THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER. Paramount, 1938. Douglass Dumbrille, Sidney Toler, Russell Hayden, Stanley Andrews. Weldon Heyburn, Charlotte Field, Monte Blue. Based on the novel by Zane Grey. Director: Lesley Selander.

   Douglass Dumbrille is the kind of actor one vaguely remembers as a perennial nasty who never really scaled the heights.

   He had his moments, though: pushing bamboo shoots under Gary Cooper’s fingernails in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, chasing Jackie Cooper up the rigging in Treasure Island (center right), or looking down his nose at the Marx Brothers in The Big Store, happy times in a busy career that somehow never achieved the status of, say, Lionel Atwill or Vincent Price.

   Imagine my surprise, then, when he turned up as the out-and-out hero of an engaging B-Western called The Mysterious Rider. Dumbrille stars here for his first and only time as Pecos Bill, the nom du rue of a legendary highwayman who gets a hankerin’ to revisit the old homestead he left twenty years ago, wanted for murder.

   From this point, the story veers toward The Odyssey, with Pecos returning to his old ranch unrecognized, greeted by the dogs and finding his daughter beset by unworthy suitors-then setting about to put things right.

   Mysterious Rider shows what magic can be done by a capable director with familiar material. Lesley Selander spent thirty years in Bronson Canyon, Gower Gulch and other stomping grounds of the B-Western, churning out vehicles for Hopalong Cassidy, Buck Jones and Tim Holt, and he always took it seriously, investing his work with inventive camera angles, capable stunting and (most important) snappy pace.

   Here given a modestly off-beat story and an unlikely star, he turns out a fast, fun film, enlivened considerably by Dumbrille’s evident delight in playing a good guy — although his typecast background makes it easy to believe that he may well have been a road agent.

   One additional note: in 1957 Dumbrille, at age 70, married the 28 year old daughter of his friend and fellow character actor Alan Mowbray. They were still married at the time of his death, seventeen years later.

RUSTLER’S PARADISE. Ajax Pictures, 1935. Harry Carey, Gertrude Messinger, Edmund Cobb, Carmen Bailey, Theodore Lorch. Story-screenwriter-director: Harry L. Fraser.

   Rustler’s Paradise.could have sat right up there with Ride Lonesome and The Searchers for sheer perverse obsession, but as served up in the clumsy mitts of Director Harry Fraser, it just seems a bit quirky.

   Loveable, crusty old Harry Carey Sr. plays a vengeful cowboy out to get the guy who seduced his wife and stole his daughter, and in his late 50s here, he’s a bit old to be carrying the heavy heroics, but he acquits himself with his own unassuming charm, and his age even lends a bit of authenticity to the proceedings.

   Just as engaging is Edmond Cobb, looking like a cartoon villain with oversize nose and pointy chin, and his final comeuppance at the hands of loveable, crusty old Harry comes as rather a shock.

   There’s a potentially very effective moment where the outlaw gang, rushing to the hideout to dispose of Carey, see what he’s done to their boss, and all the fight just runs right out of them.

   Which could have been quite enjoyable in the hands of a capable director.

   But director Harry Fraser snuffs the glimmerings of anything strange and memorable in Rustler’s Paradise pretty quickly. Fans of Ed Wood should take a look at Fraser’s oeuvre and be humbled at the feet of the master.

   Where Wood made a few bad movies, Fraser was an auteur of epic ineptitude who stayed in the cheap-movie industry for a quarter century, turning out things like Captain America (the serial with the Atomic Vibrator), Chained for Life (a murder movie with actual conjoined twins as stars) and The White Gorilla, which features Ray Corrigan chasing himself in an ape suit.

   In Rustler’s Paradise Fraser takes the directorial reins, uses them to strangle a fine actor, and turns an off-beat story into something barely coherent. Dreadful, but typical of the man.

CAPTAIN THUNDER. Warner Brothers, 1930. Fay Wray, Victor Varconi, Charles Judels, Robert Elliott, Don Alvarado, Robert Emmett Keane. Director: Alan Crosland.

   It was “Captain’s Day” one day last week on TCM. This one followed Captain Applejack which I watched and commented on a couple of days ago, with several more taped and ready to be watched as soon as I’m able, including Captain Blood, which is first movie I remember watching as a kid, when I was perhaps six or seven years old.

   Many of the other movies in this grouping, which were shown all day, seem to have been newly recovered from the vaults, but if so, this one may as well go back in. It does feature Fay Wray, whom I can watch in anything, as this movie has proven, but it has little else going for it that would prompt more than the slightest recommendation.

   Not only does Fay Wray have a leading role, but the very first time we see her, she’s in a very skimpy slip and little else, a fact worth both pointing out and explaining.

   Captain Thunder, a Mexican bandit raising havoc with the forces of the utterly inept and totally comical El Commandante Ruiz (Charles Judels), has previously robbed the stagecoach in which she was coming into town, and part of the tribute demanded was the outer clothing of all its passengers. (And perhaps the driver and the fellow riding shotgun as well. I should go back and look. I was distracted at the time.)

   El Capitan Thunder is played most boisterously by Victor Varconi, a Hungarian playing a Mexican in this movie. His career began in the silents back in his homeland, starting in 1913, and as is often the case with many early talking films, some actors did not at first understand that less is sometimes more.

   Be that as it may, Captain Thunder’s credo is that he will keep all of the promises he makes, which puts him in a quandary when one he makes to the slim and supremely beautiful Ynez Dominguez (Fay Wray) runs headlong into one he makes to the evil Pete Morgan (Robert Elliott), a strutting gent with eyes on Ynez himself, although she is about to marry another. Much booing and hissing expected here.

   Fay Wray’s career survived this pre-King Kong film, I’m happy to say, and surprisingly enough, so did Victor Varconi’s, who had many small parts and supporting roles through the early 1950s. Director Alan Crosland died in 1936 at the age of only 41, but before that, he was at the helm of a couple of Perry Mason movies, and The White Cockatoo (1935), a film based on a pretty good mystery novel by Mignon G. Eberhart.

BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE. Columbia Pictures, 1958. Randolph Scott, Craig Stevens, Barry Kelley, Tol Avery, Peter Whitney. Based on the novel The Name’s Buchanan by Jonas Ward. Directed by Budd Boetticher.

    Synopsis: Riding home through the border town of Agry, Tom Buchanan gets caught up in a feud between the lawless Agry brothers and a family of Mexicans.

   Buchanan Rides Alone is a key film in the group of films Budd Boettticher did with Randolph Scott in the late 1950’s and is something of a comment on society as a whole. There’s nothing new about the newcomer riding into town and ending up cleaning the place up, but Buchanan goes about it in a singularly tough minded manner.

   The characters played by Scott in these films are good men who have been driven by circumstance to become hard, and while they carefully guard a nugget of their humanity beneath that tough exterior they can be ruthlessly violent and even brutal when it’s warranted.

   Because Buchanan Rides Alone is the first of a series of books and the character a sort of drifter, there is less backstory than usual in a Boetticher film. Buchanan would seem to be just another drifting cowboy looking for work — until someone pushes him the wrong way.

   At that point it becomes clear just how far the Scott hero will go to restore what he considers his personal honor. In some ways his Buchanan has some relationship to John D. MacDonald’s later Travis McGee character, particularly in The Green Ripper. Once he has unleashed the man beneath the surface someone is going to pay in blood before he resumes his easy going facade.

   That’s true of most western (and other) heroes but Scott and Boetticher together so refined and perfected the Scott persona in their movies together that they develop a sort of cinematic shorthand, a gesture, a look, a single word, that says more than pages of expository dialogue and background in other films.

   In some ways Scott’s take on the iconic western loner is the dominant one in the western imagination, however important the Gary Cooper, John Wayne, or even Clint Eastwood model. Likely the truest moment in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles is when the townfolk remove their hats reverently at the mere mention of Randolph Scott’s name.

   Barry Kelly is the corrupt town boss and Craig Stevens (just before Peter Gunn) a smooth gunfighter. There is nothing unusual in the plot, but the writing and direction are as superior as would be expected in a Boetticher film, and while the plot may be tried and true, the approach to character makes this one notable.

   The surprising thing about the Boetticher films is that while they are set against the wide open spaces of the west, they are closely focused character studies of men under stress, particularly the Scott hero, who reveals depths of feeling and humanity with little more than a pained look or by holding himself a little apart from everyone else in the film.

   I imagined the Buchanan of Jonas Ward’s series of books as someone along the line as Gary Cooper, but Scott at this time was at the height of his appeal, and his take on Buchanan combined a gentle charm that could turn to steel with a glint of his narrow eyes.

   And it isn’t as if there weren’t close bonds between Scott and Cooper. Scott got his start in Hollywood as Coooper’s dialogue coach for The Virginian and replaced Cooper in the popular Zane Gray series of films. By the time he made the series of films with Boetticher his version of the western hero was almost as iconic as Cooper’s, though it has only been in recent years he’s gotten real credit as an actor in them.

   At first glance Buchanan Rides Alone only seems to be a superior product of the heyday of the adult western, but there is more to the Scott character and to Boetticher’s direction than there may seem to be on the surface.

   In the confines of a fairly common western story Boetticher is commenting on both contemporary American society, and also saying something about the idealized American character. Scott’s hero in these films is the man who does the right thing even when it’s messy and society might prefer that he look the other way. Once he is unleashed he will have a reckoning, whatever the price.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   A complete list of the “Buchanan” books by Jonas Ward can be found following my review of Buchanan’s Black Sheep, a much later entry in the series. David originally left this movie review as a comment following that earlier post. I’ve revised it slightly for its appearance here.

RELENTLESS. Columbia, 1948. Robert Young, Marguerite Chapman, Willard Parker, Akim Tamiroff, Barton MacLane, Mike Mazurki, Clem Bevans. Based on the novel Three Were Thoroughbreds by Kenneth Perkins. Director: George Sherman.

   I taped this movie many years ago, but for a time that was just as long, I put off actually sitting down and watching until several days ago. I just couldn’t see Robert Young as a cowboy star, you see. Once you know an actor as a family man (Father Knows Best) or a kindly family doctor (Marcus Welby, M.D.). it’s hard to go back and see him in a western like this one, or even a crime film. He just doesn’t fit the image.

   Looking through his list of credits, though, I see that Young was in Western Union (1941) and another film I don’t recall knowing about before, The Half-Breed (1952). I may have missed another, but even so, while it’s not a long list, he’s hardly a zero in the western category. (His first movie credit may have been The Black Camel, the 1931 Charlie Chan film with Warner Oland.)

   And in Relentless he proved to me that he could shoot, he could ride, and he was good with horses, and that’s a fact, even if he still looks like a dude to me. In the story, he’s a drifter who’s framed for the murder of one of a pair of claim-jumpers.

   Turns out, of course, that it was the other half of the pair who did it, and to clear his name Nick Buckley (that’s Young) has to track down the real killer (that’s Barton MacLane) while the sheriff (Willard Parker — he’s the one on the right in the lobby card above — who later became Ranger Jace Pearson on TV’s Tales of the Texas Rangers) is hard on his heels throughout the movie.

   Where does Marguerite Chapman come in? you ask, and you should. She’s the proprietor and sole operator of a general store in a covered wagon, sort of a traveling saleslady, you might say. When she (Luella Purdy) and Nate Buckley both proclaim their independence and total disinterest in getting hitched up with anyone, you know from that moment on that their fate is sealed — even though when Luella once shows up in a dress rather than in her rather fetching cowgirl garb, Buckley barely takes notice — seemingly far more interested in the colt he’d had hopes of raising into a race horse than in her.

   Marguerite Chapman, a vivacious brunette and a true girl-next-door type, had a decent career in Hollywood, but sadly, I don’t believe that the general public remembers her at all today.

   Interestingly, IMDB says she was asked to appear as “Old Rose” Calver in Titanic, but she was too ill at the time (1997, when she was 89) and the role went to Gloria Stuart. (She’s far too glamorous in the close-up photo I’ve found. She doesn’t look anything like this in this movie, but I thought I’d show it to you anyway.)

   As for the movie itself, filmed in color to good effect, it keeps the players on the move throughout the film, with more than enough story line to fill its full 90 minutes or so. It’s even entertaining enough to watch a second time.

   But getting back to Robert Young, even after all this, I still have to tell you that he’s too soft-spoken and nice to be a western star. As a guy more interested in his horses rather than the girl — for all but the final scene! — he’s dumb enough in that sense to be one, that’s for sure.

THE BLAZING TRAIL. Columbia, 1949. Charles Starrett, Smiley Burnette, Marjorie Stapp, Fred Sears, Jock Mahoney, Trevor Bardette, Hank Penny, Slim Duncan. Screenplay: Barry Shipman. Director: Ray Nazarro.

   You’ve probably anticipated me by now, but there’s no trail to be blazed (or on fire) in this one either, still another Durango Kid movie.

   But like Phantom Valley, the earlier entry also directed by Ray Nazarro, this one’s also a decent mystery puzzler, complete with voiceover narration by Charles Starrett.

   At issue here, after the shooting death of old Mike Brady, is the matter of his will, which leaves the bulk of his estate to the “wrong” one of his two surviving younger brothers. The will was signed and witnessed (but not read) and sealed securely. How was the document altered? If it was, of course.

   As the dead man’s attorney, Luke Masters (Fred Sears) vouches for it, and while his daughter Janet (Marjorie Stapp) acts rather suspiciously about it, especially in the beginning, so does she. (See the photo to the right to get a good look at both Sears and Ms. Stapp.)

   Smiley Burnette runs a one-man newspaper in this one. He’s both the reporter for the Bradytown Bugle and the editor and the publisher, which makes for very funny problems as he tries to manipulate the movable type and generally get his printing press running. (He has no capital “D,” which makes it hard to spell Durango in the headlines.)

   The two brothers are obvious suspects, and so are the local gambler “Full House Patterson” (Jock Mahoney, who later of course became TV’s “Range Rider” as Jack Mahoney, not to mention a couple of Tarzan movies) and Brady’s long-time foreman, Jess Williams (Trevor Bardette, who according to IMDB, made 228 movie and TV appearances, many of them in crime or western roles just like this one).

   Steve’s last name in this one is Allen, and yes, I know. While the immediate investigation is clumsily done – how smooth could things go with Smiley involved? – the secret of how the will got altered is an impossible crime that’s worth double the price of admission. (Easily. What did it cost to go to the movies in 1949? For someone my age at the time, no more than 10 or 12 cents.)

   And while I know you are probably not wondering, there’s no romantic interest at all. The songs are pretty good, though.

PostScript: I was just thinking. If you took these three movies and worked out just how much screen time Starrett got versus how much Smiley Burnette did, I have a feeling that… Have you ever watched one? What do you think?

   The problem with the Texas State Police was two fold. First they were imposed in place of the Rangers by the Federal government after the Civil War, and second they were highly politicized with positions of authority being sold to the highest bidder, who in Reconstruction Texas were likely to be carpetbaggers and crooks — the only people with any money.

   They would have been resented even if they had done a good job, but by any standard they accomplished nothing and the state had descended into such a chaotic condition under them that even the Army wanted them disbanded and the Rangers reformed.

   They managed to hold on until 1876 when the Rangers were reformed in response to wide spread outlawry and the renewed threat of the Comanche and Apache in western Texas.

   Anyone wanting to know more should read Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers which is an epic Pulitzer Prize winning history of the organization from it’s origins in the Austin colony to 1936.

   It was also loosely the basis of the movie The Texas Rangers (1936), directed by King Vidor with Fred MacMurray and Lloyd Nolan, remade as The Streets of Laredo (1949) with William Holden and William Bendix.

   The sequel, The Texas Rangers Ride Again (1940) was a B film, but had a screenplay by Black Mask alum Horace McCoy, and reflected the stories he did of modern Ranger Jerry Frost in the Mask.

   The Rangers were hardly pristine, but because the organization was always small and depended on the authority of one man with a badge and a gun it seldom had the bureaucracy to be as corrupt as the Texas State Police.

   Even today there is some confusion that the Texas Highway Patrol and the Rangers are the same. They aren’t. The Rangers are a separate investigative unit within the state police who aid in state wide crime enforcement and are called in by small towns and counties when needed.

   For most of the 20th century there have seldom been more than 500 Rangers who are recruited from the police forces around the state. Like the FBI they provide CSI and other support for localities who can’t afford their own labs and investigators. Contrary to their reputation for gunplay they actually have a good record of negotiating peaceful endings to bad situations and most agree if the FBI and ATF had left Waco to the Rangers they could have ended it peacefully.

   It isn’t that they haven’t had their bad times. In the 1920’s when Pa and Ma Ferguson controlled the governors office the Klan got a toe hold in the Rangers. A new administration brought in the legendary Colonel Homer Garrison who cleaned the Rangers up and turned them into a modern police unit.

   Garrison was so successful that during WWII he was chosen by FDR and Winston Churchill to reform the police in former Nazi controlled territories in North Africa, and helped to reform the French and German police when the war ended. Supposedly Stalin invited him to Russia to help reform the Russian police but he politely declined.

   That said the Rangers again had some trouble during the sixties during the race troubles, but again reformed and cleaned up their act. Notably even during this period it was a single Ranger who ended boss rule in South Texas when he brought down the infamous Duval County Bosses ending the virtual slavery of itinerant workers in that part of the state.

   Another film to see tackle the Texas State Police is Galloping Legion, a better than usual Bill Elliot western with Jack Holt. Not an A perhaps, but a B+ certainly.

   The Rangers, like Scotland Yard and the RCMP, trade on their legend for part of their effectiveness, but like those organizations have been aided by legendary members from Deaf (Deef) Smith and Big Foot Wallace, Rip Ford, McNelly, Lee Nace (yes, that’s where Lester Dent got the name — Nace was the Ranger who befriended William Henry Porter, O Henry when he was arrested and who is the model for the sympathetic Ranger Captain in the story that introduced the Cisco Kid), and Red Burton who arrested John Wesley Hardin and once put down a riot single handedly inspiring the “one riot one Ranger” saying (not the motto of the organization — that’s “Know you are right, then go ahead”) enshrined on the statue of Ranger Lobo Gonzales that stood in the lobby of Dallas Love Field.

   Other noted Ranger’s included the aforementioned Lobo Gonzales who cleaned up the oil boom town of Kilgore in one afternoon and Frank Hamer who hunted down Bonnie and Clyde. And I’ll confess aside from being a little prejudiced as a Texan, I’m the great grandson of a Ranger, so take all this with a grain of salt and do your own research.

   While they have their low points the actual unvarnished history of the Rangers reads like a novel. Even today a single Ranger carries with him the authority of the entire state. They aren’t infallible, and there are black marks in their history, but for once much of the hype is based on fact instead of public relations.

    “My first exposure to Charles Starret wasn’t in a western at all. He is the young leading man in the excellent Mask of Fu Manchu with Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy as the evil doctor and his daughter, Lewis Stone as Nayland Smith, Karen Morley as the romantic interest, and Jean Hersholt.

    “It was only later that I saw the Durango Kid films. They still show up once in a while on the Encore Western channel, and the comic book based on them had a long run — though they can be pricey since Frank Frazetta’s White Indian was the backup feature.”

    “Mackenna’s Gold, based on a terrific book by Will Henry (aka Clay Fisher and also Heck Allen who wrote cartoons for MGM during the Tex Avery era) is a big shaggy likable movie. It never really comes together, but there is so much going on and everyone is trying so hard that you feel like giving it a pass when it misfires.

    “There are some high points, including Edward G. Robinson as Old Adams of the Lost Adams Mine, and Julie Newmar as the most statuesque Apache in history. For the most part the movie sticks to the book, save at the end which is unfortunate. There are some fair special effects (for the time, they are pretty obvious now), and nice set pieces.

    “The real problem is that Omar Sharif is such a charming rogue that they couldn’t kill him off so the film gets a little distracted toward the end. Those that have read Will Henry’s novel will understand that the climax of the film is a bit of a disappointment, though it does manage some elements of the original. Victor Jory’s narration is great.

    “Two other caveats, Jose Feliciano crooning “Old Turkey Buzzard” will drive you to distraction, and a fine cast including Lee J. Cobb, Burgess Meredith, Anthony Quayle, Eli Wallach, Eduardo Cianelli, and Raymond Massey are largely wasted. On the other hand Keenan Wynn has fun chewing scenery as Sharif’s Mexican bandit crony, and Ted Cassidy is menacing as a giant mute Apache and there is a hint Rudy Soble might have been able to do something with a noble Apache, but doesn’t get the chance.

    “One correction, Telly Savalas doesn’t play a cavalry officer, but a treacherous sergeant who betrays his men for a shot at Adams Gold. Those who know their western history will know that the Lost Adams Mine is a real life treasure that modern adventurers are still looking for. In many ways Mackenna’s Gold is less a modern Treasure of Sierra Madre than a precursor of Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

WHIRLWIND RAIDERS. Columbia, 1948. Charles Starrett, Smiley Burnette, Fred Sears, Philip Morris, Jack Ingram, Nancy Saunders, Patrick Hurst, Don Kay Reynolds (as Little Brown Jug), Doye O’Dell and The Radio Rangers. Screenplay: Norman Hall. Director: Vernon Keays.

   Well, once again there are no raiders in this next Durango Kid movie, or if there are, by no connotation of the word, are they “whirlwind raiders.” The bad guys are more insidious than that. At a time when the Texas Rangers were officially disbanded, the “Texas State Police” were put in charge, and if the screenwriter for this film is to be believed, they were a bunch of crooks with political connections who rode sway over the populace with grafts, holdups and penny ante corruption throughout their ranks.

   (If anyone knows how true this small aberration in Texas history might be, let me know.)

   Charles Starrett is Steve Lanning in this one, a former Texas Ranger working undercover to root out the bad guys, led by saloon owner Tracey Beaumont (Fred Sears) and his head henchman, Buff Tyson (Jack Ingram, whom I am sure always played a crook in his 271 film appearances, or in at least most of them).

   But what this means is that in this movie, as opposed to the previous one, Lanning does have of a reason for having two identities. Whenever he does anything of semi-illegality, such as breaking into Beaumont’s safe late at night, he does it as the Durango Kid.

   I mentioned earlier my (adult-based) puzzlement that no one ever seems able to recognize Steve as Durango, but in this movie, a young lad named Tommy Ross (played by Little Brown Jug, as he is billed in the credits) actually does discover that the two are indeed one and the same.

    He is quickly sworn to secrecy and sworn in as an adjunct Texas Ranger to boot. His first assignment? To follow the actions of Smiley Burnette, who “is acting very suspiciously.”

   Smiley in this movie is a traveling tinkerer who’s set up shop in the same town, and with a covered wagon filled with pots and pans and objects of other obviously beneficial value, including a cage containing two chickens, it establishes a very convenient venue for Smiley to clown around in, making an enormous racket most of the time he’s on the screen.

   There’s no love interest in this one either, or just the smallest of hints that newspaper owner Bill Webster (Patrick Hurst) is interested in making moves on Claire Ross (Nancy Saunders), daughter of rancher Homer Ross (Philip Morris). There’s no time to add any mushy stuff to this story, which is chuck full of action, comedy and singing, in just about that order.

   Additional comments: This was the only movie Patrick Hurst made, and he plays his role so thinly in this one, you might not even realize he was in it. Philip Morris, although only 55, looks old and tired, and it’s scary to learn that he died the very next year. Beginning in 1949, Fred Sears began his career as a director with yet another Durango movie, Desert Vigilante. He did lots of westerns among his 51 films, including the 1958 version of Utah Blaine, based on the novel by Louis L’Amour.

[UPDATE] 02-12-09.   This is the second of three Durango Kid movies I taped and watched over four years ago now. I’ll post the third review tomorrow, if all goes well.

   After digging the reviews out of storage, it prompted me to sign up for the Encore grouping of premium cable channels yesterday — one of them being, of course, the Western Channel, the source of these Durango films.

   I canceled today without taping a single one of their offerings. I do not care to pay a premium fee for cable channels with huge logos (bugs) in the lower corner of the screens. These must have appeared between now and the last time I’d signed up for the Encore channels, since they weren’t there before, at least not as permanently and as ugly as they are now.

   Turner Classic movies uses logos, but they come on only every 30 minutes or so, and then quietly disappear. The Encore logos are four times the size and are opaque white. Maybe I’m the only one who hates these things. And don’t get me started on network TV and the bulk of the non-premium cable channels. Besides news and sports, I don’t watch any of them.

   Not only do they have logos, but they have characters from next show come wandering in on the bottom of screen and jump around until you notice them (as if) and then whoosh off, sound effects included, all the while the current show is still on. Besides this sort of nonsense, and five-minute blocks of commercials, I can’t see anyone except invalids and shut-in’s putting up with this. But I guess they do.

   On a more pleasant note, I’m going to repeat one of the comments that Walker Martin left after I posted yesterday’s Durango Kid feature:

    “Today, I just received a new book, Western Film Series of the Sound Era, by Michael R. Pitts. Published by McFarland it’s 474 pages [long and covers] 30 western film series from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. Included is a long chapter on The Durango Kid, 45 pages discussing all the films and 11 photos and posters. Also there is a chapter on the Dr. Monroe series discussing the three films starring Charles Starrett.

    “McFarland Books website lists the 30 series covered.”

    It’s just out. It was published only last December, and I’ve ordered a copy myself. As Walker says, the various series it covers are listed on the McFarland website, but to save you the time of searching online for it yourself, here’s the Contents Page:

PHANTOM VALLEY. Columbia, 1948. Charles Starrett, Smiley Burnette, Virginia Hunter, Joel Friedkin, Robert Filmer, Teddy Infuhr, Ozie Waters & The Colorado Rangers. Screenwriter: J. Benton Cheney. Director: Ray Nazarro.

   Strangely enough, there are no phantoms in Phantom Valley. But someone definitely seems determined to start a range war between the cattlemen and the local homesteaders. The mystery is who this crooked mastermind is, and it’s up to Steve [Collins] and his alter ego, The Durango Kid, to find out who.

   Assisting him is Smiley “Sherlock Holmes” Burnette, whose expertise, gained from a correspondence school manual (and a large magnifying glass), proves to be less than very valuable. Assisting Smiley, and his nemesis who easily outwits him at every turn, is a young apple-eating lad (Teddy Infuhr) who collects the clues that Smiley simply tosses away.

   When I was a kid, the Durango Kid movies were the best there were. Roy was OK, I don’t remember Hoppy at the time, and Gene, Rex and Monte were all good but second-rate. But while I was watching this one now, I started to wonder about things that never occurred to me at the time.

   Things such as, why did Steve (see below) bother even having a secret identity? It was — and still is — neat that he had a cave where he kept his white horse and DK outfit, but what good purpose did it serve in changing to and becoming the Durango Kid? (This is heresy, I know. My younger self would hardly believe my ears, hearing me say such things.)

   But how come no one recognized him, with only a black bandanna over the lower portion of his face? How come the bad guys shoot so badly and, truth be told, how come they always start shooting too soon?

   What was really neat (to me at the time) was that in almost all of the Durango Kid movie, Starrett’s character was always named Steve. Steve Langtry, Steve Norris, Steve Warren, Steve Blake. Two references on Phantom Valley disagree on which Steve it was that Starrett played in this film. One says Collins, the other doesn’t say one way or the other. After watching it, I don’t believe he ever had a last name.

   There is a girl in this one — Virginia Hunter as Yancey Littlejohn — but she’s not really a mushy romantic love interest as she would have been in one of Gene’s or Roy’s movies. She’s the daughter of an elderly and slightly crippled attorney new to Phantom Valley — Joel Friedkin as Sam Littlejohn — and along with a banker named Reynolds (Robert Filmer) her father becomes one of the primary suspects, and Yancey is his primary defender.

   And what do you know? This is an honest to goodness detective puzzler. It surprised me, but minor as it is — hidden between the songs and Smiley’s foolish antics — there it is, and it’s good in its fashion as — dare I say it? — some of the Charlie Chan movies of the same vintage.

   Additional comments: Teddy Infuhr you might remember as the mute boy in Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman (1944) and (you might not) several times over as one of the many kids in the Ma & Pa Kettle series of comedy films.

   Virginia Hunter is very pretty and attractive, but she seems to have had only a short career in films. Her roles include at least one other Durango movie, several Three Stooges shorts, and a small part in the noir thriller He Walked by Night (1948). Mostly B-movies, looking down through the rest of the list, and often small uncredited parts at that, but she makes the most of this one.