than one role in the film?
Yes. Agar plays both Luke Random and his twin brother Matthew Random, who is murdered near the start of the film. The twin device drives the revenge plot, as Luke searches for his brother’s killer using the stolen matched gun as the only identifying clue.
Q: Where can I watch Flesh and the Spur (1957) for free?
Flesh and the Spur is freely available on the Internet Archive, YouTube, Tubi, and Public Domain Movies. All versions are legal to stream and download under the film’s public domain status in the United States.
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If Flesh and the Spur (1957) sent you further into public domain westerns and 1950s American International Pictures genre cinema, these are the natural places to keep going:
- Public Domain Cartoons
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