WHISTLIN’ DAN. Tiffany Productions, 1932. Ken Maynard [as Whistlin’ Dan Savage], Joyzelle Joyner, Georges Renavent, Harlan Knight, Don Terry, Tarzan the Wonder Horse. Director: Phil Rosen.

   As far as the story line goes, this is a pretty good example of an early 30s western. It overcomes the low budget I’m sure this movie must have had, and even so, I think the worn and washed out look of the buildings the action takes place in – and there’s quite a bit of action – is a lot closer to the buildings and saloons the cowboys of the Old West actually lived (and drank) in.

   But to get back to the story, when one of Dan Savage’s range partners is kidnapped by south-of-the-border bandit leader Captain Serge Karloff (Georges Renavent) for $5000 they don’t have, and when Dan and his other partner, a grizzled old fellow named July (Harlan Knight) get to the rendezvous point too late, Dan and July decide to take the not-so-small matter of justice into their own hands.

   Posing as crooks themselves, they work their way into Karloff’s gang, and with the help of Mexican saloon girl Carmelita (Joyzelle), they begin to destroy the gang from the inside out. As it turns out, Carmelita is also quite a dancer, with two lengthy barroom scenes with which to display her talents.

   Whistlin’ Dan himself even whistles in a another scene, as he’s courting the lady, but otherwise, as was mentioned before, there’s enough action in the rest of the film to satisfy everyone who came to see this movie in 1932, and today too, for that matter.

   But as for the man who plays the hero in Whistlin’ Dan, Ken Maynard, that’s something else I’ve been meaning to get around to, but I’ve put it off until now. Maynard was a chunky fellow in this movie, with narrow squinty eyes, and he does a good job playing a cowboy who may not be the brightest bulb on the plains. What Carmelita sees in him, I’m not sure. He doesn’t strike me as the romantic type, but in the early 30s being maybe good with horses and a gun was all a cowboy hero needed.

WILD HORSE MESA. Famous Players-Lasky, 1925. Jack Holt, Noah Beery, Billie Dove, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., George Magrill, George Irving, Edith Yorke, Bernard Sigel, Margaret Morris, Eugene Pallette. Based on the novel by Zane Grey. Director: George B. Seitz. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   The fellow who introduced the film referred obliquely to a very warm relationship between Zane Grey and female star Billie Dove. You can’t blame Grey. She’s very appealing, and after some initial palling around with Fairbanks, she finally settles on the character’s older brother (Jack Holt) when he shows up to get the plot really moving along.

   Noah Beery is the totally reprehensible villain, but he’s matched (if not in charisma, at least in villainy), by another of Dove’s admirers, Bert Manerube (played by George Magrill).

   Manerube conceives the dastardly plan of driving horses into a canyon whose exit is blocked by a barbed wire fence that he argues will bring the horses up short. They won’t, he claims, run into the fence in their eagerness to escape their pursuers.

   When Holt points out the fallacy in this plan, Manerube joins forces with Beery and the action doesn’t let up until the final romantic fade-out. Among the film’s many pleasures are the performance by the magnificent white stallion who leads the wild horses and the beautiful photography by Bert Glennon, who would be a member of John Ford’s regular crew, with Stagecoach among his credits.

DONALD HAMILTON – Smoky Valley. Dell First Edition #18, paperback original; reprinted several times, first by Dell, then Fawcett Gold Medal.

  ● THE VIOLENT MEN. Columbia, 1955. Glenn Ford, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Dianne Foster, Brian Keith. Based on the novel Smoky Valley by Donald Hamilton. Director: Rudolph Maté.

   A while ago on this blog I mentioned a pleasing little Western called The Violent Men (Columbia, 1955), and last month I managed to seek out the book it was based on, Smoky Valley, by none other than Donald Hamilton.

   It turned out to be a fun read, and no less interesting to see how it was re-jiggered for the movie.

   Smoky Valley tells the brief story of John Parrish, a broken Civil War vet come west for his health, and it picks up just as the neighbors who nursed him to recovery are being forced off their land by a nasty rancher and his nastier son-in-law, who own that icon of the genre, The Biggest Spread In The Valley, and mean to make it bigger.

   In the way of Western good-guys, Parrish avoids conflict as long as possible and even eats a certain amount of dirt before striking back with that cool, deadly efficiency a writer like Hamilton puts across so well.

   Indeed, it’s Hamilton’s quiet-but-deadly prose that lifts this thing out of the ordinary. Hamilton knew about guns, horses and men, and he could structure a story to show off his skill with them.

   This was translated very ably to the screen in the movie; one particularly remembers Brian Keith casually loading his gun while everyone else talks about settling this thing peaceably, or Parrish (Glenn Ford) coolly murdering a gunman — both scenes straight from Hamilton’s book, tautly written and ably filmed.

   But the main difference between page and screen is Barbara Stanwyck. I don’t know what led Columbia to put Stanwyck in this film. Her character doesn’t appear in the book, but once she was in it, they had to build up a good part for her.

   And they sure did. Playing the cattle baron’s dissatisfied trophy wife (starring again with Edward G. Robinson ten years after Double Indemnity) she projects her dominant personality against a back-drop worthy of her, somehow without overbalancing the story. Neat trick, that.

   We still get the basic elements and the full flavor of Hamilton’s tight little novel, with the added attraction of a fine actress at her bitchiest, particularly in a definitive moment when she shows her love for her crippled husband by throwing his crutches in the fire as hes trying to escape a burning house.

THE BLACK DAKOTAS. Columbia Pictures, 1954. Gary Merrill, Wanda Hendrix, John Bromfield, Noah Beery Jr., Howard Wendel, Robert Simon, Richard Webb, Peter Whitney, Jay Silverheels. Story & co-screenwriter: Ray Buffum. Director: Ray Nazarro.

   One of the uncredited players of this rather short but compact technicolor western was Clayton Moore, marking The Black Dakotas one of the few movie team-ups between Moore and Jay Silverheels – other than as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, of course. (I didn’t include Moore in the credits above for one big reason: I never spotted him.)

   History being one of my poorer subjects in high school, I don’t know how valid the premise of this movie is, but it’s one I don’t remember reading about or seeing in a western movie before. During the War Between the States, the opening narrative reads, the South sent men to the west to provoke uprisings by the Indians, forcing the North to send troops there – and away from the war – to protect the settlers.

   Brock Marsh, who impersonates Zachary Paige in this movie as an emissary sent directly to the Dakota Territory, as played by Gary Merrill, is really the bad guy (through and through), and he definitely deserves the top billing.

   Wanda Hendryx plays the fiery daughter of a Southern sympathizer who is hanged early on, while John Bromfield, the owner of the local stage line and the man who loves her, sides with the North, as do most of the local townspeople, excluding Noah Beery, Jr., who’s Merrill’s local contact.

   All of the above is made clear within the first five minutes of the movie. (I always do my best not to reveal more than you’d want to know.) The rest of the 65 minutes running time is filled with lots and lots of accusations, high-riding action, double crosses, a kidnapping, multiple deaths from gunfire, and at stake, a fortune in gold ready for the taking.

   The movie’s relatively hard to find on DVD, but it exists – I copied my copy on VHS from TNT back in 1991 — and you can even download a video of it from Amazon. If you were to ask me, though, you shouldn’t spend a lot of money to do so. It’s a perfectly adequate western movie — and maybe even more than that, given Merrill’s better than average performance as a bad guy — but an hour later even that’s as forgettable as the rest of the film.

THE KANSAN. United Artists, 1943. Richard Dix, Jane Wyatt, Albert Dekker, Victor Jory, Eugene Pallette, Robert Armstrong. Screenplay: Harold Shumate, based on the novel Peace Marshal by Frank Gruber. Director: George Archainbaud.

   If this review of the 1943 western film The Kansan starring Richard Dix had been published in a newspaper at the time, a sly headline writer may have tried to put this one across: Nix on Dix, He’s No Tom Mix.

   The role of the film’s hero, gunplay artist John Bonniwell, fits Dix like a poorly cut, over-sized suit that makes him look ridiculous. He is not as young and fit as a Buster Crabbe or Bob Steele, both of which would have been a better suited for the role, and unlike the older John Wayne in The Shootist, when the husks are peeled away, it is difficult to believe that Dix was ever such a skilled triggerman. Dix fills the role as well as a bloated John Barrymore might have.

   What Dix does bring to the role is a modicum of acting ability, and he is successful in his nuanced play with the quasi-villain played by Victor Jory and is charming with the female lead, Jane Wyatt. Jory has the more demanding part and delivers a stronger performance as Jeff Barat, the brother of the irredeemable, crooked banker Steve Barat who masterminds the movie’s machinations.

   Dix ambles through the movie while the exciting parts like a stampede and all-compassing saloon fight happen around him. Dix is so lugubrious that he brings to mind an insurance salesman apt at dolefully describing death and disaster.

   Not as lively as a game of checkers, nor as well thought out as a game of chess, the story moves from one square to the next across a familiar board. Drawn from the novel Peace Marshal by Frank Gruber, Dix’s character John Bonniwell demonstrates his finesse with the pistol and is maneuvered into the marshal’s job by the moneyed Easterner who runs the bank, played by Albert Dekker.

   Jory’s character is the gambler brother of the banker and is in love with the woman that Bonniwell loves. The villainous banker brings in his own set of outlaws to balance out the law. Following the same plot that dozens of other bottom-billed Westerns used, the hero cleans up the town and gets his gal.

   One character, Bones, played by African-American Willie Best, stands out for the wrong reasons. Granted one should be careful about judging attitudes held more than a half century before, but the Bones character with his craven servitude and witless blubbering is a throwback even further to the nastiest caricatures of blacks.

   In one scene, the outlaws sarcastically refer to Jory’s character as the Great Liberator and moments later, find the crouching, shivering Bones in his Union soldiers cap; it is as if the movie is almost saying, this is why we have Jim Crow laws.

   In a brief key part is the hefty character actor Eugene Pallette, whose voice croaks like a frog and whose bulk and charisma fill the screen in equal proportions. Rushing masses of cattle and horses at various junctures provoke those passions stirred by thundering hooves. A troupe of pretty girls seems to have taken a wrong turn at Times Square as they present their musical number on a saloon stage instead of Broadway.

   In that granddaddy of Western talkies, Cimarron (1931), a younger, lithe Richard Dix ably acted the part of Yancey Cravat, but with its playbill opening and grease-painted actors, this earlier film is a thespian production without the constraints of the stage. The recipe for a low-budget Western does not call for a stage actor but a macho movie presence. Dix could muster the former but not the latter.

THE ARIZONIAN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1935. Richard Dix, Margot Grahame, Preston Foster, Louis Calhern, James Bush, J. Farrell MacDonald, Willie Best, Etta McDaniel. Director: Charles Vidor.

   The ruggedly handsome Richard Dix, the actor whose voice you could recognize at a hundred paces, maybe even a thousand, was – and I’d never realized it until watching The Arizonian a couple of evenings ago – an occasional but fairly popular western star in the 1930s and 40s.

   He was the star of Cimarron (1931) for example; he was in this movie, of course; and he played Wild Bill Hickok in Badlands of Dakota (1941) and Wyatt Earp in Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die (1942).

   But unless you can tell me otherwise, most of his films were B-movies, where I think his good looks and great voice were underutilized, if not wasted. Regarding his voice, and I promise I won’t bring it up again, his career in the movies in the 1920s was extensive, and in the silents, all he had was his looks and (in my opinion) some acting ability.

   Dix plays Clay Tallant in The Arizonian, the Good Guy who comes to town, a town run by a crooked sheriff – there is a marshal (J. Farrell MacDonald), but he (the marshal) lasts about a minute and a half in terms of on-screen time.

   Clay is tempted into staying on by the beauty of singer Kitty Rivers (Margot Grahame), not realizing that his brother, already in town, is deeply in love with her. Brought in by the sheriff (crooked, if you recall, and played to perfection by a nicely supercilious Louis Calhern) is notorious outlaw Tex Randolph (Preston Foster), who soon changes sides when he sees who he’s been brought into town to kill.

   All the right ingredients for a pretty good western, and a beautifully photographed one to boot, but that’s all it is, pretty good. There’s a noticeable lack of continuity between scenes — or jumps in the story line, to make myself clearer — that I found annoying. Not a matter serious enough to stop watching, but nonetheless … annoying.

   There is a terrific shootout at the corral at the end of town, though, one with few survivors left standing, and one which made me bring the back of my right hand to my forehead with enough force behind it to make me say Duh. Mostly to myself, but now you know too.

THE CISCO KID WESTERN COLLECTION:

        ● THE GAY CAVALIER. Monogram Pictures, 1946. Gilbert Roland, Martin Garralaga, Nacho Galindo, Ramsay Ames, Helen Gerald, Tristram Coffin. Director: Willliam Nigh.

       â— BEAUTY AND THE BANDIT. Monogram Pictures, 1946. Gilbert Roland, Martin Garralaga, Frank Yaconelli, Ramsay Ames, Vida Aldana. Director: William Nigh.

       ● SOUTH OF MONTEREY. Monogram Pictures, 1946. Gilbert Roland, Martin Garralaga, Frank Yaconelli, Marjorie Riordan, Iris Flores. Director: William Nigh.

        ● RIDING THE CALIFORNIA TRAIL. Monogram Pictures, 1947. Gilbert Roland, Martin Garralaga, Frank Yaconelli, Teala Loring, Inez Cooper. Director: William Nigh

        ● ROBIN HOOD OF MONTEREY. Monogram Pictures, 1947. Gilbert Roland, Chris Pin Martin, Evelyn Brent, Jack La Rue, Pedro DeCordoba, Donna DeMario. Director: Christy Cabanne.

        ● KING OF THE BANDITS. Monogram Pictures, 1947. Gilbert Roland, Angela Greene, Chris Pin Martin, Anthony Warde, Laura Treadwell, William Bakewell. Director: Christy Cabanne.

   Speaking of Gilbert Roland and Widely Available (as I was at the end of my previous review ), his six Cisco Kid movies from Monogram are out on DVD in pristine prints not seen since their original release. This is not, however, a cause for general rejoicing, as the films themselves could be charitably described as lack-luster.

   Gilbert Roland was a romantic leading man in the silent films, but despite his melodious voice and relaxed acting, he slipped badly in the 30s and 40s: he can be glimpsed in humiliatingly small parts in The Sea Hawk (1940) and My Life with Caroline (1941) and he landed in a Columbia serial, The Desert Hawk in ’44.

   In 1949 John Huston resurrected his fortunes with a meaty part in We Were Strangers that led to a satisfying career as a busy character actor, but in 1946 he was doing pretty much anything that came along — and doing it surprisingly well.

   Roland’s Cisco Kid movies have their moments, but they are mostly listless and formulaic. Action is scarce and rather routine (except for a couple of sword fights in The Gay Cavalier and Riding the California Trail) and as for formula, well, in Cavalier Martin Garralaga plays an impecunious rancher who wants to wipe out his debts by marrying his daughter to a shifty Americano. It is up to Cisco to rescue her.

   In California Trail, Garralaga plays a rancher in debt to bad guys who wants to absolve his debt by marrying off his niece to a Yankee ne’er-do-well. And in South of Monterey, he’s a Police Captain who owes his job to American bad-guy Harry Woods and pressures his sister to marry him.

   Okay, so there’s a lot of bland-and-predictable in these films, but they are saved, redeemed even, by Gilbert Roland’s swaggering, sexy portrayal of the Cisco Kid. Roland, the only Mexican actor to play Cisco, wrote some of his own dialogue for these films, which demonstrates how seriously he took the part.

   His macho swagger and general air of devil-may-care recall Doug Fairbanks in The Gaucho (1927) and even in the reduced circumstances of these poverty-row westerns he looks relaxed, expansive, and damn sexy — which isn’t easy in a B-movie.

   Errol Flynn and Clark Gable projected rugged male sexiness easily with the vast resources of Warner Brothers and MGM behind them, but Gilbert Roland somehow managed the same effect on the tiny budgets of a studio renowned in those days as Hollywood’s dumping ground. And somehow he keeps one watching these tawdry films long after their promise has waned.

THE MAN BEHIND THE GUN. Warner Brothers, 1953. Randolph Scott, Patrice Wymore, Dick Wesson, Philip Carey, Lina Romay, Roy Roberts, Alan Hale Jr. Director: Felix E. Feist.

   This elegantly staged western is busy, stylish and full of pizzazz. That the plot, based on an unknown piece of southern Californian history, makes no sense whatsoever doesn’t seem to make much difference, or at least it didn’t to me.

   Randolph Scott is working undercover in this one, trying to infiltrate a gang of California revolutionists, Southern style, who are intent on capturing all the water rights surrounding the burgeoning burg of Los Angeles.

   Is he a schoolteacher (replacing Patrice Wymore, who is supposed to be marrying army officer Philip Carey), or is he a renegade, wanted for murdering a fellow officer in a duel?

   We (the viewer) know, as if anyone as dedicated to duty as Randolph Scott could be anything but a hero and a gentleman. The action (and the laughs, courtesy Hale & Wesson) is fast and furious, from the opening scene onward — including a modicum of romance (and a rowdy row between the two ladies).

   There is a neat twist in the tale as well, making this movie more than worthy of your attention. (If this is a B-western, it is a better B.)

[UPDATE] 10-20-10.   Do I remember this one? Only vaguely. But my review was positive enough that it convinced that I ought to own a copy of it on DVD.

   Easily done. There’s one available that also contains Thunder Over the Plains (Warner, 1953) and Riding Shotgun (Warner, 1954), both also with Randolph Scott.

   I should have it in my hands in four or five days.

SHALAKO. Cinerama Releasing Corporation, 1968. Sean Connery, Brigitte Bardot, Stephen Boyd, Jack Hawkins, Peter Van Eyck, Honor Blackman, Woody Strode, Alexander Knox, Valerie French, Donald Barry. Based on the novel by Louis L’Amour. Director: Edward Dmytryk.

   An all-star cast. Make that an international all-star cast. To little or no avail, alas. Not that any western isn’t worth watching, if filmed in color and with a large enough budget, as this one very definitely is, and even on occasions when not.

   The movie takes place in the 1880s, supposedly in New Mexico but actually in studio lots in England and on location in Spain. (The vegetation is therefore generally wrong, but the mountain and rough terrain vistas are very fine.)

   The basic premise of the film is simple. An aristocratic hunting expedition from Europe, complete with fine silver, champagne (unchilled), butlers and other assorted servants, wanders into Apache land, and it’s up to an Army scout names Shalako (Sean Connery) to warn them off, and when that fails, to get them to safety before they all die.

   The warning fails, naturally enough. The blame here goes to the nominal leader of the group, Baron Hallstatt (Peter Van Eyck), who has enough arrogance and stubbornness to hold off any number of Indians, if that were all it took, and it isn’t.

   I imagine this movie, when they were putting together the cast, was designed primarily for the pairing of Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot (Countess Irina Lazaar) as the two leading characters, but they seldom have much screen time together and when they are together, it’s not particularly a match made in heaven.

   I think more sparks would have been kindled if Honor Blackman (who plays Lady Julia Daggett) had played Miss Bardot’s part instead, but she does all right in her role as a woman frustrated by her dry stick of a husband (Jack Hawkins) and who rides off with the the villainous Bosky Fulton (Stephen Boyd) instead. A bad choice, as it turns out, but she didn’t listen to me, either.

   We do get to see Miss Bardot in a skinny dipping scene, but all in all, it’s a totally gratuitous one, since even though Shalako gets an admiring view, the plot doesn’t seem to depend very much upon it.

THE NIGHT HORSEMEN. Fox Film Corporation, 1921. Tom Mix, Mae Hopkins, Joseph Bennett, Sid Jordan, Bert Sprotte, Cap Anderson. Based on the novel The Night Horseman, by Max Brand (Putnam, 1920). Director: Lynn Reynolds. Shown at Cinecon 27, Hollywood CA, September 1993.

   Tom Mix plays Whistlin’ Dan Barry in this filming of a Max Brand novel, a somewhat bizarre tale of a cowpoke who follows the flight of the geese and whose eyes turn yellow when he’s angry.

   His code would keep him away from the dying rancher who raised him and drive him to kill the rancher’s son whom he seems to love like a brother. Dan crosses the meanest man in the county by killing his brother, and their battle, along with Dan’s reconciliation with the rancher’s son and the gal who loves him, made for an exciting, satisfying wind-up.