Mon 14 Mar 2022
A Western Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: THE TEXAS RANGERS (1936)
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[6] Comments
THE TEXAS RANGERS. Paramount, 1936. Fred MacMurray, Lloyd Nolan, Jean Parker, and Jack Oakie. Screenplay by King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill, and Louis Stevens, from the book by Walter Prescott Webb. Directed by King Vidor. Currently streaming on YouTube.
A trio of desperadoes get separated while fleeing from a posse. Two of them join the Texas Rangers as cover, and gradually find themselves becoming committed to the Ranger mission, while the third forms a new gang and continues on his thievin’ murderin’ way, and if you can’t tell what develops….
Despite the formulaic plot, this is far far from routine, thanks to Vidor’s assured direction and the performances from the leads. Until he hooked up with Disney and My Three Sons, MacMurray always lent a kind of equivocal edge to his roles that contrasted uneasily with his bluff good looks, and it makes him perfect as the bad guy turned hero (for now). Oakie’s good-for-little bravura makes a fine comedy relief, and Nolan’s big-city look suits his character just fine.
But it’s Vidor’s sensitive handling of stock situations and his flair for action scenes that lifts Rangers out of its cliche’d roots.
F’rinstance, there’s a bit where the Rangers are trapped on a cliffside, holding off angry Apaches down below. A few of the more ambitious Native Americans climb up above and start laboriously rolling boulders down at the Rangers. Vidor’s smooth way of cutting (The boulders come at intervals, thundering down the near-sheer wall like a cannon shot, as the rangers claw their way up the cliff to stop them) from long-shots, to medium exteriors, to studio “exteriors†propels the scene to epic proportions.
Then, in quieter moments, the emotional resonance he puts into the scene where Nolan and Oakie have it out — Oakie’s braggadocio melting as he realizes how dangerous his old pal has become, Nolan losing control of himself, and visibly enjoying it — has stuck with me since I was a kid, and followed me into my dotage.
Jimmy Stewart called moments like these “Pieces of time.†I call it fine movie-making and great fun.
March 14th, 2022 at 1:52 pm
My personal favorite MacMurray film, way above his Universal Westerns. Remade in 1949 less effectively
as Street of Laredo. George Montgomery and Noah Beery, Jr. took a run as something similar in 1951.
March 14th, 2022 at 6:04 pm
Of course, both as a fifth generation Texan and namesake of a great grandfather who was a gunfighter and Texas Ranger this is right up my alley. I can testify from family history that the idea of the outlaw (or at least wild kid) turned Ranger is not entirely fiction. Many a young man chose between bars and or the rope and the badge. There are reasons my great grandmother’s favorite saying was it takes a thief to catch a thief, despite her husband making his living most of her married life as a lawman.
The film is loosely suggested by Walter Prescott Webb’s monumental (1095pgs) Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Rangers, THE TEXAS RANGERS published in time for the Centennial of Texas Independence from Mexico — and the reason the film came out in 1936 to coincide with the big Texas State Fair celebration (also the subject of Gene Autry’s THE BIG SHOW).
This one is a delight, and there is a sort of follow up, RANGERS OF FORTUNE (1940) directed by Sam Wood with MacMurray, Gilbert Roland, and Albert Dekker as good bad men who save a small Texas border town from outlaws led by saloon owner Joseph Schidlkraut.
It’s not as good, but still worth seeing, and obviously “inspired” by the Vidor film.
The real sequel, of sorts, is a modern Western TEXAS RANGERS RIDE AGAIN (1940) directed by James Hogan with John Howard as a modern Ranger going undercover with a gang and a strong B cast that includes Ellen Drew, Akim Tamiroff, and Broderick Crawford and a screenplay by Horace McCoy somewhat in the manner of his BLACK MASK stories about modern flying Tommy gun wielding Ranger Jerry Frost.
The 1951 film with George Montogmery has Montgomery and his brother Jerome Courtland as ex cons turned Ranger’s who go undercover to catch the Sam Bass outlaw gang. The most recent TEXAS RANGERS (2001) with Dylan McDermott and James Van der Bek is a highly fictionalized account of a famous raid by a company of Rangers into Mexico on a gang of rustlers and killers who were terrorizing the border and had built a supposedly impregnable fortress in Mexico.
March 14th, 2022 at 7:01 pm
I agree with Jimmy Stewart. There’s worlds upon worlds contained in early Hollywood films. It’s recursive, Proustian, darn near magical. No other culture down through the ages ever celebrated so fantastic a medium. Restored films don’t just preserve the wardrobe, mannerisms, postures, and attitudes of our ancestors like museum artifacts. Via cinema, we can share the same space with our progenitors –tread the same halls, dine at the same tables as our vanished forebears. We are there with them in the story.
March 14th, 2022 at 7:23 pm
Pieces of time.
March 14th, 2022 at 9:32 pm
‘The wonderful thing about movies. Because if you’re good, and God helps you, and you’re lucky enough to have a personality that comes across, then what you are doing is giving people little, tiny pieces of time that they never forget.’
And that is what James Stewart said.
March 15th, 2022 at 12:51 pm
Of course there are plenty of films I’d prefer to forget
“Cannonball Run II”, etc