Tag Archives: Bob Steele

Texas Buddies (1932, directed by Robert N. Bradbury)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Ted “Jet” Morgan (Bob Steele) returns home from World War I.  When he gets off the train in his small, western town, he’s met by Si “Old Timer” Haller (George “Gabby” Hayes).  Si explains that Ted’s aunt is dead and his uncle was run out of town for being a drunk.  Alice, “the girl next door” who Ted hoped to marry, married someone else.  Si invites Ted to stay with him.  Ted agrees and things start to look up when he meets Si’s niece, June (Nancy Drexel).

Meanwhile, a gang of outlaws led by Ken Kincade (Harry Semel) hijack a mail plane and steal the payroll that it was carrying.  Ted is not nicknamed Jet for nothing.  He not only know how to ride a horse but he’s good with planes too.  With the help of Si and the local sheriff (William Dyer), he aims to stop those turn of the century skyjackers before they can force another unexpected landing.

Though the film takes place after World War I and features Bob Steele flying a plane and Gabby Hayes driving the same car he drove in Rainbow Valley, this is definitely a western.  Before he proves himself as a pilot, Ted has to prove himself as a horseman and the movie ends with a traditional western gunfight.  The postwar setting does still bring some unexpected elements to the story.  Ted’s lonely arrival in his hometown reflects what it was like for many veterans returning home from Europe.  At first, Ted doesn’t feel like he has a place in his old town but he soon gets a chance to prove to both himself and the townspeople that he belongs.

Bob Steele and Gabby Hayes are good heroes.  Robert N. Bradbury, who was also Steele’s father, was one of the best of the B-western directors.  For fans of the genre, this film is a definite treat.

The Nevada Buckaroo (1931, directed by John P. McCarthy)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When the population of a small frontier town all sign a petition asking that the governor name their town the new county seat, the petition is stolen by outlaw Cherokee (George “Gabby” Hayes).  Cherokee substitutes a different petition requesting a pardon for a member of his gang, The Nevada Kid (Bob Steele).

The Nevada Kid gets his pardon, is released from prison, and returns to the town.  No one is happy to see him, even though he says that he has changed his ways.  Even if the pardon was gotten through illicit means (which the Nevada Kid himself knew nothing about), the Kid still says that he’s going to take advantage of his second chance.  When Chereokee and the gang start to demand that the Nevada Kid once again work with them, Nevada gets his chance to show whether or not he’s really left being an outlaw behind.

I never expect much from these Poverty Row westerns but The Nevada Buckaroo, despite having not a great title, is actually pretty good.  A very young-looking Bob Steele gives a good performance as the Nevada Kid and George Hayes show that, before he became everyone’s favorite sidekick, he was capable of being a very intimidating actor.  The movie actually has something to say about trust, community, and second chances.

I don’t know much about director John P. McCarthy and I think this is the first of his films that I’ve seen.  He and cinematographer Faxon M. Dean put together a film that looks infinitely better than the average B-western.  That was obvious with even the grainy print that I watched.  The final shot, of the Nevada Kid riding into the sunset, is a perfect western image.

Gun Lords of Stirrup Basin (1937, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

On the frontier, crooked lawyer Gabe Bowdre (Karl Hackett) is trying to secure all of the local water rights for himself and that means running off both the homesteaders and the ranchers.  Bowdre and his men try to start a range war between the ranching Stocktown family and the homesteading Dawsons.  Meanwhile, Dan Stockton (Bob Steele) has fallen in love with Gail Dawson (Louise Stanley) and marries her mere minutes before someone shoots his father in the back.

Gun Lords of Stirrup Basin has all the common elements that usually come with a B-western.  I have lost track of how many times I have watched Karl Hackett play a crooked businessman who tries to start a range war to win either the water rights or the property deeds.  Bob Steele spent a good deal of his career beating up Karl Hackett on screen.

What sets Gun Lords of Stirrup Basin apart is the Romeo and Juliet angle.  While it’s predictable, the love story between Dan and Gail still adds more emotional depth than is usually found in these movies.  The scene where all of the ranchers glare daggers at Dan’s new wife is powerful.

Bob Steele’s as good a hero as usual and Karl Hackett is a dastardly villain.  Gun Lords of Stirrup Basin runs a little less than an hour, making it a good western for an afternoon break.

Riders of the Desert (1932, directed by Robert N. Bradbury)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In the closing days of the frontier, a group of Rangers in New Mexico receive a telegram telling them that it is time to disband and to turn law enforcement duties over to the local sheriff.  However, there’s a viscous outlaw named Hashknife (George “Gabby” Hayes) on the loose so Bob Houston (Bob Steele) and Slim (Al St. John) pretend that they never received the telegram so that they can arrest him.  Hashknife kidnaps Bob’s girl (Gertie Messenger) and that makes thing personal.

Riders of the Desert is an appropriate name for this film because the majority of its 50-minute running time really was just taken up with footage of men riding their horses from one location to another.  Even though the film was less than an hour long, the story sill needed some filler.

Riders of the Desert is still a pretty good western, though.  It’s definitely better than the average Poverty Row western.  As always, Bob Steele look authentic riding a horse and Al St. John provides good support as Fuzzy.  The disbanding of the Rangers gives the first half of the film an elegiac feel that would later show up in several of the westerns made during and after the 1960s.  The old west is coming to an end and there’s less need for the Rangers.  The second half of the film is almost all action and George “Gabby” Hayes is a surprisingly effective villain.  Of course, this movie was made before he became Gabby.

As with most Poverty Row westerns, this is not the film to watch if you’re not already a fan of the genre.  But for those who like westerns, Riders of the Desert is a good one.

Billy The Kid In Texas (1940, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Billy the Kid (Bob Steele) escapes from a Mexican prison (where he was being held on a trumped-up charge) and ends up in Corral City, Texas with his old friend, Fuzzy Jones (Al St. John).  This version of Billy the Kid may be an outlaw but he’s a really nice outlaw.  He holds up two men who had previously held up a express wagon but he turns over the loot after he and Fuzzy are appointed the new law in Corral City.  The bad outlaws don’t want Billy the Kid or anyone else as their new sheriff so they bring in a notorious gunslinger (Carleton Young) to help them keep the town under their control but it turns out that Billy and the gunslinger have a past that no one knew about.

Bob Steele played Billy the Kid in a series of films, until Buster Crabbe took over the role in 1942.  Steele was a convincing cowboy and a convincing gunman but he wasn’t a convincing kid.  Of course, this version of Billy the Kid didn’t have much in common with the real Billy the Kid.  The movie version of Billy the Kid got into a lot of trouble but it was usually due to a misunderstanding.

Billy the Kid In Texas is definitely a Poverty Row western.  It looks cheap and it was cheap but it did feature a good fight scene between Bob Steele and Charles King and the relationship between Billy the Kid and Carleton Young’s gunslinger also added some extra dimension to the otherwise predictable story.  This film is okay for western fans who aren’t sticklers for historical accuracy.

 

Horror Film Review: Giant From The Unknown (dir by Richard E. Cunha)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1958’s Giant From The Unknown, something strange is happening in a California mountain town.  Animals are being killed.  Property is being destroyed.  People are being murdered.

Sheriff Parker (Bob Steele) suspects that the murderer might be Dr. Frederick Cleveland (Morris Ankrum), mostly because Dr. Cleveland spends a lot of time in the mountains looking at fossils with his daughter, Janet (Sally Fraser).  When a younger scientist named Wayne (Ed Kemmer) shows up to help Dr. Cleveland out with his research, Sheriff Parker is even more suspicious.  Meanwhile, the local citizenry suspects that it might be a member of the local Native American community.

It turns out that everyone’s wrong!

The murderer is a formerly dead conquistador (Buddy Baer), who was brought back to life by a bolt of lightning and who is now wandering around the mountains and killing people.  The conquistador walks around in his full conquistador uniform, which is in pretty good shape when you consider the fact that he’s been dead for over two hundred years, maybe longer.

The odd thing about the conquistador is that he’s regularly described as being a giant, even though he’s clearly not.  I mean, he’s tall.  He appears like he might be 6’5.  That makes him taller than the average person but shorter than the average professional basketball player.  The filmmakers regularly attempt to shoot him from a lower angle in order to make him look taller but there’s nothing that can be done to disguise the fact that he’s just a 6’5 guy wearing what appears to be a fake beard and mustache.  If anything, he looks like the frozen-faced Burger KIng mascot.  Maybe he would stop killing people if the sheriff would just order a cheeseburger and fries.  I mean, seriously, his whole rampage could have been avoided.

The title is also incorrect about the giant being from the unknown.  He’s very obviously from Spain.  All one has to do is look at his uniform.  I think the unknown element of this film is how the conquistador has spent centuries underground without losing any skin.  For someone who has been dead for as long as this conquistador was, his hair is very clean and well-groomed.  Watching this film, it’s hard not to feel that Dr. Cleveland should have spent some time researching conquistador embalming techniques because whoever preserved the “giant” did a very good job!  Everyone should be so lucky to look that good for being dead for that long.

Giant From The Unknown attempts to do the usual thing where the monster falls for the only woman in the entire film.  (Indeed, it was hard not to notice that town’s population seemed to be 99% male.)  Unfortunately, the giant was a pretty silly monster so it was difficult to get wrapped up in his emotional journey.  There are some monsters that you feel sorry for and there are other monsters that you just wish would go away.  The giant is a monster who probably had a lot of good haircare tips and who could have probably helped out the entire town …. if only they had been willing to listen!

Hang ‘Em High (1968, directed by Ted Post)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

1889.  The Oklahoma Territory.  A former lawman-turned-cattleman named Jed Cooper (Clint Eastwood) is falsely accused of working with a cattle thief.  A group of men, led by Captain Wilson (Ed Begley) lynch him and leave Cooper hanging at the end of a rope.  Marshal Dave Bliss (Ben Johnson) saves Cooper, cutting him down and then taking him to the courthouse of Judge Adam Fenton (Pat Hingle).  Fenton, a notorious hanging judge, is the law in the Oklahoma territory.  Fenton makes Cooper a marshal, on the condition that he not seek violent revenge on those who lynched him but that he instead bring them to trial.  Cooper agrees.

An American attempt to capture the style of the Italian spaghetti westerns that made Eastwood an international star, Hang ‘Em High gives Eastwood a chance to play a character who is not quite as cynical and certainly not as indestructible as The Man With No Name.  Cooper starts the film nearly getting lynched and later, he’s shot and is slowly nursed back to health by a widow (Inger Stevens).  Cooper is not a mythical figure like The Man With No Name.  He’s an ordinary man who gets a lesson in frontier justice as he discovers that, until Oklahoma becomes a state, Judge Fenton feels that he has no choice but to hang nearly every man convicted of a crime.  (Judge Fenton was based on the real-life hanging judge, Isaac Parker.)  Over the course of this episodic film, Cooper becomes disgusted with frontier justice.

Hang ‘Em High is a little on the long side but it’s still a good revisionist western, featuring a fine leading performance from Clint Eastwood and an excellent supporting turn from Pat Hingle.  The film’s episodic structure allows for Eastwood to interact with a motley crew of memorable character actors, including Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper, L.Q. Jones, Alan Hale (yes, the Skipper), and Bob Steele.  Hang ‘Em High has a rough-hewn authenticity to it, with every scene in Fenton’s courtroom featuring the sound of the gallows in the background, a reminder that justice in the west was often not tempered with mercy.

Historically, Hang ‘Em High is important as both the first film to be produced by Eastwood’s production company, Malpaso, and also the first to feature Eastwood acting opposite his soon-to-be frequent co-star, Pat Hingle.  Ted Post would go on to direct Magnum Force.

Billy The Kid’s Range War (1941, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Billy the Kid was a big damn hero.

At least that’s the claim of Billy The Kid’s Range War, in which Billy (played by middle-aged Bob Steele) is a do-gooder with a comedic sidekick named Fuzzy (Al St. John) and a hankering to help Ellen Gorman (Joan Barclay) bring a new stagecoach line to town.  Williams (Karl Hackett) does want to the Gorman family to success so he hires Buck (Rex Lease) to dress up like Billy the Kid and ride a horse that looks like Billy the Kid’s and commit crimes, like killing Ellen’s father.  Framed for all those crimes that he didn’t commit and with his best friend (Carleton Young) ordered to arrest him, Billy decides to go under cover so that he can clear his good name.  Someone pretending to be Billy the Kid got him into this mess.  Now, Billy’s going to get out of it by pretending to be someone else.

The action is pretty standard for a B-western.  Mostly, it’s interesting to see a movie where Billy the Kid is actually a nice guy who gets framed.  No wonder a whole generation grew up with no idea about true history of the American frontier.  Sam Newfield directed a handful of Billy the Kid films and the capable Bob Steele starred in most of them but this is the only one that I’ve sat down and watched and it actually left me missing the production values of the Johnny Mack Brown films.  For fans of these type of westerns, there’s the promise of seeing familiar actors like George Cheseboro and Ted Adams doing there thing.  Even the outstanding character actor Milton Kibbee makes an appearance.  For those who do not like westerns, this film is not going to change their minds.

Despite the promise of the title, there is no range war in this movie.  There’s just Billy the Kid, trying to clear his good name.

Cattle Drive (1951, directed by Kurt Neumann)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In this coming-of-age Western, Dean Stockwell plays Chester Graham, Jr., the spoiled and unruly son of a railroad owner (Leon Ames).  While riding on his father’s train and making trouble for the conductor, Chester overhears his father talking about sending him to a military school.  When the train makes as top, Chester impulsively runs away.  The train leaves without him and Chester finds himself stranded in the middle of the wilderness.  That’s when he sees cowboy Dan Matthews (Joel McCrea) trying to catch a wild stallion.

Dan is a part of a cattle drive.  Knowing that he can’t leave Chester to die in the wilderness, Dan brings him back to his camp.  The other members of the company aren’t too keen on having to look after a spoiled brat along with the cattle and Chester isn’t too happy to hear that he’ll be expected to work if he expects to get fed.  But with no choice but to work together, Chester, Dan, and the rest of the company make the journey to Santa Fe.  Chester finally drops his attitude enough to work with the company’s cook (Chill Wills) while Dan deals with a rival cowboy named Currie (Henry Brandon). Chester learns about responsibility and Dan finally finds the courage to consider settling down.

Of the many westerns that Joel McCrea made over the course of his career, he considered Cattle Drive to be his favorite and it’s easy to see why.  Cattle Drive features McCrea doing what he did best, playing a tough but good-hearted and down-to-earth cowboy who looked after an outsider.  If you were ever lost in the old west, Joel McCrea is precisely the type of cowboy that you would hope would come to your rescue.  The plot features almost every single cattle drive cliché that you could imagine but McCrea plays his role with a winning combination of grit and compassion and he and Dean Stockwell, who is also very good, make a good team.  Shot in Death Valley and Utah, Cattle Drive feels and look authentic and should be enjoyed by anyone looking for good, heartfelt western.

Marlowe at the Movies Returns!: Bogie & Bacall in THE BIG SLEEP (Warner Brothers 1946)

Posted on by gary loggins

gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

It’s been a long time since we last visited with Raymond Chandler’s fictional “knight-errant”, PI Philip Marlowe. Way too long, so let’s take a look at THE BIG SLEEP, starring Humphrey Bogart as the definitive screen Marlowe. This 1946 Howard Hawks film was a follow-up to 1944’s hit TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, which introduced audiences (and Bogie) to luscious Lauren Bacall . The pair was dynamite together onscreen, and off as well, marrying a year later. Their May/December romance was one of Hollywood’s greatest love stories, lasting until Bogart’s death from cancer in 1957.

For me to try and explain the plot here would be futile, as it takes more twists and turns than a “Balinese belly dancer”. Marlowe is hired by elderly General Sternwood, whose sexy young daughter Carmen is being blackmailed. The General’s other daughter Vivien, a sexy divorcee, is also in trouble. This takes Our Man Marlowe…

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