Tag Archives: Charles King

Phantom Ranger (1938, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Treasury agent Pat Doyle (John St. Polis) is sent to investigate a counterfeiting ring in Wyoming but ends up getting kidnapped by gang leader Sharpe (Karl Hackett) instead.  With Doyle’s daughter, Joan (Suzanne Kaaren), demanding that the government rescue her father and generating all sorts of bad publicity for the Secret Service, the decision is made to send in Tim Hayes (Tim McCoy).  Hayes, who will be working undercover, is selected because he’s not a “city boy.”  He’s a cowboy, through and through.  If you want to tame the west, you have to send a cowboy.

Phantom Ranger is a low-budget, 56-minute western from Monogram Pictures.  The plot is nothing special but the film itself still interesting because it’s a western that takes place in the 1930s.  Tim Hayes may ride a horse and wear a cowboy hat but he also works in a Washington D.C. office building and he interacts with a woman dressed like a flapper.  In this movie, the frontier has not caught up with the modern world but the modern world has also forgotten what life is like away from civilization.

The movie has the usual collection of B-western stalwarts.  Karl Hackett, John Merton, Charles King, Frank Ellis, Herman Hack, and Horace B. Carpenter are all present and accounted for.  Tim McCoy, a former rodeo performer and army officer, plays the hero and brings a lot of natural authority to the role.  McCoy was not only one of the first western heroes but he was also one of the best.

There’s no phantoms to be found in Phantom Ranger.  It’s still a good western.

Gun Packer (1938, directed by Wallace Fox)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Someone is holding up stages and making off with a fortune of gold bullion.  The government decides to send in a gun packer.  Jack Denton (Jack Randall), the son of a legendary lawman, is sent to investigate, along with his sidekick Pinkie (Ray Turner) and Rusty the Wonder Horse.  Jack goes undercover, telling an elderly ex-con (Barlowe Borland) that he’s a former partner of his, which leads Jack to the leader of the robbers, Chance Moore (Charles King).

There are a lot of familiar faces in this western.  Not only does Charles King play yet another villain but Glenn Strange shows up in his customary role as the town sheriff.  Lloyd Ingraham, Forrest Taylor, Victor Adamson, George Hazel, Dave O’Brien, and Tex Palmer all have roles.  It’s interesting that the same actors showed up in these movies and almost always seemed to be playing the same roles.  The only thing that changed was the hero.  In this case, it’s Jack Randall, who may not have been a great actor but who was a believable western hero.  His sidekick here is Ray Turner, a black actor who began his career during the silent era and who had a long career in the westerns.  While Turner plays a subordinate character, the role still avoids a lot (though not all) of the demeaning racial stereotypes that were very common in most films from the 1930s.  Jack treats Pinky with respect and they’re clearly friends outside of work.  That may not sound like a lot but it was a big deal for a 1938 Poverty Row western.

The real hero here is Rusty the Wonder Horse.  Rusty’s best scene?  Jack, needing to climb a mountain, calls for Rusty to drop his lariat.  Jack grabs the rope and Rusty pulls him up.  Rusty truly earns the right to be called a wonder horse.

Man’s Country (1938, directed by Robert F. Hill)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When his innocent son, Ted (David Sharpe), is accused of committing a murder, Lex Crane (Walter Long) turns him over to Texas Ranger Jack Haile (Jack Randall) because he knows that Jack will make sure that Ted gets a fair trial.  Lex says that he and his men are accused of every crime that happens in the area, even though they’re always innocent.  Jack understand and respects Lex as a man and a father.  But when someone shoots and kills Ted, Lex and his men set out for revenge.  The twist?  Lex has a twin brother named Buck (also played by Walter Long) and the two brothers hate each other.

Most poverty row westerns blend into each other but Man’s Country stands out as an intelligent and well-acted western.  Even though the twin twist is undoubtedly an overdone one, Man’s Country does a good job with it and Walter Long gives such a good performance that both Lex and Buck emerge as individual, identifiable characters.  Jack Randall may not have been the greatest of the old western actors but he’s believable as the tough but fair Texas Ranger.  There’s enough western action for fans of the genre but, for once, the plot is interesting enough that it might hold the attention of other watchers as well.

Of course, this is a Poverty Row western so Charles King does appear as one of the bad guys.  He gets into a fist fight, like he almost always did.  I wonder how many onscreen punches Charles King actually threw over the course of his career in the westerns.  It had to have been a lot.

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.

 

Pony Post (1940, directed by Ray Taylor)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In the days of the Old West, Griff Atkins (Stanley Blystone) manages a Pony Express station but, because of his gambling debts, he actually encourages the Indians and the outlaw Richard brothers (John Rockwell and Ray Teal) to attack the Pony Express riders and steal their horses.  Major Goodwin (Tom Chatterton) tries to put a stop to all this by firing Griff and putting Cal Sheridan (Johnny Mack Brown) in charge.  Griff and the Richard brothers continue their outlaw ways and eventually, the head of one of the relay stations is killed in one of their raids.  While the dead man’s daughter, Norma (Nell O’Day), investigates the murder, Cal works to bring peace the line and falls in love with Goodwin’s daughter, Alice (Dorothy Short).  Meanwhile, aspiring Pony Express rider Shorty (Fuzzy Knight) tries to invent a trampoline system that will help him to mount a horse.

No matter how bad things get in the west, you can always count on Johnny Mack Brown to bring some order and to get it done in less than an hour.  Johnny Mack Brown was always a good hero and that’s the case here.  Eventually this film has all of the horse riding and tough fighting that fans of the genre expect from these westerns but, for a short movie (it only runs for 59 minutes), it still seems to take a while for it to really get going.  The first half of the movie is more about Fuzzy Knight singing songs and trying to become a rider than it is about anything else.  I usually enjoy Fuzzy’s antics but, like the B-western themselves, they are definitely an acquired taste for most viewers.

Desert Phantom (1936, directed by S. Roy Luby)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In a frontier town, rancher Jean Halloran (Sheila Bromley) has a big problem.  Someone is shooting and killing all of her ranch hands and sending her notes in which he tells her to give up her ranch and leave town.  When an ammunition salesman and trick shooter named Billy Donavon (Johnny Mack Brown), Jean hires him to serve as a bodyguard and to track down the mysterious Phantom.  Billy, however, has a secret of his own.

Desert Phantom is a remake of an old Harry Carey film.  I don’t know why Poverty Row did remakes since all of their films pretty much had the same plot regardless.  A stranger comes into town and gets involved with a female rancher and a bad guy who is trying to hide his actual identity.  In this one, Nelson McDowell gets to supply the comic relief as a befuddled veterinarian while familiar faces like Ted Adams and Karl Hackett are there to keep us guessing about how the Phantom could actually be.  If you’ve watched enough of these movies, though, you’ll always be able to guess who the bad guy is.

This isn’t the best of Johnny Mack Brown’s movies.  The Phantom’s story seems like it could have been interesting but that would have meant taking more risks than most of the Poverty Row studios were willing to do.  Johnny Mack Brown is as convincing a cowboy as always and is the film’s saving grace.  Brown was a western star precisely because he could make even something like Desert Phantom watchable.

Oath of Vengeance (1944, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In a small frontier town, the ranchers and the farmers are nearly at war with each other.  Cattle are being rustled.  The head of the farmers (Karl Hackett) is accused of killing a ranch hand.  Store owner Fuzzy Q. Jones (Al St. John) suspects that it’s all a set-up and he’s not going to stand for it.  If the farmers kill all the ranchers and the ranchers kill all the farmers, there won’t be anyone left to shop at his store.  Fuzzy calls in his friend, Billy Carson (Buster Crabbe).

Buster Crabbe may have gotten his start in the westerns by playing Billy the Kid but the producers of his films eventually realized that there was only so long that Buster could play a character known as “the Kid” and Billy the Kid’s reputation as an outlaw was actually not helpful at the box office because parents didn’t want to send their kids to a matinee that might teach them the wrong lessons.  After a handful of “Billy the Kid” films, Buster’s western hero suddenly had a new name.  Billy Carson was a standard western do-gooder, called in whenever a town needed to be cleaned up or his old sidekick Fuzzy needed some help around the store.  Crabbe was a convincing hero no matter what but the Billy Carson films lacked the thing that made the Billy the Kid films interesting.  Usually, no one was trying to arrest Billy Carson.

Oath of Vengeance isn’t bad, at least not by the standards of Poverty Row westerns.  There’s plenty of fights and Crabbe, being a former Olympian, looks convincing with he throws a punch.  The plot is a pretty standard B-western plot but Crabbe’s natural likability carries the day.  Fans of the genre will be happy to see Charles King and Kermit Maynard, playing bad guys.  Frank Ellis plays the ranch hand whose murder sets off the story.  It’s always good to see the old gang back together again.

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.

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.