Frank Ellis | Through the Shattered Lens

In this B-western, Johnny Mack Brown plays Chip Bennett, the foreman of the Flying U Ranch. The ranch is owned by J.G. Whitmore (Forrest Taylor) and his daughter (Doris Weston), who has just returned from college and who has eyes for Dusty (Bob Baker), a singing ranchhand.

Ed Duncan (Anthony Warde) and his gang are in the arms smuggling business. To make their business a success, they need access to the ranch, which sits on the shore of a lake. Knowing that Chip would never let them take over, Duncan tries to frame Chip for a bank robbery and murder. Chip responds by kidnapping two of Duncan’s men, leading to a final and explosive shootout.

Chip of the Flying U is a western that doesn’t seem to know what era it’s supposed to be taking place in. Chip, Duncan, and all of the other ranch hands dress like they’re in the late 1800s. Doris Weston dresses like she’s just stepped out of a 1930s photoshoot. Duncan is trying to smuggle hand grenades, which were invented in 1908 but not commonly used until World War I. The movie’s time period is all over the place but that was frequently the case with the B-westerns of the 30s. Shot on studio backlots and for a very low budget, these films were not concerned with historical accuracy. Instead, they were about shootouts and a few songs. Chip of the Flying U offers up both, along with Fuzzy Knight as the comedic sidekick who turns out to be very good with a rifle.

With lots of horse chases and bloodless shoot-outs and not too much romance, this movie may seem creaky by today’s standards but probably thrilled the kids who caught while spending an afternoon at the movies in 1939. Today, the appeal of movies like this is that the good guys are unquestionably good and the bad guys are unquestionably bad. They remind us of a simpler time that may have never existed but we all hope it did.

Steve Holden (Charles Starrett) is hired by an old friend, Jack Mahoney (played by Jock Mahoney), to serve as the sheriff of a frontier town. Steve soon discovers that his old friend has been corrupted by power and is plotting to cheat the locals out of their land and the gold that the land holds. Despite their friendship, Steve knows that Jack has to be stopped and made to see the errors of his way. It’s a good thing that Steve is secretly the Durango Kid and that his old sidekick, Smiley Burnette, is the town’s police chief. But even if Jack Mahoney does eventually see the error of his ways, will it be soon enough to stop his out-of-control henchmen?

This was one of the last of the Durango Kid films and it’s heavy on stock footage and Smiley Burnette musical numbers. It has all of the usual horse chases and gunfights but making the villain an old friend of the Durango Kid adds a little more emotional weight to this entry than some of the other Durango Kid films. As always, Charles Starrett is a strong western hero and Smiley Burnette’s antics are nowhere nearly as annoying as the antics of some of the other western sidekicks who were populating matinee movie screens in 1952. Western fans should enjoy this fast-paced and undemanding film.

This is not the first time that Jock Mahoney played a friend of the Durango Kid who is named Jack Mahoney, though I think the Jack Mahoney who appeared in Pecos River, Junction City, Smokey Canyon, The Hawk of Wild River, and The Kid From Broken Gun was meant to be a different character than the one who appeared in The Rough, Tough West. If Smiley Burnette could have a rotating cast of musicians who followed him from town-to-town, then the Durango Kid could very well have known multiple Jack Mahoneys.