In 1861, just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Owen Pentecost is a man from North Carolina who comes west to Denver in the Colorado Territory on a whim. He encounters Ann Merry Alaine, who is going there to open a dress shop.
In a Denver hotel saloon, Owen wins a poker game with the owner, Jumbo Means, who bet his estate on the last hand. Along with the hotel comes Boston Grant, who works there.
Both women begin to fall for Owen. He has money on his mind, specifically the gold of the town's Confederates, which turns out to be what brought him here. But the predominantly Union town wants the gold, and with the Civil War approaching, the town is split. Owen leads the Southerners in an escape attempt with the gold.
The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: "There's so much feudin' and fussin' and talk about the possibility of Civil War, that when the flag at Fort Sumter is fired on it comes as both anticlimax and relief....As in several recent films, the cast is considerably better than the material. Richard Hardy Andrews' novel as given director Jacques Tourneur and scenarist Lesser Samuels a tough time, but they have tried. And so, to their credit, have Robert Stack, Ruth Roman, Virginia Mayo, Alex Nicol, Raymond Burr, young Donald MacDonald, Leo Gordon and Regis Toomey. 'Great Day in the Morning' is in Superscope and Technicolor, and at least it looks quite handsome."[4]
