Michael Vallon | Through the Shattered Lens

The telegraph company has come to the frontier town of Hangtown Mesa and soon, the citizens will be connected to the rest of the world. The wealthy men who run the town don’t want that to happen because then people might discover how corrupt they are. They hire a gunman known as the Utah Kid (Hugh Prosser, not looking much like a kid) to come to town and kill the owner of the telegraph line, John Wilkins (Henry Hall). The Utah Kid steals the clothes of engineer Steve Collins (Johnny Mack Brown) and frames him for Wilkins’s murder. With the help Betty Wilkins (Helen Deverell) and traveling medicine man Dr. J. Willington Dingle (Fuzzy Knight), Steve sets out to clear his name.

This is a pretty good Johnny Mack Brown western. The plot isn’t half-bad as far as Poverty Row westerns are concerned and director Joseph H. Lewis keeps things lively. Lewis not only gets good performances from his cast but he also makes Hangtown Mesa seem like an actual, growing frontier town. Lewis even manages to create some suspense as The Utah Kid and Steve Collins switch identities. Comparing Lewis’s westerns to the ones directed by Sam Newfield shows how much difference a good director can make, even within the confines of a poverty row production. Even Fuzzy Knight is used well!

Boss of Hangtown Mesa is one of the better Johnny Mack Brown westerns, featuring a good story and an interesting idea behind it as it shows how far the bad guys will go to keep their own private fiefdom from connecting with the rest of the world. Brown is convincing, whether he’s riding a horse or holding a gun. He’s playing an educated man here, an engineer, but Brown is still a cowboy through-and-through.

In this “modern-day” western, Ken Maynard stars as Ken Baxter. While out camping in the wilderness with his trusty horse Tarzan and his two comic relief sidekicks, Pancho (Julian Rivero) and Panhandle (Ralph Peters), Ken comes across the gravely injured Professor Wahl (Michael Vallon). Wahl is an archeologist who has been left to die. Wahl is too weak to reveal who attacked him and, when Ken gets Wahl back to civilization, he discovers that Wahl’s colleagues, Dr. Flotow (William Castello) and Baron Starkoff (Sven Hugo Bard), aren’t willing to help Wahl unless he shares the location of a helium mine.

Flotow and the Baron are working for “a foreign power” and want to smuggle the helium back to Europe so that their country can use it to fuel their dirigibles. Ken and his sidekicks have to stop the bad guys from getting control of the ranch that sits near the mine. Going undercover, Ken allows himself to be hired by Joe Larkin (Charles King), who is trying to steal the property away from Letty Morgan (Fay McKenzie). Romance and gunfight follows. Ken’s horse, Tarzan, saves the day more than once.

The plot of Death Rides the Range is intriguing and, for a 55-minute programmer, complex. Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t allow the story to fulfill its potential. By the time Maynard starred in this film, the once-major cowboy star had alienated most of the major studios and he had a reputation being difficult. He was reduced to working for poverty row studios, like Colony Pictures. Maynard is a convincing hero and his horse, Tarzan, was one of the most talented of the animal actors working at that time but Death Rides The Range still feels rushed.

Death Rides The Range is mostly interesting as an example of the type of anti-German films that were being made before the U.S. officially entered World War II. The film keeps it ambiguous who Flotow and Starkoff are working for but any viewer who had been following the news out of Europe would automatically know they were working for the Germans. Even when he was making movies for Poverty Row, Ken Maynard was still fighting the good fight.