William Nigh’s South of Monterey is another dreary Cisco Kid programmer from Monogram Pictures. Gilbert Roland, in his second appearance as the character, cuts a dashing figure and is always fun to watch, but overall this one is a real snoozer.
I wasn’t exactly knocked out of my seat by Roland’s first turn as the character in The Gay Cavalier (1946), and his second outing is more of the same, with a by-the-numbers story and an anticlimactic finale. As before, Roland is fun to watch as a smooth Lothario and laid-back hero. It’s everything else about this picture that’s the problem.
This time around, Cisco, his sidekick Baby (Frank Yaconelli), and his merry band of Mexican outlaws have a rival, called “The Silver Bandit.” It should come as no surprise to veterans of Saturday afternoon matinees that Cisco and his crew will be blamed for the nefarious exploits of The Silver Bandit.
South of Monterey combines the two hoariest concepts in these types of films; the evil landowner bleeding the poor farmers dry and the young woman in danger of being forced to marry a man she doesn’t love.
The main villain of the piece is the local tax collector, Bennet (Harry Woods), who repossesses peasants’ land based on non-payment of sky-high taxes and then resells them for a profit. The young woman in danger of being forced into a loveless marriage is Carmelita (Iris Flores), the sister of local commandante of police Auturo (Martin Garralaga). Carmelita is engaged to a fiery young activist named Carlos Mandreno (George J. Lewis), but her brother is angling to have Carlos thrown in jail and his sister married off to his friend Bennet.
The film tries hard to achieve an exciting, south of the border flavor, and occasionally succeeds. Roland doesn’t play Cisco as a Boy Scout — he’s a tequila-drinking, womanizing, cigarette-smoking rapscallion. Also, there are four songs in the film sung in Spanish, one of which leads Cisco to pay Carmelita one of his typically over-the-top compliments, “Your voice has the sweetness of a meadowlark, and the softness of mission bells at twilight.”
South of Monterey isn’t a terrible programmer, it’s just a fairly typical Monogram cheapie. The main reason for me that it was a step down from The Gay Cavalier was the climactic fight, which was a fistfight. Yawn.
As he ably demonstrated in Captain Kidd (1945) and The Gay Cavalier, Roland was a hell of a sword fighter, so it’s a shame to see him swinging haymakers and smashing furniture when his blade was no doubt screaming out for blood. I know I was.
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