Tall, handsome, amiable, confident and brave 27-year old cowpoke Jim Lacy (Mitchum), nicknamed Nevada, rides with his two sidekicks, an ornery wisecracking Dusty (Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams), and a juvenile amorous Mexican-Irish guitarist singer, Chito Jose Gonzales Bustamante Rafferty (Richard Martin).

After a winning streak with the dice, Nevada has a small fortune in yellowback bills from his craps winnings. With news of gold being up in the Comstock, these cowboys are tempted to speculate themselves. Gold prospecting ranch owner Ben Ide (Larry Wheat) takes the money and sets off to buy mining equipment, but Cash Burridge (Craig Reynolds) gets his thug-heavy man Joe Powell (Harry Woods) to kill Ide and recover the money.

Nevada finds Ide and the money. He is the first man on the scene when the prospector is whacked by two men. The posse arrives immediately after, suspects Nevada of foul play, and Nevada is unjustly accused of a murder he didn't commit.

Along the way Nevada is helped out by both a worldly saloon singer, Julie Dexter (Anne Jeffreys), who with her ladies are heading to Comstock; and the innocent, sweet, murder victim's daughter, Hattie Ide (Nancy Gates), but Nevada is too busy solving the crime and rootin’-shootin’ to waste time romancing the girls.

Nevada is arrested by the by-the-book Sheriff William Brewer (Alan Ward), and Burridge gets Powell to get the locals to Lynch Nevada.

Nevada eventually figures out that the slimy baddie in a suit, evil town banker Cash Burridge (Craig Reynolds), was responsible.

The plot also works in the discovery of silver in the Sierra Nevadas, with Edmund Glover as an assayer, assaying the pesky blue mud the miners hate.

At the end, Julie has a pompous and grandiloquent closing speech.

A 1944 Western B-movie directed by Edward Killy, produced by Herman Schlom and Sid Rogell, screenplay by Norman Houston, based on Zane Grey's popular 1928 novel, cinematography by Harry J. Wild, starring a 27-year-old Robert Mitchum, Anne Jeffreys, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Nancy Gates, Richard Martin, Craig Reynolds, Harry Woods, Edmund Glover, Alan Ward, and Harry McKim. The location shooting around the "Movie Rocks" of the Alabama Hills adds a lot of atmosphere, and Harry J. Wild's cinematography of the Lone Pine locations is classic.

Mitchum is billed with "Introducing Bob Mitchum as Jim Lacy" at the film's beginning. Although this was not Mitchum's first movie. After serving his time as heavy in Hopalong Cassidy movies in the early 1940s, Robert Mitchum finally made it to star in his own Westerns when RKO’s reliable Tim Holt was drafted during World War II, and had joined the service when this film was produced.

Richard Martin played the same sidekick character, "Chito Jose Gonzales Bustamante Rafferty," in an endless string of different RKO Westerns throughout the '40s. Martin turned up time and again as a character with this unusual name. The casts and characters varied, many starred screen cowboy Tim Holt. The first time Martin played the role was in a World War II movie, "Bombardier" (1943). This was the first western outing for the character, and it wasn't until Tim Holt returned from the war that he partnered up with Martin as Chito Rafferty.

Anne Jeffreys was married to actor Robert Sterling from 1951 until his passing in 2006. They costarred in the TV series "Topper" in the 1950s.

Nancy Gates is three years younger than Jeffreys. Her best-known work was in Westerns, including "Masterson of Kansas" (1954) with George Montgomery; "Stranger on Horseback" (1955) and "Gunfight at Dodge City" (1958) with Joel McCrea; and the Randolph Scott Western "Comanche Station" (1960), directed by Budd Boetticher. She did a great deal of TV work, including a couple episodes of MAVERICK in the late '50s.

Harry McKim plays Nancy Gates' little brother. He was one of a family of child actors which also included Sammy McKim, who became a Disney Imagineering legend.

This fun Western programmer is a remake of the silent film "Nevada" (1927) starring Gary Cooper, Thelma Todd, and William Powell. This is the only time that Gary Cooper and Robert Mitchum played the same role in two different films. The following year, Mitchum again played the lead in another Zane Grey movie with the same writer and director titled "West of the Pecos" (1945) also featuring Richard Martin as Chito Rafferty.

This Comstock Lode yarn was directed by experienced Edward Killy, a “feisty little Irishman”, who knew his business. This nice little slice of movie history is by no means a great movie, but the movie is workmanlike and sound. This typical B-Western from the 1940s is a fairly routine one-hour programmer with few pretensions. Standard RKO fun entertainment fare, but it marked the rise to Western stardom of Robert Mitchum. So, it has its place in the history of the Western movie, capturing both the young Mitchum and the beautiful Alabama Hills on film. A must see for Robert Mitchum completists.