Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

Dead Or Alive (1944, directed by Elmer Cifton)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In this Poverty Row western, the Texas Rangers, a trio of western do-gooders who appeared in a handful of films, are sent to a small town to stop the Yackey Gang, led by the town’s saloon keeper (Ray Bennett).

The Texas Rangers are led by Tex Haines (Tex Ritter), who is known as the Idaho Kid despite apparently being from Texas.  Tex goes undercover as a lawyer and tries to rally the community to stand up the Yackey Gang.  Tex also sings some songs because he’s a singing cowboy along with being a cowboy who can hold his own in bar brawl.  Maybe if he didn’t sing so much, there wouldn’t be as many brawls.  Dave Wyatt (Dave O’Brien) is the younger Ranger who goes undercover and joins that Yackey Gang.  Panhandle Perkins (Guy Wilkinson) is the comic relief, who loses a lot of money at Yackey’s casino but only to help Dave maintain his cover.  The film was an obvious rush job and the plot is far more difficult to follow than any 54-minute film should be.  The kids at the matinee probably enjoyed it, though.  It delivers exactly what fans of the old B-westerns expect, including Charles King as yet another villain.

Tex Ritter, who appeared in a lot of these films, was also the father of actor John Ritter.  In 1970, long after the days of the poverty row westerns, Tex Ritter ran for the Senate in Tennessee but he lost the primary.  If he had won, he would have been the Republican candidate against Al Gore’s father.  That would have been a battle for the ages.

Music Video of the Day: Encore, Thank You, Goodnight by Sammy Hagar (2025, directed by ZZ Satriani)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When it comes to Van Halen, I will always prefer the music from the David Lee Roth days to what was produced by Sammy Hagar but that’s nothing against Hagar.  Sammy may not have had Diamond Dave’s showmanship (which was as important to Van Halen’s early success as Eddie’s virtuosity) but he was still a good front man who brought his own style to the band.  Sammy was and is one of the best in the business and, at 77 years old, he still rocks.

With Encore, Thank You, Goodnight, Sammy Hagar pays tribute to Eddie Van Halen and his time with the band.  Performing with Hagar are almost all of the members of Chickenfoot, including former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony, making this video both a tribute to one of Hagar’s bands and a reunion of another.  (Of the Chickenfoot lineup, only drummer Chad Smith is missing.)

Enjoy!

I Killed Wild Bill Hickok (1956, directed by Richard Talmadge)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Not that Wild Bill Hickok!

This low-budget western programmer tries to draw viewers in by using the name of an icon of the old west but it doesn’t take place in Deadwood, there’s no poker game, no dead man’s hand, and Wild Bill (Tom Brown) is presented as being a corrupt sheriff who works for evil businessman Jim Bailey (Denver Pyle).  Denver Pyle, we all know him best as Uncle Jesse on the Dukes of Hazzard.  He’s a bad guy here, the film’s Boss Hogg.

Our hero and the man who kills Wild Bill Hickok is a horse trader Johnny Rebel, who tells his story in flashback and who is often called “Mr. Rebel.”  Johnny Rebel is played by Johnny Carpenter, no relation to the director.  This Johnny Carpenter was a stunt man who took control of his career and wrote and played lead in a series of forgettable B-westerns, like this one.  Carpenter probably could have been quite the hero in the Poverty Row days, when fast-paced westerns were being released on a weekly basis and directors and actors knew exactly what a matinee audience wanted.  By the time I Killed Wild Bill Hickok came out, westerns had started to grow up.

There’s the usual amount of stock footage.  Director Richard Talmadge was himself a former stunt man so he does get a few good stunts into the last 15 minutes of the movie.  Before the final gun battle, this movie about Wild Bill Hickok is nowhere near wild enough.

 

Shadows of Death (1945, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After a railroad agent is murdered and his map of the future locations of the railroad is stolen, Billy Carson (Buster Crabbe) rides into a frontier town and searches for the guilty party.  Fortunately, for Billy, his best Fuzzy Q. Jones is the mayor, the sheriff, and the town barber!  Unfortunately, local gunslinger Clay Kincaid (Eddie Hall) wants to make a name for himself by taking on the famous Billy Carson.  Corrupt businessman Landreau (Charles King) encourages Clay by lying to him and telling him that Bully is planning on stealing Clay’s girl, Babs (Dona Dax).

A standard Poverty Row western, Shadows of Death was made by the same crew and cast who were involved with most of Buster Crabbe’s Billy The Kid films.  I’m not sure if Billy Carson is meant to be the same character as Billy the Kid, though.  Billy the Kid always had bounty hunters after him but Billy Carson works for the railroad.  However, it would be strange if Fuzzy Q. Jones just happened to be the favored sidekick of two gunslingers who just happen to both be named Billy.  Along with Fuzzy’s vaudeville style comedy, one thing that audiences could always take for granted was that Charles King would play the villain in these movies and Frank Ellis would always be his henchman.  I always wonder if audiences in the 40s noticed that Charles King’s businessman and Frank Ellis’s gunslinger always returned from the dead with every B-western that came out.

My favorite scene in this one is Billy bursting into Landreau’s office, just for Landreau to say that he expects visitors to knock.  Billy pauses long enough to knock on the door before getting down to the business of frontier justice.

Cattle Stampede (1943, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Billy the Kid (Buster Crabbe), that western do-gooder who has been framed for crimes that he didn’t commit, narrowly escapes being captured by a group of bounty hunters.  To thank the man who helped him and his sidekick, Fuzzy Q. Jones (Al  St. John), escape, Billy agrees to help the man’s family make a cattle drive.  It turns out that local ranchers are being targeted by rustlers who cause the cattle to stampede and then buy up what’s left of the herd at a discount.  Even though Mary Dawson (Frances Gladwin) doesn’t trust Billy and initially suspects him of being one of the rustlers, Billy and Fuzzy take over the cattle drive and protect the family from Coulter (Glenn Strange) and Elkins (Frank Ellis).  They even prove their worth by rescuing Mary after she’s kidnapped by the villains.

This is one of the many Poverty Row westerns to feature Billy the Kid not as an outlaw but instead as a hero.  Best-known for playing Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers, Buster Crabbe was a believable hero even if he was more than a little too old to be nicknamed “the kid.”  Al St. John provides the comedic relief and veteran bad guys Charles King, Glenn Strange and Frank Ellis go through the motions as the villains, much as they did in countless other westerns of the era.  Cattle Stampede is typical of the cheap western programmers that came out of the Poverty Row studios in the 40s.  It was simplistic and predictable but featured enough western action to keep the kids in the audience entertained.  Today, its main selling point is a nostalgic one.

The Billy the Kid films are always strange because they avoid the reason why Billy is being pursued by the law and instead just present him as being another generic western hero.  It seems like a waste of a good legend.

Juke Girl (1942, directed by Curtis Bernhardt)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Farm workers Steve (Ronald Reagan) and Danny (Richard Whorf) arrives in Florida, looking for work.  The whole town is controlled by the corrupt Henry Madden (Gene Lockhart) but the honest Steve would rather work for Nick (George Tobias), who treats his workers fairly.  While Steve romances Lola Mears (Ann Sheridan), who works at a “juke joint,” he also tries to organize the other workers into demanding better conditions.  When Madden frames Steve and Lola for a murder, the entire town turns against them.

This is not a bad Warner Bros. melodrama.  As with a lot of Warner Bros. films, the heroes are the poor workers who have found themselves exploited by wealthy men like Madden.  As played by Ronald Reagan, Steve is no radical firebrand.  He is just someone who wants the workers to get a fair shake and who wants to help decent bosses like Nick make a living despite the efforts of Madden to put them out of business.  As was so often the case with his movies, Reagan is an affable hero without ever actually being compelling.  Gene Lockhart is the dependably hateful villain and the cast is full of dependable character actors, including Faye Emerson, Alan Hale, Howard Da Silva, and Fuzzy Knight.

Ann Sheridan is really the main reason to Juke Girl and she’s as sexy and tough as ever.  There’s a reason why this movie was named for her character’s profession, even though its really only a minor part of the film.  Sheridan is the main attraction here and she gives a strong performance as a bad girl who is actually good underneath it all.  Her character worries that settling down with Steve will mean a lifetime of struggling to make ends meet but she sees that Steve is worth it by the end of the movie.  The town may not be worthy of either of them but Steve and Lola are meant to be together.

May The Fourth Be With You: Looking Back At Star Wars

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today is Star Wars Day.  (It’s May 4th.  May the Fourth Be With You!  I’ll stop now.)  Five years ago, I ranked all of the Star Wars feature films that had been released up until that point from best to worst.  Here’s how I ranked them:

  1. The Empire Strikes Back
  2. Rogue One
  3. New Hope
  4. The Force Awakens
  5. Revenge of the Sith
  6. Return of the Jedi
  7. Solo
  8. The Rise of Skywalker
  9. The Last Jedi
  10. Attack of the Clones
  11. The Phantom Menace

Since that was a while ago, I decided to take a look back and see if I still felt the same way.  Here are my brief thoughts on each film, in order of release.

Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope (1977, directed by George Lucas) — A New Hope may not be the best Star Wars film but it’s still the most entertaining, even if George Lucas doesn’t seem to realize that.  A tribute to the serials and space operas that Lucas grew up with, A New Hope features great action scenes, special effects that hold up well despite not being as slick as modern CGI, and great performances from Alec Guinness and Harrison Ford.  Mark Hamill would eventually become a much better actor, though you might not guess just from his performance here.  Watching New Hope today, I really appreciate that the movie doesn’t get bogged down in overexplaining things.  We don’t need to know what the Clone Wars were specifically about or what the Kessel Run actually was.  They sound cool and that’s all that was really required.  Despite what some claim, there is absolutely no evidence that Darth Vader was meant to be Luke’s father in this move.

Star Wars Holiday Special (1978, directed by Steve Binder) — Only aired once, I debated whether to include it here or not.  I eventually did just because it features the debut of Boba Fett.  It’s as bad as you’ve heard but the special’s real since is that it’s incredibly boring.  Harrison Ford still looks happier here than he did in Return of the Jedi.

Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980, directed by Irvin Kershner) — The best of the original trilogy, this installment was surprisingly dark, downbeat, and violent.  Mark Hamill finally started to show some signs of growth as an actor while Harrison Ford’s Han Solo continued to be the coolest rebel in the universe.  Combining the more thoughtful scenes with Yoda with the action-orientated scenes on Cloud City made this the most intelligent of the Star Wars films.  The battle on Hoth remains one of the best action scenes ever.  I think every kid who saw this movie wanted an AT-AT Walker.  I know I did.

Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi (1983, directed by Richard Marquand) — It’s not quite as bad as its reputation, largely due to the opening with Jabba the Hutt’s court.  Jabba is so grotesque and evil in this movie that it’s hard not to regret that the subsequent films made him into more of buffoon than a crime lord.  Brining back the Death Star made this film feel like a retread.  The Ewoks were created to sell toys but so was everything else in this movie.  Harrison Ford looks particularly grouchy at the end.

The Ewok Adventure (1984, directed by John Korty) and Ewoks: The Battle For Endor (1985, directed by Jim and Ken Wheat) — I guess if these had been successful, there would have been an Ewok television show.  The Ewok Adventure feels childish and features a narrator.  Battle for Endor is surprisingly violent for a movie about teddy bears.  Both films are more bland than truly bad.

Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999, directed by George Lucas) — There’s been some revisionism about this film.  Some people actually defend it now.  Not me.  It’s still pointless.  This movie started the trend of every popular film having to have an in-depth “mythology” behind it.  It turns out that the Evil Empire was all about trade routes and tariffs.  Jake Lloyd gets more blame than he deserves.  Overexplaining the Force was a sign of things to come.  This movie would feature Natalie Portman’s worst performance if not for…

Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2o02, directed by George Lucas) — As painfully generic as its title, this movie was responsible for Hayden Christensen having an undeserved reputation for being a bad actor.  I doubt any actor, no matter how talented, could make Lucas’s dialogue feel natural.

Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (2005, directed by George Lucas) — The only one of the prequels that actually added anything to what we already knew, Revenge of the Sith is dark, violent, and it doesn’t have as many slow spots as the other prequels.  Ewan McGregor finally gets a chance to act and Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman are finally given actual characters to play.  Today, some people say it’s the best of the Star Wars films.  They’re wrong but it’s still pretty good.

The Clone Wars (2008, directed by Dave Filoni) — The only animated Star Wars film doesn’t get much attention and it does get bogged down in the mythology of the of the prequels.  No one really cares about the specifics of the Clone Wars.  The fact that it’s animated and clearly marketed at kids makes the dialogue easier to tolerate.

Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens (2015, directed by J.J. Abrams) — When this first came out, a lot of people (including myself) were so happy to have a new Star Wars film that we overrated it.  It’s hard to watch today without thinking about how bad things got after it was released but it does still hold up well as a space adventure, though Daisy Ridley’s blandness is more apparent on subsequent viewings.  The performances of Adam Driver and John Boyega still hold up.  The main attraction, though, is Harrison Ford returning as Han Solo.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, directed by Gareth Edwards) — The first stand-alone live action Star Wars feature film is a thrilling space adventures that holds up on subsequent viewings and works because the stakes actually feel real.  For the first time since New Hope, the Death Star is actually frightening.  This remains one of the best films in the franchise and it’s not surprising that it led to the best of the Star Wars television shows.

Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi (2017, directed by Rian Johnson) — The haters are right about much of this film.  For all the complaints about Disney not allowing their Marvel directors much freedom, the Star Wars sequels shows what happens when a franchise isn’t sure where it wants to go.  Rian Johnson tries to bring Star Wars down to Earth but that’s not where we want Star Wars.  Rose Tico was an annoying character and her line about saving what we love deserves all of the mockery it received but Kelly Marie Tran still didn’t deserve to be run off of social media.  Turning Luke into a bitter old man was this film’s greatest sin.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018, directed by Ron Howard) — That this wasn’t a box office hit was the a clear warning sign that audiences were getting bored with Star Wars.  This Han Solo origin story isn’t bad.  Ron Howard could direct a film like this in his sleep.  It just feels unnecessary.  Alden Ehrenreich does his best but no one can replace Harrison Ford as Han Solo.

Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker (2019, directed by J.J. Abrams) — J.J. Abrams tries to undo everything that Rian Johnson did in his film.  I don’t blame Abrams because Johnson’s film wasn’t great but just shrugging it all off doesn’t really work either.  The sequel trilogy, which started with such high hopes, ends with a whimper.  Daisy Ridley’s boring performance doesn’t help.

My rankings, as of 2025, are below:

  1. The Empire Strikes Back
  2. Rogue One
  3. New Hope
  4. Revenge of the Sith
  5. Return of the Jedi
  6. Force Awakens
  7. Solo
  8. Rise of Skywalker
  9. The Last Jedi
  10. Ewoks: Battle for Endor
  11. The Clone Wars
  12. The Ewok Adventure
  13. Holiday Special
  14. Phantom Menace
  15. Attack of the Clones

Girls On Probation (1938, directed by William C. McGann)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Eager to get away from her abusive father (Sig Ruman), Connie Heath (Jane Bryan) keeps making the mistake of hanging out with the ultimate bad friend, Hilda Engstrom (Sheila Bromley).  Hilda steals a dress from where they work and when the dress is torn, Hilda lets Connie take the blame.  When the dress’s owner (Susan Hayward, making her film debut) insists on pressing charges, insurance investigator Neil Dillon (Ronald Reagan) helps Connie get off the hook and out of jail.

Having not learned her lesson, Connie continues to hang out with Hilda and her new boyfriend, Tony Rand (Anthony Averill).  This time, Connie gets caught up in a bank robbery.  Will Neil be able to get her out of another jam?

63-minutes long, Girl on Probation is a Warner Bros. B-movie.  Ronald Reagan is surprisingly mellow as someone falling in love with a woman who keeps getting framed for his crimes she didn’t commit.  Sheila Bromley steals the show as the out-of-control dangerous blonde who tells a priest, “I’m about to meet your boss.”  The main problem with the film is that Connie is incredibly stupid.  How many times can one person be framed?  Jane Bryan, who played Connie, ended her acting career when she got married but she and her millionaire husband later helped to bankroll Reagan’s first political campaign and both of them were members of his unofficial “kitchen cabinet” when he was governor of California.

The movie has never been released on DVD and is hard to find.  It plays on TCM occasionally, which is where I saw it.  Online, the only place it appears to be streaming, ironically enough, is on a Russian site.

Angels Wash Their Faces (1939, directed by Ray Enright)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Gangster William Kroner (Bernard Nedell) and his henchman Martino (Eduardo Ciannelli) frame teenager Gabe Ryan (Frankie Thomas) for setting several buildings on fire.  Because Gabe has just gotten out of reform school and is a member of a local neighborhood gang, they know that no one will believe him or his sister, Joy (Ann Sheridan).

What Kroner and Martino did not count on were the Dead End Kids (Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Gabriel Dell, Huntz Hall, and Benard Punsley).  They’re not going to sit by while the adults send their friend to jail.  Plus, one of their friends was killed in one of the fires.  The kids are out for revenge and sympathetic district attorney Pat Remsen (Ronald Reagan) is on their side.

As a publicity stunt, the city is holding an election for “Kid Mayor.”  The Kid Mayor gets to run the city for a week.  What could go wrong?  Billy Halop decides to run for Kid Mayor so that he can order the arrest of Kroner and then beat a confession out of him.

Angels Wash Their Faces was one of the last of the studio-made Dead End Kid films.  After this one, they would be sent down to Poverty Row and their films would be more obviously comedic.  Angels Wash Their Faces starts out as a juvenile delinquent drama, with Gabe struggling to rebuild his life and keep on the right track.  Then it becomes a goofy comedy, with Billy Halop running for mayor and unleashing vigilante justice on the bad guys.  I’m not sure that any city would actually give the “kid mayor” the power to lock people up.  Whoever came up with the idea of a kid mayor should be run out of politics.

On the positive side, Ann Sheridan is beautiful.  Future president Reagan is his usual friendly self.  On the negative side, the movie, overall, lacks the edge that made the first few Dead End Kids films memorable and the Dead End Kids themselves seem to be pretty much interchangeable.  Huntz Hall would have made a better mayor.

 

The Girl From Jones Beach (1949, directed by Peter Godfrey)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Painter Bob Randolph is famous for painting a beautiful woman who is known as “the Randolph Girl.”  Everyone wants to meet the model but they can’t because there is no one model.  Instead, there are a dozen models, each with a perfect feature that Bob uses in his paintings.  In need of money, Bob and his business partner, Chuck Donavon (Eddie Bracken) search for a woman who can be the real-life Randolph Girl.  Chuck thinks that he’s found her when he spots school teacher Ruth Wilson (Virginia Mayo) but Ruth has no interest in being a model.  She wants to be known for how she thinks and not how she looks.  Hoping to change her mind, Randolph pretends to be Czech immigrant and enrolls in Ruth’s citizenship class.

When a photograph of Ruth in a swimsuit is published without her prior knowledge, the school board decides that Ruth is not a good role model and they fire her.  With the support of Bob and Chuck, Ruth sues for reinstatement.  Bob ends up posing in the courtroom in his own swimsuit, the better to prove that there’s nothing wrong with  appearing in public in a swimsuit.

The role of Ruth was originally offered to Lauren Bacall, who turned it down because she didn’t think she could play a pin-up.  Not to knock Bacall but Virginia Mayo does seem like a better choice for the role of Ruth and she does a good job of bringing the role to life.  She proves to be a good match for Ronald Reagan, whose amiable nature allows him to get away with taking her class under a false pretext and speaking in a mangled approximation of a foreign accent.  The comedy is light and it fits well with Reagan’s affable screen presence.  The film is pleasant but ultimately lightweight and forgettable.  I can understand why, by this point in his career, Reagan was getting frustrated with the quality of scripts he was being sent.  The Girl From Jones Beach would be forgotten today if it didn’t star the future president of the United States.