Tag Archives: Slim Whitaker

Everyman’s Law (1936, directed by Albert Ray)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Corrupt Sheriff Chris Bradley (Homer Murphy) sends letters to three outlaws, asking them to come to his town and to work for him.  Sheriff Bradley wants to use them to kick some homesteaders off their land.  What Sheriff Bradly didn’t count on was one of the outlaws being an undercover Texas Ranger!  Johnny Mack Brown plays Johnny, a.k.a. The Dog Town Kid.

The Kid takes a liking to homesteader Marian Henley (Beth Marion) and her infant son.  When the Kid and the other two outlaws don’t move out the homesteaders to the sheriff’s liking, Bradley hires fearsome outlaw Lobo Joe (Roger Gray).

This is a pretty typical Poverty Row western.  After you see enough of these, you realize that every plot is going to be about a corrupt sheriff and a businessman teaming up to try to steal the land away from the settlers.  What makes these film work (or not) is the quality of the stars and Johnny Mack Brown was one of the best, someone who seemed authentic when he was riding a horse or shooting a gun but who was also a good enough actor to bring some life to the familiar plots.  As usual, with this film, Johnny Mack Brown is better than his material.

Everyman’s Law is best-known for the scenes of Brown and the other two outlaws having to babysit Marian’s baby.  The “comedic” scene where the baby puts the barrel of Johnny’s six-shooter in his mouth probably had the audience rolling in 1936 but today, it would undoubtedly get the film banned.

Billy The Kid’s Smoking Guns (1942, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s a tale as old as time.  During the days when the west was wild, the U.S. Army is planning on setting up a new outpost near a town so the bad guys want to run all the ranchers off of their land so that they can be the ones to sell it.  Sheriff Carson (Ted Adams) is corrupt and working for the bad guys so the ranchers have to turn to Billy the Kid (Buster Crabbe) and his sidekicks, Jeff (Dave O’Brien) and Fuzzy (Al St. John) for help.  When Jeff is wounded in a fight, Fuzzy takes him to Doc Hagen (Milton Kibbee), little suspecting the doctor is actually the leader of the bad guys and using his medical practice to kill anyone who won’t give up their land!

Coming to us straight from Poverty Row, this B-western is interesting in that it seems to take a very cynical view of law enforcement.  Sheriff Carson is corrupt and Billy and his friends are running from the law themselves.  Buster Crabbe’s Billy the Kid films always kept it unclear why Billy was in trouble with the authorities.  Crabbe’s Billy the Kid always seemed to be the nicest guy in the west.  (Of course, Crabbe was also 33 and no longer seemed like he should have been known as “the Kid.”)  Eventually, the series was retconned and Buster Crabbe was no longer playing Billy the Kid but instead he was playing an upstanding citizen named Billy Carson.

Crabbe may not be a convincing outlaw but he is a convincing hero, which is all these films really required.  Billy the Kid’s Smoking Guns is a little bit interesting because of the character of Doc Hagen, whose occupation makes him a little more memorable than typical B-western bad guy.  The film is also interesting in that, for once, there’s no love interest.  Instead, it’s just men in hats shooting at each other.  That probably made the film’s youthful target audience happy.

The real-life Billy The Kid was killed when he was only 21 and after he had been an outlaw for only three years.  Buster Crabbe would g0 on to play Billy (or o some variation of Billy) until he was closing in on 40.

 

Return of the Lash (1947, directed by Ray Taylor)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

There’s another range war brewing on the frontier.  Big Jim Kirby (George Chesebro) knows there’s plans for a new railroad so he wants to steal the land from the ranchers so he can make a fortune off a selling it.  Kirby calls in everyone’s mortgage, knowing they’ll never be able to pay.  Rancher Tom Grant (Buster Slaven) reaches out to Cheyenne Davis (Lash LaRue, a look alike for Humphrey Bogart)) and Fuzzy Q. Jones (Al St. John) for help.  Cheyenne raises the money but then he makes the mistake of trusting Fuzzy to deliver it.  Fuzzy takes a knock to the noggin and now, he’s got amnesia.  Where’s the money?

This is a standard B-western and you know the drill.  Big Jim’s henchmen don’t want that money to get paid.  Cheyenne is on the side of the angels.  Fuzzy provides comic relief.  Lash LaRue appeared in several B-westerns.  He never became as big a star as some of his contemporaries but he did have a gimmick that made him memorable.  Most westerns stars used guns.  LaRue had a bullwhip.  When LaRue was first offered the role of Cheyenne, he lied and said he could crack a whip.  After he struggled to teach himself, tiny production company PRC hired a professional trainer.  That was a huge expense for a poverty row studio but it paid off because LaRue became proficient with the whip and he had a surprisingly long career.  He was born Alfred LaRue.  The studio came up with the Lash nickname.  Many western stars, like Johnny Mack Brown, played characters who shared their name.  Lash almost always played Cheyenne Davis.

Lash LaRue’s movies were cheap and never that memorable.  In this one, Lash barely appears and most of the action is carried out by Al St. John as Fuzzy.  But Lash LaRue did play an important part in Hollywood history when he briefly came out of retirement to teach Harrison Ford how to crack a whip for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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.