Did anyone find the plot really familiar?
I watched this film a few weeks after watching BRANDED (1950), a western in which Alan Ladd is recruited to pose as rancher Charles Bickford's long-lost son in order to get an inheritance. The basic plot to to obtain a big inheritance by posing as a long-lost heir is very similar in both films. TWO OF A KIND came out nine months after BRANDED. Also, certain aspects of the poseur's relationship to both a young female family member and the mother of the long-lost son are similar as well. The big difference, of course, is that Ladd has a change of heart and high-tails it to Mexico to find the REAL son and bring him back, while O'Brien is just buffeted around by others' machinations. I wonder if any reviewers at the time noticed the films' similarity. Or had BRANDED, a far superior film, already been forgotten by that point? Interestingly, Lizabeth Scott, the femme fatale in TWO OF A KIND, then turned around and co-starred with Ladd in her very next film after this, a western called RED MOUNTAIN. (A very good one, as I recall.) I wonder if Ladd brought up to her the similarity between their two previous films or, more likely, simply didn't notice or even care himself.