Adequate and serviceable western
Robert Mitchum plays Ben Kane who teams up with the eponymous Billy Young and they become lawmen in the town of Lordsburg .He is motivated by personal reasons as well as professional-he believes he will find the slayer of his son in Lordsburg .Young (Robert Walker)is himself on the run and is a former associate of the bad guy ,Jesse Boone(David Carradine)and his vicious father(John Anderson) and part of the movie hinges on Billy's desire for redemption and to turn away from the outlaw life .It is no mean feat that Kane sets himself -the rscue of Billy,cleaning up Lordsburg ,avenging his son's death and romancing the delectable Angie Dickinson ,cast here as a dance hall girl

Andrew V McLaglen directs with style and the performances are uniformly strong .Indeed ,given the importance of family in the story of the movie,it is appropriate that several offspring of notable stars figure in the cast -Carradine ,Walker Jones(son of Jennifer Jones) Chris Mitchum and Deana Martin also appear

This is not a great Western but it is a good one and will be appreciated by lovers of the genre .I also strongly recommend the source novel Who Rides With Wyatt by Will Henry -its very good indeed

Shelly Manne conducts the film
A Western for sure, but just before the arrival of Sergio Leone and his spaghetti westerns. All the clichés are there, just a little bit too much and too many though, so that we may suspect something is cooking in the coffeepot on the firecamp. Especially since there is no preacher and no undertaker. No vultures either, nor rattlesnakes. The music is the revelation. It comes directly from some canning factory and sounds more like what we could hear on Fishery Wharf in San Francisco than in the middle of the desert in Oklahoma or Arizona in a time when they were more or less virgin territories. In other words the music is making fun of the far west. It amounts to a vengeance of a sheriff against an outlaw who killed the sheriff's son and whose son the sheriff can put in the can before the arrival of his daddy. Just as you hold a cherry by the tail, here the men are held by their sons, dangling like dongles. And the sheriff finds a son-substitute in the outlaw's son's friend, an outlaw himself but reformed by some good turn of events and female encounter. And everything will turn out all right. The bad ones will be put aside. The good ones will get the stars. The others will get the show and, if they are lucky or unlucky according to their personal vistas, some lost bullet. Entertainingly nostalgic of a good old time, the late 1960s, the time of Bonanza and other Dead or Alive or OK Corral.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne

Solid, Entertaining Mitchum Western
Young Billy Young is a reliably entertaining Western with a stolid, solid performance as Robert Mitchum as a veteran lawman who takes a job as a town marshal to settle an old score. along the way, he runs into Billy Young, a wet-behind-thge ears gunfighter who's nursing his own grudge, having been left behind after a killing by his riding partner, played by David Carradine. Young is played by Robert Walker with earnestness and genuiness. And soon, Mitchum and Walker's characters are working together to right wrongs and settle scores. Throw Angie Dickinson in as a saloon girl with a heart of gold, and Paul Fix as a crusty old stage driver, and you've got the makings of a Western standard.

Young Billy Young is pretty standard, from the sometimes cliched dialogue to the plot, but Mitchum holds everything together with the strength of his charm and personality. This is a good film that is very watchable.

marcus
good movie, not great. interesting action scenes however a little too pyschologically bent. The jazz score although well played, is out of place. You'll recognize many vetran western actors such as Paul Fix, David Carradine, Jack Kelly, and John Anderson