German Film Director HEINZ FANE wants to bring old JOSHUA JOHNSON out of retirement to star in a Western. Josh, was once a man who walked tall through Tombstone, now he walks with a slight stoop through the corridors of an actor's retirement home. Physically he's fine; it's just his soul that's heading for the last round up.
On location, a hundred miles from the nearest town. The unit has set up in an ecological disaster area. The collection of trucks and trailers looks as out of place as a space capsule on the moon. J.D.Shaw, the producer hoped the whole thing could be shot in six weeks but things have gone wrong. The heat is debilitating and the old Indian wrangler, Horse-in-Clouds, is a disaster, a full-blooded Kiowa, who has been shot off more horses than he had had sober mornings. And Josh is slowly losing it. Sometimes he stops halfway through a sentence and stares blankly ahead. It's either the heat or the mushrooms that Horse keeps feeding him on toast. Or maybe it's just the contradiction between the West Josh helped to create and the modern Western with it's slow motion violence and explicit sex scenes with the Italian leading lady, who just arrived from a bit part in 'Roman Games'.
"It ain't like the old days" pleads Josh to the glowing specter of TOM MIX. "I want to live by the code but they want me to curse and shoot at fella's in the back." But Tom just frowns in disappointment "A man's got to make a stand sometimes, Josh, a stand for the things he believes in." Before Josh can answer Tom fades away only to return to haunt the old cowpoke. 'It is only when a man is confronted with violence that you see his true worth.' justifies the director for the gross scenes of violence in the film. These lines will return to haunt him as Josh finally flips and becomes an Avenging Angel firing real bullets and reliving his 1947 hit 'Badmen's Spurs'. He wreaks havoc on the crew and challenges the Producer to the final shoot out. They draw..........
