Duel on the Mississippi (1955)

It's Louisiana at the start of the 19th century and sugar is becoming an hugely valuable commodity. The traditional (largely French) plantation owners are trying to capitalise on this crop but so are the inventive pirates who wait til it's all harvested and bagged up, then they pinch it! The leader of these ruthless thieves is "Lili" (Patricia Medina) who, along with her dad "Jacques" (Ian Keith) and sidekick "Hugo" (Warren Stevens) has set her sights on the "Tulane" family. She owns the debt on their land and is determined to force them into ruin. Luckily, that family has an hunky son in "André" (Lex Barker) to whom she takes a shine. She agrees to swap the debt for his indentured servitude and so our adventure of crosses and double crosses begins in earnest. OK, so Barker is easy on the eye but not much of an actor and Medina spends much of the time here wishing she was Maureen O'Hara, but it's got a solid story of greed and revenge before the fairly obvious denouement delivers predictably. It's fairly swiftly paced, there's plenty of action - how often do you see a duel with machetes - and I actually quite enjoyed the hamminess of it all.