Robert Barron | Through the Shattered Lens

Three Texas Rangers — Tex Wyatt (Dave O’Brien), Jim Steele (James Newill), and Panhandle Perkins (Guy Wilkerson) — ride into a small town. They each arrive separately and they all sing while sitting on their horses. They’re in town to help out Jed Wilkins, who was Panhandle’s superior officer during the Civil War. Jed is having a nervous breakdown because a crooked surveyor (Jack Ingram) and shifty lawyer (Charles King) are trying to cheat him out of his land. Jed thinks that he’s serving in the war again so Panhandle has to wear his old Confederate uniform to keep Jed from losing it any further.

The Texas Rangers starred in a series of B-westerns. This one is mostly amiable, though I think modern viewers will probably have a more difficult time with the Confederate uniform than viewers did in 1944. Having watched enough of these movies, I’ve lost track of the number of crooked lawyers that Charles King played over the years. He was one of the great B-movie villains, that’s for sure.

I don’t really know what to make of the singing cowboy genre. Why are they singing while riding through the wilderness and trying not to get shot? Do all of the Texas Rangers sing or is it just these three? This movie raises so many questions. What’s odd is that the songs in this movie are actually really catchy. I can still remember the tunes, if not all of the lyrics. Don’t break the law, the Rangers sang as they rode out of town at the end of the movie. Don’t break the law.

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.