Clyde McClary | Through the Shattered Lens

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.

In Mexico, two American cowboys, Johnny Darrel (Johnny Mack Brown) and Dick Martin (Julian Madison) join a poker game to try to win some money and help out their buddy, Oscar (Sid Saylor). When they discover that cantina owner Manuel Mendez (Ted Adams) has rigged the game, a fight breaks out. The lights turn off. In the darkness, several guns are fired. When the lights come back up, Dick is dead. Mendez convinces Johnny that he accidentally shot his friend in the fight. Guilt-stricken, Johnny tosses aside his guns and returns to Texas.

Johnny has sworn that he will never shoot another gun but when he’s hired to work at a ranch owned by Joan Williams (Claire Rochelle), he finds himself in the middle of a range war between Joan and Brace Stevens (Dick Curtis), with Mendez also making an unwelcome return to Johnny’s life. Even after Johnny discovers the truth about what happened that night at the cantina, he doesn’t pick up a gun. Instead, Johnny fights the bad guys with lassos and plates.

Guns In The Dark is only 54 minutes long and it features actors who will be familiar to any fan of the old B-westerns. Sidekcick Sid Saylor’s stuttering schtick gets old quickly but Johnny Mack Brown is as likable as always in Guns In The Dark and he comes across as being an authentic cowboy even when he’s not carrying a gun Given that this film features even more horse chases than the typical Johnny Mack Brown b-western, it’s good that Brown is so convincing. What isn’t convincing is how stupid Johnny Darrel is required to be in order for him to fall for Mendez’s lie in the first place. I appreciated the change of pace from Brown just using a gun to stop the bad guys but I wish the reason behind it had been more convincing. This isn’t one of Johnny Mack Brown’s more memorable westerns though, as always, it’s easy to see why he was one of the early stars of the genre.