Tue 1 Jun 2021
An Archived Western Movie Review: HIDDEN VALLEY OUTLAWS (1944).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[6] Comments
HIDDEN VALLEY OUTLAWS. Republic Pictures, 1944. Wild Bill Elliott, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Anne Jeffreys, Roy Barcroft, Kenne Duncan. Story and co-screenwriter: John K. Butler. Director: Howard Bretherton.
Right on the heels of Sundown in Santa Fe (reviewed here ), here is a review of another B-western, and if you don’t like them and if this happens to be one too many for you, you can ask for your money back. (Let me repeat that. You can ask.) This one’s a jim-dandy one, though, and I think maybe the key is one of the names up above in the credits.
If you’re a long time reader of the detective pulp magazines of the 1930s and 40s, you may have spotted him already. John K. Butler. The story is what makes this one go. Butler made a living at writing, and what’s more he was awfully good at it. This one is as tightly plotted as it can get. You’ve got to watch the actions of everyone every minute, and listen to the dialogue, too. There’s humor (*), there’s action when it’s needed, and while there is a good-looking woman involved, not a bit of romance is even hinted at.
The story concerns a rancher who’s murdered for his land, his son who tries his hand at revenge until his equally untimely death, and Wild Bill Elliott, who along with his friend Gabby, is framed for the murder in the slickest bit of trickery you can imagine. They escape, join up with ranchers, try to persuade them not to become vigilantes, and bring the crooked lawyer behind it all to justice.d b
This review has gone on long enough, but one of these days I’m going to have to put in a word for comic sidekicks in western movies. B-variety detective movies had them, too, I know, but it was the westerns who couldn’t exist without them, and Gabby Hayes was surely the rootin’, tootin’ best of the lot of them.
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(*) Here’s the line I liked best. A crooked actor has been hired to play several parts in the fraud being played against Wild Bill and his friends, and one of the other owlhoots has this to say about him: “I don’t like actors. My wife ran away with one, but I still don’t like actors.”
June 1st, 2021 at 10:11 pm
Holly Martins is my favorite western author! 🙂
June 2nd, 2021 at 6:53 am
Lazy Georgenby, Martin’s work suffered after his disastrous marriage to Diane Redfern.
Wild Bill Elliott, on the other hand, was that rarity, an actor whose films got better when he left the major studios for the less prestigious Republic and Monogram.
June 2nd, 2021 at 9:55 am
Dan, that is so, but at Republic Wild Bill’s budget went way up, and many of his films were not at all B pictures. Of course, at Monogram those budget’s dropped well below his Columbia days, but intelligent playing and scripting helped out quite a bit.
June 2nd, 2021 at 11:20 am
“They escape, join up with ranchers, try to persuade them not to become vigilantes, and bring the crooked lawyer behind it all to justice”
Where were these guys when we needed them on Jan. 6?
June 2nd, 2021 at 12:21 pm
Right on, Fred Blosser!
(Do the kids still say that? “Right on!”?)
June 2nd, 2021 at 6:58 pm
Elliott had real weight on screen, an unlikely B Western star in films made for kids considering his on screen persona and tough guy attitude (as someone one said it was just within the bounds of possibility that Wild Bill would tire of messing with the bad guy and just shoot him). Yet at the same time he was a great Red Ryder.
I was watching EL PASO with John Payne, Gail Russell, and Sterling Hayden where Gabby Hayes has a major role, still comedy relief though he is involved as a major character, but in an A film, and he played in quite a few A films with John Wayne and Roy Rogers in DARK COMMAND where his comedy relief dentist has to perform surgery to save Roy or with Randolph Scott.
That was fairly common for Andy Devine too, and of course Guinn Williams with Errol Flynn. It’s not that other sidekicks didn’t have roles in major productions, but a few of them were as much a staple in A films as B playing the same kind of roles.