Sun 15 Feb 2009
Archived Western movie review: THE BLAZING TRAIL (1949).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews , Western movies[2] Comments
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?
February 16th, 2009 at 12:50 am
The mention of Jock Mahoney reminded me that he was king of the stuntmen for a while (Sally Field was his stepdaughter and the Burt Reynolds film Hooper featured Mahoney’s last stunt — in a wheel chair — and the Brian Keith character was loosely based on him). He earned his status as a stuntman for his work in the Errol Flynn Raoul Walsh film The Adventures of Don Juan (where he also played one of Don Juan’s fencing students). At the end of the film there is a duel between Flynn and villain Robert Douglas fought on a broad staircase. The final scene calls for Flynn to throw aside his sword, draw his dagger, and leap from the steps onto Douglas (or rather, his stuntman). The problem is that the costume Flynn wore was fairly form fitting — tights and a silk or satin shirt — and the scene was shot from an angle where there was no mattress for the two men to land on. Mahoney, who was doubling for Flynn had to make a spectacular leap from mid staircase, land on Douglas stuntman, and drive the dagger home. If he missed he would crash face first into a hardwood (or tile, though it was supposed to be marble) floor, and even if he hit all his marks he and the second stuntman had no protective gear and nothing but a hard floor to land on (there was likely a mattress off camera, but from the angle of the shot it would require quite a bit of skill hitting it). Douglas stuntman did have a cape, so he most likely had some protective gear, but it can’t have been much.
Needless to say Mahoney made the leap, and not long after that his career began to take off. He appeared in Three Stooges shorts and played villains in westerns, even in one Randolph Scott western Carson City, and eventually got his break on television with The Range Rider and then mystery writer Richard Sale’s series Yancy Derringer about a New Orleans gambler in the post Civil War south. Neville Brand was his Native American companion and Beverly Garland a recurring character who was something of a lady pirate.
Throughout the period he had a variety of film roles varying from leads in The Land Unknown and some well done westerns culminating in the role he had always dreamed of playing, Tarzan (previously he played a villain in the Gordon Scott Tarzan the Magnificent, held to be one of the highpoints of the jungle man’s film career), but illness that caught him while filming Tarzan in India resulted in his losing considerable weight so in his only two Tarzan’s films he is emaciated and drawn looking. He withdrew from the series and was replaced by football star Mike Henry when the films took a slightly more adult turn with Tarzan and the Valley of Gold.
In later years I believe he suffered emphysema, arthritis, and never quite recovered from the illness in India. He died not long after the scene in Hooper. He did do one full fledged mystery film, Three Blondes in His Life where he played a globe trotting insurance investigator investigating a murder in L.A..
February 16th, 2009 at 12:57 am
Reading the little postscript about the amount of time in the Durango Kid films devoted to Smiley Burnette I couldn’t help but recall something Leonard Maltin once said about a B mystery series (the Falcon I think), namely that some of the films could use a good dose of mystery relief from the comedy relief. From what I recall of the Durango Kid, a little western relief wouldn’t have been out of place, enjoyable as they were.