Tag Archives: Yakima Canutt

The Lucky Texan (1934, directed by Robert N. Bradbury)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After graduating from college, Jerry (John Wayne) travels down to the ranch owned by his uncle, Grandy (George “Gabby” Hayes).  Jerry wants to look after the cattle but it turns out that Grandy doesn’t have any more cattle.  They’ve all been stolen by rustlers.  What Grandy does have is a dog, some horses, and a granddaughter named Betty (Barbara Sheldon) who Jerry is eager to marry even though the two of them are related.  Things start to look up when Grandy and Jerry discover gold in a nearby creek.  When a crooked assayer named Mr. Harris (Lloyd Whitlock) and a rustler named Joe Cole (Yakima Canutt) find out about the creek, they scheme to steal both it and the ranch from Grandy.  It’s up to Jerry to save the ranch and to expose the bad guys, even after they attempt to frame him for murder.  Fortunately, both Jerry and Grandy have a few tricks up their sleeves.

This was one of the many B-westerns that John Wayne did for the poverty row studios in the years before Stagecoach made him a star.  (Though the film is a western with its ranches and its search for gold, the climax features Gabby Hayes driving a car so it’s hard to say for sure when it’s supposed to be taking place.)  Though he seems too old to be playing a recent college graduate (John Wayne was 27 when he starred in The Lucky Texan but he looked closer to 40), Wayne gives a relaxed and likable performance as Jerry.  Watching him in this film, it’s possible to see hints of the screen presence that led to John Ford casting him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach.  As always, Yakima Canutt is on hand to do some impressive stuntwork during the film’s many chase scenes and Gabby Hayes provides the comic relief.  Like most of the poverty row productions, the film can seem more than a little creaky by today’s standards but fans of John Wayne will not be disappointed with either his performance or the film’s action.

The Star Packer (1934, directed by Robert N. Bradbury)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

A mysterious outlaw known as the Shadow is terrorizing turn-of-the-century Arkansas.  He and his gang have killed the last few sheriffs of Little Rock.  No one is sure who the Shadow is or how he communicates with his gang but somehow, he is always one step ahead of the law.  However, the Shadow didn’t count on federal agent John Travers (John Wayne) riding into town and declaring himself to be the new sheriff.  Working with his Native sidekick, Yak (Yakima Canutt), Travers sets out to expose the Shadow and take him down.  Along the way, he falls for Anita (Verna Hillie), the niece of rancher Matt Matlock (Gabby Hayes).  Luckily, Anita knows her way around a gun too.

This is one of the 50 B-westerns that John Wayne made before Stagecoach made him a star.  The Star Packer is more interesting than some of Wayne’s other poverty row productions because The Shadow is a more interesting and much more clever villain than the usual greedy but dumb outlaws that Wayne went up against in these movies.  The Shadow actually has a clearly thought-out plan and, for once, Wayne can’t defeat the bad guys on his own.  In The Star Packer, it takes a community to stand up to evil.  As always with Robert Bradbury’s westerns, the fights and the stunts are impressive.  Fans of Wayne’s B-period will probably especially be interested to see the legendary stuntman, Yakima Canutt, play a good guy for once.  He and Wayne both do a good job in this 52 minute programmer.

Neath The Arizona Skies (1934, directed by Harry L. Fraser)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Chris Morrell (John Wayne) is an honest cowboy who keeps an eye on Nina (Shirley Jean Rickert), a little girl whose Indian mother died when Nina was just a baby.  When oil is discovered on land that belonged to Nina’s mother, Nina is offered $50,000 for the land.  Because Nina is only eight years old, her legal guardian will be responsible for taking care of the money.  Chris and Nina set out to find Nina’s father so that he can sign the guardianship papers and make Chris into Nina’s legal guardian.

When outlaw Sam Black (Yakima Canutt) decides that he would rather be Nina’s legal guardian, Chris sends Nina to a ranch owned by his old friend, Bud Moore, while he defeats Sam and his men.  At the ranch, it turns out that Bud Moore has died and the new ranch owner is another outlaw named Vic (Jack Rockwell) and Vic wants Nina’s oil claim for himself.  What Vic doesn’t know is that Nina’s father is one of his ranch hands.

For a 52 minute programmer, there’s a lot going on in ‘Neath The Arizona Skies.  There’s actually too much going on and, with that short of a run time, it feels as if more than a few important plot points were glossed over, like how Chris came to look after Nina in the first place.  John Wayne is stiff but likable as Chris while Yakima Canutt does his usual double duty as both an outlaw and a stuntman.  There are a few good action scenes, especially when Chris runs off Sam’s gang for the first time.  Sheila Terry plays Wayne’s love interest, who has to be first convinced that Chris isn’t actually an outlaw.  As Nina, Shirley Jean Rickert is energetic but you’ll quickly get tired of her yelling, “Daddy Chris!” whenever anything happens.  This isn’t one of the best of the 50 poverty row films that Wayne appeared in before Stagecoach made him a star but, even in this film, there are still hints of the screen presence that would later become Wayne’s trademark.

Paradise Canyon (1935, directed by Carl Pierson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Someone is passing counterfeit bills on the Mexican border and the government thinks that it might be Doc Carter (Earle Hodgins), the manger of a traveling medicine show.  Working undercover, Treasury agent John Wyatt (John Wayne) joins Doc Carter’s medicine show as a trick shooter.  John discovers that Doc Carter is a quack and the miracle cure that he sells is 90% alcohol but that Doc Carter isn’t a counterfeiter.  Instead, Doc Carter is being framed by his former partner, Curly Joe (Yakima Canutt).  When John tries to tell the Mexican authorities about Curly Joe is doing, he discovers that Curly Joe has framed him as well!

This was the last of the B-programmers that John Wayne made for Monogram Pictures and it was the only one of Wayne’s films to be directed by Carl Pierson.  As he did in almost all of his early B-pictures, John Wayne gives a tough but likable performance.  He’s the most cheerful undercover agent that I’ve ever seen.  The action scenes are rudimentary and Pierson was obviously not as creative a director as some of the other filmmakers that Wayne worked with early in his career.  Carl Pierson was no Robert Bradbury.  But the medicine show angle does bring a different angle to the story, with Wayne getting to show off his trick shooting skills and Earle Hodgins providing comedic relief with his miracle cure.  Of course, John has a romance with pretty Linda (Marion Burns), who is Doc Carter’s daughter and who is also known as Princess Natasha.

Though it may not be one of the best of the 50 movies that John Wayne made before getting his star-making role in Stagecoach, Paradise Canyon will still be appreciated by fans of both the Duke and the simple but entertaining B-westerns of the past.

Sagebrush Trail (1933, directed by Armand Schaefer)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Accused and convicted of a murder that he didn’t commit, John Brant (John Wayne) breaks out of prison in Maryland and, following the advice of Horace Greeley, he goes west.  After making a narrow escape from the authorities, he meets and befriends Joseph Conlan (Lane Chandler).  Conlan brings Brant into his gang, where Brant starts out as a cook but is soon being assigned to help rob stores and stagecoaches.  Despite his time in prison, Brant is no criminal and he secretly thwarts every robbery that the gang tries to pull off.  When the gang starts to suspect that Brant might be an undercover cop, Conlan is the only one willing to stand up for him and help him.  Conlan is also responsible for the murder that Brant was accused of committing.

John Wayne as a hardened escaped convict?  Maybe the older John Wayne could have pulled that off but, in 1933, Wayne was still too cheerful and easy going to be believable as someone who had spent the last few months doing hard time.  Fortunately, even early in his career, Wayne was convincing when riding a horse or shooting a gun and that’s probably all that the audience for these short programmers demanded.  There’s also an exciting scene where Wayne is forced to swim across a pond while his pursuers shoot at him.  As the criminal with a conscience, Lane Chandler steals the film.

Fans of westerns will want to keep an eye out for legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, playing yet another outlaw gang leader.  Yakima Canutt started out his career risking his life as a rodeo rider and then went on to risk his life ever more as Hollywood’s most daring stunt performer.  When he got too old to continue doing stunt work, he became a second unit director, for John Ford and others.  He staged Ben-Hur‘s famous chariot race and was credited with making sure that not a single horse was hurt and not a single human was seriously injured during filming.  Yakima Canutt lived to be 90 years old, outliving most of the actors from whom he doubled as a stuntman.

Winds of the Wasteland (1936, directed by Mack V. Wright)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When the invention of the telegraph puts the Pony Express out of business, two veteran riders — John Blair (John Wayne) and Larry Adams (Lane Chandler) — decide to start their own stagecoach line.  The richest man in Buchanan City, “Honest” Cal Drake (Douglas Cosgrove), sells them the line to nearby Crescent City.  Though initially grateful, Blair and Larry soon discover that Crescent City is now a ghost town that serves as home to exactly two inhabitants.  Rather than give up, Blair and Larry set up their stagecoach and they suddenly get lucky as settlers start to find themselves in Crescent City.  Blair is even able to convince the local telegraph company to run the wire though Crescent City, which leads to an influx of even more people.  Now, Blair just needs to land the contract delivering mail for the area.  To do that, he’ll have to win a stagecoach race against Drake, who turns out to not be very honest at all.

Winds of the Wastelands is one of John Wayne’s better pre-Stagecoach programmers.  While it has the western action that most people would expect from a B-western, it also has a lot more comedy than some of Wayne’s other poverty row productions.  For instance, a skunk tries to turn the stagecoach into his home and, of course, shows up at a key moment during the big race.  When one of bad guys tries to convince Blair to take his donkey to Crescent City in the stagecoach, Blair asks if there are any other “jackasses” who want a ride while casting a look at Drake’s men.  The movie takes a more serious turn when Drake goes to extreme methods to try to stop Blair and, as a result, Larry is wounded in a gunfight.  Doc Forsythe (Sam Flint), the founder of Crescent City, has to rediscover his confidence to perform the operation that can save Larry’s life.  Fortunately, the doctor’s daughter (Phyllis Fraser) is there to both help him out and to fall in love with John Blair.

This 55-minute programmer featured John Wayne playing the type of character for which he best known, the level-headed westerner who wasn’t going to let anyone push him around but who still fought fair.  Watching this movie, it’s easy to see why, just three years later, John Ford used him in Stagecoach.

Blue Steel (1934, directed by Robert N. Bradbury)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

On a stormy night, frontier Sheriff Jake Withers (George “Gabby” Hayes) and undercover U.S. Marshal Carruthers (John Wayne) both check into the same inn.  They are both searching for the infamous Polka Dot Bandit (Yakima Canutt), who has been burglarizing homes and businesses all over California.  They both figure that, on a rainy night like this, there’s no way that the Bandit is going to be out.  It turns out they are both wrong.  The Bandit breaks into the inn and robs the safe but also leaves behind one of his spurs.  The sheriff comes across Carruthers investigating the safe and mistakenly believes that Carruthers is the bandit.

Later, when Sheriff Winters goes out to Carruthers’s cabin, he’s planning on arresting Carruthers.  Before he can do so, they both hear gun shots.  Outside, another group of bandits is chasing Betty (Eleanor Hunt) and her father.  The Sherriff and Carruthers manage to save Betty but her father is killed.  The grieving Betty is taken in by a local rancher named Malgrove (Edward Peil, Jr.) but it turns out that Malgrove is the head of the Polka Dot Gang and he is planning on killing Betty in order to keep a shipment of supplies from coming to the town!  Carruthers and the sheriff have to work together to thwart Malgrove’s plan and bring the Polka Dot Bandit to justice.

This 54-minute programmer was one of the many B-westerns that John Wayne made for Monogram Pictures in the days before John Ford made him a star by casting him in Stagecoach.  Though Wayne was still learning how to act on camera, the screen presence that would make him a star can be seen in Blue Steel and he and Hayes make a good team.  The story is simple enough but there’s enough horse riding and fistfights to keep most B-western fans entertained.  It’s still hard not to imagine how much different the movie would have been if the sheriff had arrested Carruthers at the scene of the crime instead of letting him ride out to his cabin.  It’s a good thing these old programmers never had to make too much sense.

Action in the Alps: WHERE EAGLES DARE (MGM 1969)

Posted on by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Alistair MacLean’s adventure novels, filled with muscular action and suspenseful plot twists, thrilled moviegoers of the 60’s and 70’s in such big budget hits as THE GUNS OF NAVARONE and ICE STATION ZEBRA. In his first foray into screenwriting, 1969’s WHERE EAGLES DARE,  he adapted his own work to the silver screen, resulting in one of the year’s biggest hits, aided by the box office clout of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood . The film’s a bit long, running over two and a half hours, but action fans won’t mind. There’s enough derring-do, ace stunt work, explosions, and cliffhanging (literally!) to keep you riveted to the screen!

A lot of the credit goes to veteran stunt coordinator Yakima Canutt, in charge of all the action scenes as second unit director. Canutt staged some of the most exciting scenes in film history, from John Ford’s STAGECOACH to William Wyler’s BEN HUR, and certainly keeps things busy…

View original post 617 more words