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Railroaded (Sept. 25, 1947)

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Adam Lounsbery

Anthony Mann’s Railroaded represents a number of missed opportunities and a few modest successes.

In 1947, Mann made his first really good film noir, Desperate, which was released by RKO Radio Pictures. It wasn’t a perfect film, but the actors were decent, the story was suspenseful, and many of the lighting setups by Mann and his cinematographer, George E. Diskant, were stunning.

Railroaded was the next film he made. While I was watching it, I found myself frequently saying “If only…”

If only the script was more focused. If only the music wasn’t so terrible. If only the actors were talented. If only the film featured more screen time for the interesting villains and less screen time for the uninteresting heroes. If only Mann had been given a larger budget. If only he had worked with cinematographer John Alton.

But if you want to watch that kind of movie, you have to dig into Mann’s later work; his six collaborations with Alton, made between 1947 and 1950, or the five westerns he made with James Stewart between 1950 and 1955. Railroaded is a modestly entertaining little picture if you have no expectations, but if you’re familiar with Mann’s later work, it’s bound to disappoint.

Mann made Railroaded for Producers Releasing Corporation (P.R.C.), a dependable old Poverty Row workhorse. It was the last really cut-rate movie that Mann would make. (P.R.C. was in the process of being bought by the powerful British film distributor J. Arthur Rank, and P.R.C.’s name would soon be changed to “Eagle-Lion International” to class it up a little. It was through Eagle-Lion that Mann’s excellent T-Men would be released later in 1947.) While Mann’s budgets were low, he was able to work with less studio control at Eagle-Lion International than he had been faced with at RKO, Universal, Paramount, and Republic.

In Jeanine Basinger’s book Anthony Mann (published in 1979; expanded and republished in 2007), she writes that Railroaded “is more unified than Desperate and points toward the coherence of Mann’s later works. It is perhaps his first really unified film, presenting the story of a young woman … and her attempts to clear her brother’s name of a murder charge.” I don’t agree with Basinger’s assessment, and find Railroaded an even more uneven film than Desperate.

Guy Roe was Mann’s cinematographer on Railroaded, and even though he’s not as good as Alton, there are still a number of impressive sequences, particularly the robbery that opens the picture.

John Ireland (the only actor in the film with any talent) plays a sneering criminal named Duke Martin who perfumes his bullets. (What’s a B-noir bad guy without a gimmick or two?)

The robbery is of a joint controlled by Jackland Ainsworth (Roy Gordon). It’s a numbers operation hidden in the back of a beauty shop run by Clara Calhoun (Jane Randolph). Clara is Duke’s girlfriend, and the inside job was supposed to be a cinch, but the cops show up, and Duke snuffs one of them, which sets the events of the film in motion.

Duke arranged everything to point in the direction of a patsy, Steve Ryan (Ed Kelly). Steve is a young guy who lives with his sister, Rosie Ryan (Sheila Ryan), and his mother, Mrs. Ryan (Hermine Sterler). At the breakfast table, Rosie talks about the movie she saw the night before, and how she cried at the end, when the police got their man. Even though he was a criminal, she felt bad for him. Steve is unsympathetic, and says “Maybe some guys need a goin’ over.” Minutes later the police bust in and arrest him for murder. (John C. Higgins’s screenplay, which is based on a story by Gertrude Walker, could have used more clever and ironic moments like this one.)

Things look bad for Steve. Duke used Steve’s scarf as a mask during the robbery. Steve’s car was stolen and used as the getaway vehicle. A paraffin test to see if Steve has recently fired a gun comes up negative, but that doesn’t mean much after Duke’s partner, Cowie Kowalski (Keefe Brasselle), who was shot during the robbery, gives a deathbed confession that implicates Steve.

Railroaded isn’t actually a very accurate title for the film, since the cops don’t railroad Steve. They work with the evidence they have. (Framed would have been a more accurate title.) Unlike Desperate, which followed an innocent man’s terrifying flight from both gangsters and the police, the unjustly accused protagonist of Railroaded pretty much disappears from the film as soon as he’s jailed. Enter Sgt. Mickey Ferguson (Hugh Beaumont), a police detective who grew up in the same neighborhood as the Ryans, and is still sweet on Rosie.

Rosie believes her brother is innocent, and eventually starts to convince Sgt. Ferguson. This is where the picture really took a nosedive for me. Sheila Ryan is nice to look at, but she’s a completely unconvincing actress. Beaumont is even worse. He brings the same gravitas to his role as Sgt. Ferguson that he did to the scenes on TV a decade later in which he punished Wally and The Beav. Watching his scenes is like watching grass grow, and he and Sheila Ryan are the protagonists of Railroaded, not bit players.

With no one to root for, the only enjoyment I got out of Railroaded was watching John Ireland’s scenes, especially the ones with Jane Randolph. With the heat on, Duke orders Clara to hole up and stay off the booze. He’s planning one last score — a robbery of the Club Bombay, where the vigorish from Ainsworth’s bookie shops goes. Duke figures he can get revenge on Ainsworth and make off with $30 to $40 grand, which he’ll use to finance his and Clara’s getaway to South America. Of course, he can’t keep Clara off the sauce, but things aren’t all bad, since occasionally something exciting happens, like a vicious catfight Clara gets into with Rosie that Duke impassively watches while hidden:

Railroaded is a pretty typical P.R.C. product. The sets look like they’re made out of cardboard, the dialogue is stilted, the music is awful, and actors who can carry a scene are in the minority. Stretches of the film are entertaining, and occasionally the cinematography and editing create suspense and some real excitement, but overall, this isn’t one of Mann’s better pictures. There are plenty of people who champion the film, but for me, if a picture doesn’t have decent actors and strong characterizations, it doesn’t hang together. A few great scenes do not a great film make.

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The Brute Man (Oct. 1, 1946)

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Actor Rondo Hatton, whose face was so unique that it has been immortalized in bust form as a series of horror awards, was reportedly voted the best-looking boy in his class at Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Florida.

Whether or not this story is apocryphal, we do know that Hatton didn’t always look the way he did when he starred as the hideous “Creeper” in a series of low-budget horror films in the 1940s.

Born on April 22, 1894, Hatton worked as a sportswriter and served in World War I, after which acromegaly began to change his facial features. Acromegaly is a syndrome often associated with gigantism. It usually manifests in adulthood or middle age, and its progression is slow. It involves swelling of the soft tissues — particularly the hands, feet, nose, lips, and ears — general thickening of the skin, the swelling of internal organs, and the pronounced protrusion of the brow and lower jaw.

While working as a reporter for the Tampa Tribune, he was spotted by director Henry King, who was in Florida to make Hell Harbor (1930). King hired Hatton for a bit part, and Hatton eventually moved to Hollywood, where he appeared in a series of small roles, most notably as a contestant in an “ugly man competition” in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and as a member of the lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). He first appeared as a character called “The Creeper” in the Sherlock Holmes thriller The Pearl of Death (1944), and then twice more in two horror films that were unrelated to the Sherlock Holmes series, House of Horrors and The Brute Man, both of which were directed by Jean Yarbrough.

In House of Horrors, which was released on March 29, 1946, an unsuccessful sculptor saves the Creeper from drowning, and gets him to murder all the critics who have written unfavorably about his cubist “tripe.”

In The Brute Man, a once-handsome B.M.O.C. (big man on campus) who was disfigured in a lab accident prowls the city, killing for revenge. Spinning newspapers with headlines like “Back Breaker Claims Second Victim” fill in the missing details, as the viewer wonders why police can’t find the most unique and strange-looking person in the city, who is spotted in public plenty of times.

After one of his murders, the Creeper takes refuge in the home of a blind piano teacher named Helen Paige (Jane Adams, who unfortunately never appears in that pink satin and white ermine number we see her wearing on the lobby card above). For no reason I could discern, she lies to the police about someone being in her apartment, and the Creeper climbs out her window and makes his escape.

We eventually learn that the Creeper used to be a boy named Hal Moffet, a football star at Hampton University, who was popular and handsome, although his temper made him some enemies. He and his friend Clifford Scott (Tom Neal) were in love with the same girl, Virginia (Jan Wiley). The night before an oral exam in chemistry, Cliff fed the academically impatient Hal the wrong answers so he’d be kept after class and not be able to score with Virginia. Naturally, the professor did what any professor would do with a student who bungled a quiz; he kept him after class working on a complicated and dangerous experiment. After seeing Cliff and Virginia through the window, Hal realized he’d been deliberately crossed up, and smashed a flask of chemicals on the floor. Unfortunately, the cloud of caustic smoke damaged his face, and he’s now hell-bent on getting revenge on everyone he thinks wronged him. Last on his list are Cliff and Virginia, who are now married.

This story is, of course, a burlesque version of reality. Acromegaly, not a lab accident, was responsible for Hatton’s appearance, but he was a football player and handsome young man whose appearance gradually became monstrous. (The publicity department of Universal Studios actually claimed that Hatton’s facial deformities were the result of a mustard gas attack in World War I.)

Hatton died on February 1, 1946, before either House of Horrors or The Brute Man were released. He was 51 years old, and his death was caused by a heart attack that was directly related to his disorder. He wasn’t much of an actor, but his appearance alone telegraphed pathos, and the renewed interest in Universal’s horror films in the ’60s and ’70s eventually turned him into a horror icon.

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Prairie Badmen (July 17, 1946)

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Is wildly prolific Poverty Row director Sam Newfield’s Prairie Badmen really that much better than the last two westerns of his I’ve seen? Or is he just wearing me down?

Probably a little of both. Prairie Badmen has all the hallmarks of a shoddy P.R.C. western — incompetent use of library music by musical director Lee Zahler, insouciant use of obvious stunt doubles, and static, unimaginative camerawork — but it moves at a nice clip, has a decent story, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and features plenty of goofy physical humor courtesy of Al “Fuzzy” St. John.

As the film opens, we see Fuzzy, wearing a feathered trailer warbonnet that flows down his back and reaches the ground. He’s standing on the back of a wagon, hawking patent medicine called “Kickapoo Elixir” (subtitled “A Blessing to Mankind”) to a bunch of cowpokes and yokels. Inside the wagon lies Doc Lattimer (Ed Cassidy), who is convalescing. Lattimer tells his daughter, Linda (Patricia Knox), “Fuzzy seems to be all right on the crescendo, but he doesn’t seem to have the proper persuasive note in his confidential appeal.”

Before you can say “Jack Robinson,” a trio of no-good characters, Cal (Charles King), Lon (Kermit Maynard), and Steve (John L. Cason), surreptitiously hitch their horses to the front of the wagon and take off with it, with Lattimer and his daughter inside. Fuzzy falls off, but he quickly gets to his feet and chases after them, his headdress flying behind him, nearly parallel to the ground. (It’s clearly held aloft by an off-screen wire, since its angle is different in each shot.)

Pretty soon, Billy Carson (Buster Crabbe) rides in and saves the motley crew of good-natured scam artists from the troublemakers. They claim they were just having some fun. Prairie badmen? More like prairie frat boys.

Or so it seems. Eventually we’ll learn that those badmen are after a map that a wounded and dying outlaw named Bill Thompson (Frank Ellis) may have left with Doc Lattimer five years earlier. The map supposedly shows the location of four bars of gold stolen from an express office.

The thickening of the plot, such as it is, comes from Doc Lattimer’s son, Don (John L. Buster), who’s sick of traveling with his father and sister, making chicken feed while standing on the back of the medicine wagon and singing songs like “Prairie Pete.” Billy offers him some avuncular advice, “You don’t prove you’re a man by carrying a chip around on your shoulder.” But Don doesn’t take it to heart, and soon falls in with the black hats, attempting to finagle a half share of the loot in exchange for revealing the location of the treasure.

The plot is nothing outstanding, but it’s engaging enough, and frequently punctuated by Fuzzy’s corn-pone antics, so it never gets boring. When Billy tells Fuzzy he should know what he’s selling for a dollar a bottle, Fuzzy accidentally grabs turpentine instead of patent medicine. He pours it on his head, down his back, and then drinks it. He proceeds to make facial expressions that would make Red Skelton ashamed, spits it out, yowls, and leaps up and down like a jumping jack.

Some of the comic relief goes on too long, such as the scene in which Fuzzy attempts to string up a hammock and then get into it, but it’s mostly entertaining. He wears his Indian warbonnet for most of the picture, and it’s practically another character in the movie, snaking and flying around, constantly manipulated by that off-screen wire.

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Colorado Serenade (June 30, 1946)

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

P.R.C. western Colorado Serenade, which stars lunkheaded cowboy actor Eddie Dean, is a good movie to fall asleep while watching. Dean has a terrible screen presence, zero acting ability, one dopey facial expression, and a great voice. So the best way to enjoy him is with your eyes closed, halfway between sleep and wakefulness.

That’s how I imagine at least a few moviegoers enjoyed this picture in the summer of 1946. As a one-hour Poverty Row oater, Colorado Serenade would have played as the bottom half of a double bill. After the newsreel, the cartoon, and the feature at the top of the bill, who wouldn’t be a little bit sleepy? And with Dean’s smooth, rich baritone belting out tunes like “Home on the Range,” “Ridin’ Down to Rawhide,” “Riding on Top of the Mountain,” and “Western Lullaby,” staying awake doubtless proved a challenge to anyone who hadn’t just drunk a cup of coffee.

Because, Lord knows, the plot of the film won’t keep you on the edge of your seat. Like many of Dean’s other P.R.C. westerns, Colorado Serenade is filmed in color — a rarity for the bargain basement studio — but everything else is typically cheap. Eddie and his comical sidekick, “Soapy” Jones (Roscoe Ates) team up with an undercover lawman named Nevada (David Sharpe) to take down a bunch of stagecoach robbers, but not before Eddie and Nevada, thinking each other on opposite sides of the law, slug it out in a good old-fashioned western saloon brawl.

The fight that closes the picture is actually pretty good, too, with a few stand-out stunts, such as Nevada leaping from the balcony and tackling a black hat in the bar below him, but it’s too little, too late after a turgid, talky flick that feels much longer than its 68-minute running time.

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Ghost of Hidden Valley (June 5, 1946)

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

When it comes to Poverty Row westerns, there’s a fine line between watchable and unwatchable.

I didn’t dislike Ghost of Hidden Valley, and even enjoyed a lot of it. I can’t say whether that’s because it’s a slight cut above other Poverty Row westerns distributed by P.R.C. (Producers Releasing Corporation) that I’ve seen lately, or because my expectations were ground down to a nub by the three other movies directed by Sam Newfield that I’ve watched in the past year.

One of the most prolific directors of all time, Newfield directed more than 250 movies in a career that spanned almost 40 years. Martin Scorsese once said, “Newfield is hard, that’s a hard one, you can’t do too much of that.” This from a man well known for his insatiable appetite for films of all kinds.

Ghost of Hidden Valley begins with some stock footage of an enormous herd of cattle. In the next scene, Ed “Blackie” Dawson (Charles King), the leader of a group of cattle rustlers, shoots an interloper so he won’t tell any tales to the law. “Well, that takes care of that,” Dawson’s henchman says. “The ghost of hidden valley will get all the blame.”

I’m a fan of economical storytelling, even when it’s outlandish.

There is no ghost, of course, and we won’t see any more cattle, either. There will be some weak-sauce comedy in which the grizzled and toothless Fuzzy Q. Jones (Al “Fuzzy” St. John) will mistake the calls of a hoot owl for the spectral cries of a wandering spirit, but that’s it.

After Dawson and his rustlers commit murder, we see cowboy Billy Carson (Buster Crabbe) and his friend Fuzzy at the post office in Canyon City, Arizona. Fuzzy has received a letter from someone named Cecil Trenton. (It comes addressed to “Fuzzy Jones, Esq.”) Cecil’s late brother, Sir Dudley Trenton, spoke well of Fuzzy, as well as his sojourn in America generally. “It was his wish that his son Henry, a young gentleman just out of Oxford, should experience a bit of the rugged life and devote some attention to the property Sir Dudley purchased in your vicinity,” Cecil writes.

“What is this Oxford he just got out of, a penitentiary?” asks Fuzzy.

“No,” Billy responds. “Some sort of a school.”

Henry Trenton (John Meredith) is exactly what you might expect. A fey, snooty-accented tenderfoot wearing a checked shirt, vest, ten-gallon hat, and ridiculous sheepskin chaps. “I always make it a point to dress correctly,” he says. He even has an aristocratic butler in tow named Tweedle (Jimmy Aubrey).

Billy sees the potential of Hidden Valley Ranch, if only someone could knuckle down and work it properly. Will Henry Trenton be that man?

Ghost of Hidden Valley is a typical P.R.C. western, with plenty of shootouts, chases on horseback, and furniture-destroying fistfights to fill out its 56-minute running time, but at least it’s briskly paced. Also, the female lead (Jean Carlin) is pretty, unlike the last Crabbe P.R.C. western I saw, and the script by Ellen Coyle is breezy and relatively entertaining.

There’s still Newfield’s trademark sloppiness and inattention to detail for the viewer to contend with. For instance, there’s one scene in which Crabbe’s skinny stunt double, his loose shirt hanging out of his pants, takes a punch, there’s a cut, and the next shot is of the real Crabbe, his chunky torso unmistakable, and his shirt tightly tucked into his jeans.

Crabbe was my main problem with this film. No longer the dashing young actor he was when he played Flash Gordon in the ’30s, Crabbe phones in his performance, has trouble mounting his horse in at least one scene, and generally looks as if he’d rather be somewhere else.

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Devil Bat’s Daughter (April 15, 1946)

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Frank Wisbar’s Devil Bat’s Daughter is a film that follows the template created by Dracula’s Daughter (1936), but doesn’t quite get it right.

Like Dracula’s Daughter, Devil Bat’s Daughter is a sequel to a Bela Lugosi horror film — in this case, The Devil Bat (1940) — that does not feature Lugosi. Instead, the protagonist is … you guessed it, his character’s daughter. But while Dracula’s Daughter was a slick, good-looking Universal horror picture that featured a haunting lead performance by Gloria Holden, Devil Bat’s Daughter is a run-of-the-mill Poverty Row mystery thriller whose connection to its predecessor feels forced.

I haven’t seen The Devil Bat, but based on plot synopses, there seem to be several inconsistencies with how its treated in its sequel. Nina MacCarron (Rosemary La Planche), is the daughter of Dr. Paul Carruthers (Lugosi), of The Devil Bat, but she uses her mother’s maiden name. Returning in a stupor to her father’s home in Wardsley, New York (Heathville, Illinois, in the original), she collapses while searching the basement where he conducted his experiments (the basement was also apparently not present in the first film). She is taken in by the physician Dr. Elliot (Nolan Leary), who cares for her while she lies in a catatonic state. After she escapes from the hospital, Dr. Elliot has her transferred to the care of a psychiatrist, Dr. Clifton Morris (Michael Hale), who treats her while she lives in his home with him and his wife, Ellen Masters Morris (Molly Lamont). With Dr. Morris’s treatments, she slowly returns to normal, but she is plagued by terrifying visions (rippled footage from The Devil Bat).

Intrigue abounds. We learn early on that Dr. Morris has a mistress, Myra Arnold (Monica Mars), who is pressuring him to divorce his wife, whom he only married for her money. When Ted Masters (John James), Mrs. Morris’s son from her first marriage, returns home, he and Nina start to fall for each other, but a series of murders throws Nina’s sanity into question. The film seems confused about what type of picture it wants to be. There’s plenty of talk of vampires (Lugosi was inextricable from his most famous role), but it doesn’t come to anything, and this isn’t really a horror picture.

Devil Bat’s Daughter is modestly entertaining, but I was hoping for more. Director Wisbar was a German émigré, and his previous film, Strangler of the Swamp, was a great-looking, creepy little horror picture. Like Devil Bat’s Daughter, it also starred Rosemary La Planche, Miss America 1941. It’s too bad for genre film fans that La Planche wasn’t in more movies, especially horror movies. She could have been one of the great scream queens. She’s uniquely pretty, with thick eyebrows, big eyes, bow lips, a very straight nose, and mountains of wavy hair. Her face retains its attractiveness even when she’s screaming, and she sure can take a fall while running.

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Thunder Town (April 12, 1946)

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Diminutive cowboy actor Bob Steele rides again! In Harry L. Fraser’s Thunder Town, Steele plays Jim Brandon, a man recently paroled after serving time for a crime he claims he didn’t commit. Things aren’t easy for a parolee out there. As soon as Brandon gets off the stagecoach, he warmly greets the fellow loading it, but the man refuses to shake his hand. Then, while getting some drinking water, the sinister Dunc Rankin (Edward Howard) warns Brandon to stay away from him and his brother.

Brandon has a few friends on the outside, however. Matt Warner (Steve Clark), the local sheriff, recommended his parole, even though he doesn’t believe Brandon’s claim that he and his late partner Jim Donovan were framed. Brandon also claims Donovan’s suicide was really murder, and with the help of small-town ballistics expert Peter Collins (Jimmy Aubrey), he intends to prove it.

He also has a steadfast pal in Utah McGirk (Syd Saylor), who took care of Brandon’s ranch while he was behind bars. McGirk is hanging on to the ranch by his eyeteeth, and even had to take a job as a cook to make ends meet and keep paying taxes on the ranch.

The sheriff firmly reminds Brandon that, as a parolee, he won’t be allowed to carry a firearm. Brandon’s inability to carry a gun means that fisticuffs rule the day. This could have been interesting, but unfortunately he’s too obviously doubled by a stunt homunculus in some of his fight scenes. Also, he doesn’t do anything clever or flashy against his armed opponents, like throwing a knife into their hands or lassoing their guns. Mostly he just flees from them on horseback.

The main heavy in the picture is the aforementioned brother of Dunc Rankin, Bill Rankin (Charles King). Unsurprisingly for a P.R.C. western from the ’40s, the bad guy wants everyone else’s land, and will stop at nothing to get it. He even kidnaps Brandon and threatens to kill him in a bid to force a young woman named Betty Morgan (Ellen Hall) to marry Dunc so they can gain possession of the Morgan ranch. On the plus side, Hall is really easy on the eyes (too often, P.R.C. pictures featured some real dogs as the female leads), but if there was a scene that established her relationship with Brandon, I missed it. Also, the 23-year-old actress looks too young for Steele, who looks older than his 39 years. Strangest of all, the only love scene they share occurs in the last 30 seconds of the picture, and ends with a whispered proposal of marriage.

While Steele continued to appear in films and on television into the early ’70s, in parts both large and small, Thunder Town was his last leading role. He had a good run, though. He was a star of the silent era, and appeared in more than a hundred westerns.

For my money, Thunder Town is the type of western that should have died years earlier. The editing is jumpy, the framing is static, and every scene is lit like a bar after last call, when they turn all the lights on, temporarily blinding the patrons. The actors all deliver their lines in a stilted, cautious fashion, as though their pay will be docked if they flub a line. Steve Clark, who plays the sheriff, is the only supporting player who imbues his lines with any kind of human feeling, and his few scenes with Steele are the only ones that seem as if they belong in a decent movie. Overall, though, the acting is better than the last Steele P.R.C. western I saw, Ambush Trail. Blessedly, Syd Saylor acts like a normal person in this one, instead of the goggle-eyed, rubber-faced mugging machine he was in Ambush Trail. Except, that is, when he’s punched in the face. Then all bets are off. He’s still in this film to provide comic relief, after all.

There are also a few musical numbers shoehorned into the picture that aren’t bad, if you like old-school country music that occasionally involves yodeling.

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Gentlemen With Guns (March 27, 1946)

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Another week, another bargain-basement western from P.R.C. (Producers Releasing Corporation).

Chances are, if you were starring in westerns for P.R.C. in the ’40s, you were either a has-been or a never-was. I guess Buster Crabbe falls into the first category. The last time I remember seeing Crabbe, he was cutting a dashing figure as Flash Gordon in the Universal Pictures serial from 1936. Here, 10 years later, his face haven’t developed any character, and his acting certainly hasn’t improved. He’s just older and a little bit fatter.

In Gentlemen With Guns, which should get an award for “most generic title for a western,” he’s listed in the opening credits as “Buster Crabbe, King of the Wild West,” but just saying it doesn’t make it so. While he’s not the worst cowboy I’ve ever seen, Crabbe doesn’t exhibit any of the qualities I think of when I think of a western star, except earnestness. He earnestly seems to wish he were starring in a better movie.

Alas, only a fool would have cast him in one. While neither unattractive nor truly overweight, by 1946 Crabbe was just far enough over the hill to bear an eerie resemblance to the comedian Bob Odenkirk, of Mr. Show. While there’s nothing wrong with looking like Odenkirk, he’d never be anyone’s first choice to play a cowboy.

The plot of Gentlemen With Guns, such as it is, involves a bunch of black hats attempting to pin a murder on Fuzzy Q. Jones, who is played by Al “Fuzzy” St. John. Fuzzy is the type of bearded, toothless old coot who will be familiar to anyone who’s seen a few western programmers from the ’30s or ’40s. (“Gabby” Hayes made a whole career out of playing this type of character.) The frame-up is fairly ingenious. A man is shot while Fuzzy is talking to him, then the evil sheriff (Budd Buster) moseys on over, his gun drawn, and inspects Fuzzy’s revolver. He switches them and produces a weapon with a single round fired; the round that killed the man. At this point the audience is clued in to the fact that the sheriff is the one who actually did the killing. But wait, it turns out that the supposedly dead gentleman was just playing possum, and he spends the rest of the movie hiding out so Fuzzy can be lynched nice and legal-like. Meanwhile, it’s up to Fuzzy’s friend Billy Carson (Crabbe) to fight the bad guys and eventually discover the ruse.

If the bad guys are so ruthless, however, I’m not sure why they didn’t just murder someone they had it in for and pin it on Fuzzy. But I guess without a faked death there wouldn’t be a movie.

Along with all the fistfights and shootouts, there’s a light-hearted subplot about a mail-order bride named Matilda Boggs (Patricia Knox) who arrives in town thinking that Fuzzy is a young, strapping man who owns a huge ranch. In fact, as soon as she sees Billy, she exclaims, “Fuzzy! Oh, you great, big, wonderful man,” and throws her arms around him.

Gentlemen With Guns was certainly better than Romance of the West, the last P.R.C. western I saw. Unlike Romance of the West, the acting isn’t godawful, and the production values are a little better, even though it’s filmed in regular old black & white, not Cinecolor.

It’s still not anywhere close to being an A-list production. At times, it seems as if the actors are struggling to make their lines heard over the blaring, canned music on the soundtrack. Since the music in a movie is usually added last, however, that can’t possibly be the case, can it? It must just be that their lines are terrible and their delivery is wooden, right?

Maybe I’m being too hard on Crabbe. He can ride a horse without falling off, fire a revolver without dropping it, sit a hat atop his head, and vault over a three foot-high fence and then mount his horse in just two attempts. But as far as former champion swimmers turned western actors go, he’s no Timothy Olyphant.

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Romance of the West (March 20, 1946)

Posted on April 14, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Romance of the West is a movie with its heart in the right place, if nothing else. It’s filmed in Cinecolor (a two-color film process, a.k.a. “not Technicolor”), which might initially fool you into thinking that it’s a high-class affair. Make no mistake, however. Romance of the West is bottom of the barrel, even by the notoriously low standards of the studio that distributed it, P.R.C. (Producers Releasing Corporation).

In the grand tradition of singing cowboys, country and western star Eddie Dean plays a character named “Eddie Dean.” Eddie is an Indian agent sympathetic to the plight of his American Indian pals. He’s got a great singing voice, but not much else. When delivering lines, Eddie appears to be a life-size mannequin with a string in his back that somebody pulled to make him talk. He’s a lunkhead with a big, dopey mouth and zero screen presence. In a review of one of his films from the ’40s (I don’t know which one), the NY Times said, “Instead of the usual black and white, Eddie Dean’s newest western has been shot in Cinecolor, but it’s not an improvement; you can still see him.”

So why do I say that Romance of the West has its heart in the right place? Well, because it treats its Indian characters with a degree of respect, and there’s mention of all the treaties with them that the United States broke, forcing them into smaller and smaller reservations. But after lip service is paid, the plot goes off the rails. Eddie was supposedly raised by the Indians. So why doesn’t he speak their language with them, or act like them in any way? He’s also a tool of the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs, and toes the line, but it’s presented as a wholly positive thing. When he informs his friend Chief Eagle Feather that the Indians’ land is being stocked with 200 head of cattle, since the buffalo are all dead, the chief acts as if it’s Christmas morning, and he just got the present he always wanted.

The tribe is never named. They’re all “Indians.” There are, however, good Indians and bad Indians. A consortium of powerful men who want the silver that exists on the good Indians’ land gin up some bad Indians to rape and pillage so the good Indians can be blamed for it and driven off their land with the government’s approval.

In a ridiculous scene following a raid by the bad Indians on the good Indians, a little boy is mourning his father’s death. Eddie asks the chief if he know the boy’s name and the chief says, “All I know is that him Indian boy,” or some such twaddle. Never mind that the kid’s at least seven years old and should probably know his own name. Eddie decides he’ll call him “Little Brown Jug” and takes him to be raised by the local monk, Father Sullivan (Forrest Taylor), even though the chief offers to take the boy in. Eddie and Father Sullivan cut Brown Jug’s long hair and dress him like a cowboy. And we’re supposed to believe that Eddie was raised by Indians?

Incidentally, Chief Eagle Feather is played by an actor listed in the credits as “Chief Thundercloud.” Chief Thundercloud was actually a part-Cherokee actor named Victor Daniels, who also had Scottish, Irish, and German ancestors. He played Tonto in two serials and the lead role in Geronimo (1939).

There’s really nothing to recommend Romance of the West aside from the songs, of which there are several; “Ridin’ the Trail to Dreamland,” “Love Song of the Waterfall,” and “Indian Dawn.” The arrangements are good, and Dean has a great voice. A great voice for radio, that is. To paraphrase the Times, the problem with this movie is that you can see him.

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Ambush Trail (Feb. 17, 1946)

Posted on March 19, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Even by 1946 standards, Ambush Trail looks like a relic of an earlier time. The film stars cowboy actor Bob Steele, who played in more than a hundred westerns from the silent era onward, but Ambush Trail is the first film starring him that I’ve seen. He was a supporting player in The Big Sleep (1946), which I have seen, but I couldn’t have picked him out of a crowd if you paid me. Even though it’s a talkie, Ambush Trail has all the hallmarks of a bad silent film; stilted acting, awkward pauses, and lame comic relief from a rubber-faced sidekick (Syd Saylor). It’s also blocked and edited like a silent movie, and only really comes alive during the fistfights, of which there are many.

A small, trim man (his listed height is 5’5″), Steele had dark, curly hair and a neat little mustache. (Check him out in the lobby card above. He’s the one with the whitest hat, the bluest jeans, and the fanciest shirt.) Steele’s earliest roles were in a series of shorts directed by his father, Robert N. Bradbury. He originally went by his birth name, Bob Bradbury, Jr., and his first film role was at the age of 14, in the Pathé short The Adventures of Bob and Bill (1920), which also starred his twin brother, Bill Bradbury. The two young men went on to star together in more than a dozen semi-documentary nature adventure shorts with titles like Trapping the Wildcat (1921), Outwitting the Timber Wolf (1921), and Trailing the Coyote (1921). As he grew older, Steele became a star in his own right, and a box office draw as a star of westerns.

By the mid-’40s, however, his star was fading, and it’s not hard to see why. Steele may be the best actor in Ambush Trail, but that’s only because everyone else is so God-awful. He plays a cowboy named Curley Thompson who has just purchased the Flying A Ranch. To his surprise, Curley learns that the ranch comes with a pea-brained foreman named Sam Hawkins (Saylor), who can’t even ride a horse. (He can handle a buckboard, however, which will come in handy later in the picture.) Curley quickly runs afoul of the local boss, freight owner Hatch Bolton (I. Stanford Jolley). Bolton is systematically ruining the local ranchers so he can buy them out cheap and sell their ranches to a grain combine in Chicago.

After Sheriff Tom Gordon (Henry Hall) is ambushed and disappears, his brother, Deputy Walter Gordon (Kermit Maynard) takes over. Gordon and his gal pal, Alice Rhodes (Lorraine Miller), join up with Curley and Hawkins in their fight against Bolton. When a local rancher named Joe Moore (Al Ferguson) is shot through a window and murdered while he’s meeting with Curley, Bolton and the crooked Marshal Dawes (Ed Cassidy) pin the murder on Curley. After Deputy Gordon frees him from the local jail, Curley hunts for evidence against Bolton that the missing sheriff may have left behind, and the fight is on.

Throughout the picture, Steele moves and emotes as though he’s in a silent film. He delivers his lines in a competent fashion, but he still looks as if he’d be more comfortable with heavy makeup and a live piano accompaniment. His character is a bit of a wet blanket, too. Curley drinks lemon soda instead of liquor, and even weans his sidekick, Hawkins, off the hard stuff, too. Steele’s not terrible, and neither is Ambush Trail, but it’s not very good, either. It’s a passable B western, but only if you really like B westerns.

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