Tag Archives: James Sheridan

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.

Knight of the Plains (1938, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Clem Peterson (Richard Cramer) has a plot to force all of the ranchers in the valley to give up their land.  He gives a phony land claim to Carson (John Merton), who presents himself as being a Mexican nobleman.  In a situation like this, you need a singing cowboy and luckily, there’s one nearby.  Fred (Fred Scott) and Fuzzy (Al St. John) get involved after their cattle are stolen by Clem and his men.  Fred not only fights to save the ranchers but he also sings a song or two.

Singing cowboy films are always strange.  Cowboys who ride horses and pull guns and get into fistfights should not also be tenors.  Fred Scott looks convincing on a horse and he has one heck of a fistfight towards the end of the movie but he’ll also start singing at the drop of a hat and it just doesn’t feel right.  John Wayne did a few singing cowboy films early in his career and he could usually pull it off.  Fred Scott wasn’t much of an actor and had a forgettable screen presence.  He had a good voice, though.

This film was produced by Stan Laurel, of Laurel and Hardy fame.  Always read those credits.  You never know who you might find.

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.

 

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.

Boothill Brigade (1937, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Rancher Jeff Reynolds (Frank LaRue) used to be one of the good guys on the frontier but he’s recently changed.  He fired all of his loyal ranch hands and instead hired a motely crew of outlaws.  He’s buying up land and evicting the squatters who have been living there.  About the only good thing he does is hire Lon Cardigan (Johnny Mack Brown) to be his new herd boss.  Lon is engaged to Reynolds’s daughter, Bobbie (Claire Rochelle).  With the help of Bobbie and comic relief cook Calico Haynes (Horace Murphy), Lon tries to figure out why Reynolds is now doing the bidding of the evil John Porter (Ed Cassidy).

The title is the most exciting thing about this movie, which is one of those old B-movies that puts the “creak” in creaky.  There’s surprisingly little gunplay but there is a lot of horse riding.  For a film that runs less than an hour, a surprising amount of it is just shots of people riding from one location to another.  The horses’ hooves sound impressive on the soundtrack but it’s not exactly exciting.  As always, Johnny Mack Brown is a convincing cowboy.  It’s a good thing he looks like he knows what he’s doing when he’s riding a horse!  The plot was standard B-western fluff.  Johnny Mack Brown appeared in a ton of westerns and almost all of them seemed to feature the same range war.  There are better Johnny Mack Brown movies out there.  This one is for completists only.

Guns In The Dark (1937, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

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.

 

Horror on the Lens: The Headless Horseman (dir by Edward D. Venturini)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Adapted from the classic short story by Washington Irving, 1922’s The Headless Horseman tells the story of Ichabod Crane (Will Rogers), a stern schoolmaster and a student of the occult.  He comes to the town of Sleepy Hollow to serve as the new school teacher and he immediately gets on everyone’s bad side by being a bit tougher on the students than they were expecting.  When it appears that Ichabod is interested in Katrina Von Tassel (Lois Meredith), Katrina’s other suitor, Abraham Von Brunt (Ben Hendricks, Jr.) conspires to make it appear as if Ichabod is working with a coven of witches.

Of course, even if Ichabod survives the witchcraft accusations, there’s still the threat of the Headless Horseman who is said to haunt the isolated roads around Sleepy Hollow….

This was not the first film adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  There were two other silent versions that came out before The Headless Horseman but they are both lost films.  The Headless Horseman is the earliest surviving film version of Irving’s tale.  Historically, it’s interesting as an example of an early horror film.  To be honest, the scene in which Crane imagines what will happen to him if he is found guilty of witchcraft is more effective than the Horseman scenes.  But Will Rogers does do a good job with the role of Ichabod Crane, even if Rogers is hardly the tall and thin Crane who was described in Irving’s story.  Rogers was, of course, best-known for being a humorist and it was claimed that he “never met a man he didn’t like.”  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Ichabod Crane.

Enjoy!