Sun 28 Feb 2010
A Western Movie Review: THE LAW OF THE 45’s (1935).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[12] Comments
THE LAW OF THE 45’s. Normandy Pictures, 1935. Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams (Tucson ‘Two-Gun’ Smith), Molly O’Day, Al St. John (Stoney Martin), Ted Adams, Lafe McKee, Fred Burns. Screenplay: Robert Emmett Tansey, based on the novel by William Colt MacDonald (Law of the Forty-Fives, Covici Friede, 1933). Director: John P. McCarthy.
To start off, to put off the inevitable and to put it bluntly, there is absolutely no reason anyone should watch this Bottom of the Barrel B-Western movie except for historical reasons.
To wit: although not officially part of the canon, and even though only two of them show up, and one of them has the wrong name, this is the first of the “Three Mesquiteers” movies, of which there were 51 more to come, beginning in 1936 and ending in 1943.
Although many players played the three cowboys over the years, the ones I remember most are Robert Livingston as Stony Brooke, Ray Corrigan as Tucson Smith, and Max Terhune as Lullaby Joslin. You may have your own favorite threesome, but as much as I liked Bob Steele as a cowboy star (Tucson Smith in the last 13 of them), the ones above were mine.
Some movies with a running time of 57 minutes have so much crammed into them that each and every scene has a crucial part of the story line in it. Not so with Law of the .45’s. It is the longest 57 minutes I can remember sitting through since grad school. The acting is a mixture of old-fashioned silent movie stars trying to figure out what the microphone is doing there, with pauses for emphasis that you could plow an 18-wheeler through, while other of the players seem to have taken nicely to the new technology, speaking in normal tones and normal rhythms.
Story: a crooked lawyer is apparently behind the gang of outlaws terrorizing the valley where Tucson and Stoney are bringing their herd of cattle, and the latter agree to work for Joan Hayden (Molly O’Day) and her father (Lafe McKee) to bring peace and justice back to the land again.
Other than that, there is little but cowboys riding here and there in the hills, ranches being burned to the ground and cattle stampeding (as cattle are wont to do) — all very exciting, or it would be if you care for watching cowboys riding here and there in the hills, sometimes at very high speeds. There is also a group of singing wranglers, unnamed as a group or individually in the movie’s credits, but their identities can be found on the know-all IMDB page for the film.
As for Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams, he gets to grimace and squint a lot, but on the other hand, he also gets the girl.
February 28th, 2010 at 6:12 am
By far the best team was Livingston, Corrigan, and Terhune, even above the John Wayne entries. However, the initial entry in the regular series Powdersmoke Range (1935), with Harry Carey (Tuson Smith), Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele, Guinn Big Boy Williams, and Tom Tyler was a solid B western.
The later series with Livingston, Duncan Renaldo, and Raymond Hatton tried to capitalize on Livingston’s role in the second Lone Ranger serial by finding excuses for Stony to put on a mask and ride forth on a white horse.
My favorite film of the series is RIDERS OF THE WHISTLING SKULL, an Indiana Jonesish adventure with the boys dealing with an archeological dig.
Sounds as if this one was hard going even for historical purposes. And try as I might I just can’t see Williams as the hero. I still have trouble with the first Green Hornet serial with Gordon Jones in the lead. Some actors just weren’t cut out for screen heroics.
February 28th, 2010 at 10:38 am
Darn, what a shame this movie is such a dog. I like Guinn “Big Boy” Williams in both Dodge City (1939) and Virginia City (1940).
February 28th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
David
You’ve caught Wikipedia in an error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Mesquiteers
They have the first entry in the series as THE THREE MESQUITEERS (1936), not POWDERSMOKE RANGE.
Whereas IMDB has the correct total of 53 films in the series, not 51, including both LAW OF THE 45s and POWDERSMOKE RANGE:
http://www.imdb.com/keyword/three-mesquiteers-series/
Unfortunately the latter lists the movies in order of popularity, not chronologically. The one most highly rated is RIDERS OF THE RIO GRANDE, from 1943, while RIDERS OF THE WHISTLING SKULL languishes in 22nd place.
Go figure.
And as an interesting aside, perhaps, by the time they got around to making VALLEY OF HUNTED MEN (1942) the threesome had Nazis as a threat to track down, up Montana way.
James B.
To me, Big Boy Williams has a persona about him that makes him seem a little too dopey to be a hero. Dopey’s too harsh a word, I have to admit, but at the moment I can’t think of a better one.
I think his best work was as a supporting actor, as in the two movies you mention, where his basic good nature wins out, and when it comes down to it, even in LAW OF THE 45s.
— Steve
February 28th, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Steve mentions VALLEY OF HUNTED MEN, one of my favorite films in the series, starring Bob Steele and Tom Tyler, with John English as director. You can’t go wrong with The Three Mesquiteers and Nazis!
February 28th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
Walker
I saw VALLEY OF THE HUNTED MEN a few months back and it is an entertaining entry. There is also a John Wayne one where he, Corrigan, and Terhune battle foreign saboteurs, but I think their German origin is only hinted at in that one.
James B. — Steve
I like Guinn “Big Boy” Williams too, but not as a leading men. He came off that same legendary football team that gave us John Wayne, Ward Bond, and Bruce Cabot among others, and had a good career still playing the same basic character as late as THE ALAMO. Yes, he was great in DODGE CITY, VIRGINIA CITY, and SANTA FE TRAIL.
But he just wasn’t leading man material. There were actors like Dick Foran who could do both, but Williams just wasn’t one of them. Oddly, Hoot Gibson, who was in POWDERSMOKE RANGE, often played comic roles though he was usually the hero as well. Hoot was the comic relief in the Rough Riders series with Tim McCoy and Buck Jones, though never a silly one. Dave O’Brien, who is best remembered for the Pete Smith shorts and as a writer for Red Skelton, also played the male ingenue in the Tex Ritter films.
But “Big Boy” Williams as a leading man was a leap too far.
Maybe the oddest hero was Douglas Dumbrille in THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER. You have to wonder what the eight to ten year old audience made of him as the hero. It would have been like seeing Roy Rogers battling good guy Roy Barcroft, though some actors like Clayton Moore played as many villains as heroes.
March 1st, 2010 at 3:08 pm
I l-o-v-e Douglas Dumbrille in MYSTERIOUS RIDER! He looks like he might actually have spent the last 10 years as an outlaw. Also, the plot echoes the last part of THE ODYSSEY with the wandering man of action returning home unrecognized to find his daughter besieged by an unworthy suitor…
As for LAW/.45s, the problem with all too many B-westerns is that fights, chases, etc. cost $ they couldn’t afford, leaving most of them regrettably leisurely affairs..
March 1st, 2010 at 6:45 pm
I’ve read if you wanted a big posse or a bunch of extras milling around in a town scene, then it was easy in the 1920’s and 1930’s; just give the extras a box lunch and a couple dollars and you would have someone happy to ride all day shooting blanks, etc.
March 3rd, 2010 at 4:47 am
Dan
Dumbrille was good in MYSTERIOUS RIDER, I just wondered what the average eight to ten year old in the audience made of him come Saturday morning.
True, he was younger than Tom Mix or Buck Jones or Harry Carey, but I can’t imagine that offbeat casting was much encouraged by that audience.
I’d love to know the back story to giving him the part.
You have to wonder why they would cast Guinn “Big Boy” Williams in something that required more acting than the usual western.
Incidentally he’s also in POWDERSMOKE RANGE as the comic relief, though I don’t know if that was meant as a tie to the first film since Harry Carey is now playing Tucson Smith.
The studios were always experimenting. Jimmy Durante plays a more or less straight role in THE WET PARADE as a Prohibition agent and somehow Eddie Quillan got cast as Ellery Queen (it had to be the initials). Sometimes it worked as with Edmund Gwenn as the assassin in FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, but most of the time it mostly confused the audience.
Walker
At that time period, on any given day hundreds of extras were waiting for ‘cattle calls,’ and there were enough ‘cowboys’ and ‘indians’ hanging about most of the studios to stage the Little Big Horn or Oklahoma Land Rush. Even Ayn Rand was an extra in one of de Mille’s silent biblical epics and Lon Chaney supposedly got his start in films that way.
Republic had enough western town sets to film several films at the same time. As you say, a box lunch and a few bucks would be all they asked — and for many a good day. And since most of the studios had their own livestock they also had wranglers who worked as extras and sometimes stunt men. Since you were likely already paying them you might as well get the most out of them.
But some of the really small studios were working on a shoe string and didn’t have the kind of resources of even the poverty row studios.
March 4th, 2010 at 6:38 am
While searching through my old movie collection, I stumbled upon a Sinister Cinema VHS of LAW OF THE 45’s. So despite the many warnings listed above and the low IMDB.com rating, I thought I’d watch it and then report how everyone was mistaken because the film is a forgotten masterpiece.
Wrong. Right from the beginning when “Big Boy” snap shoots 3 cowboys out of their saddles, I knew I was in trouble. For all he knew these guys were duly authorized deputies chasing an outlaw, but he guns them down without a moment’s hesitation. Then minutes later another 3 bite the dust and later another 3 in a darkened saloon. Finally at the end he shoots 3 more in the villain’s house and proceeds to thrash the bad guy despite being seriously wounded in the shoulder.
Total dead bad guys shot by our hero: at least 12 and frankly the chief bad guy didn’t look too good after Big Boy beat the living hell out of him with one arm.
I noticed the girl, Molly O’Day was so shocked by this violence, that she never made another movie after 1935. At least that’s my theory.
March 5th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Walker
I would have mentioned Big Boy’s snap shooting, if I’d remembered that’s what it’s called. For those who don’t know, it’s a means of firing a gun by bringing your arm back over your shoulder, then flinging your hand (and your gun in it) in a fast forward arc, and thus adding immeasurably to the velocity of the bullet as you pull the trigger precisely the right instant to fell a rider on a horse over 50 yards away.
I suppose it can be done, but I’ve never tried it myself, not since I was seven years old and was playing Cowboys and Indians with the other kids on the block, all of us having seen far too many B-western movies for our own welfare.
We all turned out well, though, I’m sure.
— Steve
February 28th, 2013 at 4:15 pm
Powdersmoke Range is a Mesquiteers story but quite correctly not included in the main series. Different studio for starters.
Hoot Gibson played in The Trail Blazers which succeeded The Rough Riders.
March 1st, 2013 at 11:18 am
Re Hoot Gibson
Just in case this wasn’t clear. The Rough Riders were played by Tim McCoy, Buck Jones and Raymond Hatton. Rex Bell filled in for the final film in that series. No Hoot.