In 1869, when the railroad mail service is threatened by frequent bandit attacks, the authorities assign federal postal inspector and former professional boxer Steve Davis to infiltrate a gang. He poses as an escaped convict and joins the criminal operation in order to destroy it from the inside.[4]
The railroad scenes were filmed on the Sierra Railroad in Tuolumne County, California.[5] The action involving pursuit of the mail trains by mounted bandits was filmed from camera trucks by cinematographer Russell Metty.[6] Director Reginald LeBorg was particularly pleased with one scene that he had inserted into the production:
I did something different when the cowboy [gang members] rode in. I had Stephen McNally stop in the midst of riding on the prairie and pick some flowers to bring to his sweetheart. A [Hollywood] cowboy never did that before, which is a nice touch. So the critics picked up on it. That’s what I do.[7]
Reception
In a contemporary review for TheNew York Times, critic A. H. Weiler wrote: "If the trappings of Technicolor, eye-filling rugged backgrounds, some name players and post-Civil War costuming were stripped from 'Wyoming Mail,' it would be bared as another horse opera. It just about misses that fate. But since the muscular melodrama ... does have these attributes, it may be set—a notch, say—above the run-of-the-range sagebrush saga."[8]
↑ Dixon, 1992 p. 105: Interview with Dixon, April 8, 1988 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Film Studies Program. And p. 6: LeBorg’s own “favorite film was Wyoming Mail.”
↑ Weiler, A. H. (October 23, 1950). "The Screen in Review: 'Wyoming Mail,' Universal Western Describing Downfall of Postal Thieves, Opens at Criterion". The New York Times. p.26.
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