No Mercy

This hayburner of a western mystery is short on whodunit and long on six-gun body count. Young Clint Durby is a wise-cracking, carefree cowboy who rides for the rich and powerful Sawtooth Syndicate cattle ranch in frontier Montana. His younger brother, Lee, is a serious college student--righteous, ambitious and nosy--visiting from Chicago. Soon arrayed against the pair are the three syndicate owners. These typical hard cases--a brutal railroad baron, a cruelly arrogant English duke and a murderous U.S. senator--are plotting an illegal land grab on a huge scale. Lee smells a polecat and naively uncovers the conspiracy, causing the trio of owlhoots to pick up their guns to cover their tracks. After Lee is murdered, Clint and a couple of ``sporting girls'' team up to avenge the young man's death, discovering too late that the swamp of treachery and danger spreads far beyond ranch boundaries. Although beaten, tortured, shot and betrayed, Clint always has a snappy comeback, unloading his six-gun into any hapless thug who happens by. The action is fast and furious, but the plot is transparent and the characters shallow, adding up to a vehicle apparently designed to show off only as much gunplay and gore as possible. (Dec.)