Stephen Chase | Through the Shattered Lens

With the country distracted by the Spanish-American war, someone is stealing cattle on the border between Mexico and the United States. Federal marshal Rocky Lane (Allan Lane) is sent to investigate. He gets a job with Nugget Clark (Eddy Waller), a local feed merchant, and gets to know Nugget’s daughter, Alice (Phyllis Coates). As was usually the case with these B-westerns, it turns out that the band of onery outlaws is secretly being led by a villain who is an otherwise respectable member of society. When it comes to the Old West in these films, the biggest threat was not from the outlaws but instead from the greedy and corrupt settlers who wanted to get their own piece of the action and who were willing to sell out their own neighbors and sometimes their own country to get it. It falls to Rocky and Nugget to save the day, rescue Alice from the bad guys, and recover the cattle.

This was the last of the B-westerns to star Allan Lane as Rocky Lane and Eddy Waller as his sidekick. Unfortunately, the arrival of television made short programmers like this one obsolete. Kids could now just watch westerns on television instead of spending the day down at the theater. This was not a bad western for the Rocky Lane character to go out on, though. The plot is predictable but that’s to be expected for a 53-minute programmer like this one. However, Rocky is an appropriately square-jawed hero. He rides his horse, Black Jack, with authority and he looks convincing handling a gun and throwing a punch. There are actually some good shots involving the outlaws’s hideout, which just happens to be hidden behind a waterfall. For western fans, El Paso Stampede is a watchable and undemanding genre entry.

As I mentioned earlier, this was the last film to star Allan Lane. He appeared in a few more westerns after El Paso Stampede but it was always in supporting roles. Allan Lane appeared in 88 films, the majority of which were B-westerns like this one. Today, though, Lane is best-remembered for a role for which he wasn’t even given onscreen credit, providing the voice of the talking horse, Mr. Ed.

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.