Rex Lease | 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.

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.