As he opens the Sundown State Bank for another day of fiduciary
operations, president John Cameron (Howard C. Hickman) boasts to the customers
waiting in line that the vault where their money is stored is “burglar-proof”—because
he’s the only one with the
combination. Then the door to the vault
swings open, and the dead body of the night watchman falls to the floor. (Apparently it is not watchman-proof.)
The bank has been robbed of its $90,000 in cash reserves…and
the depositors? Well, they are not happy
campers. Suspicion for the theft falls
on Cameron; after all, he’s the only one who could have conceivably opened that
bad boy up! As upright and outstanding
citizens Tex (Monte Montague) and Dusty (Ward Bond) start riling up their
fellow Sundownians for a party (necktie, that is), Clint Bradford (George
O’Brien) just happens to ride into town with his sidekicks Andy (Ray Whitley)
and “Whopper” (Chill Wills). Clint,
who’s kinda sweet on Cameron’s daughter June (Rosalind Keith), tells the
beleaguered bank prez to hie himself to a cabin in Red Rock Canyon and hide out
there since the crowd is turning ugly (and that’s not much of a turn).
Naturally, Cameron is innocent of the robbery: the mastermind
behind the heist is crooked real estate agent Ross Daggett (Cy Kendall), whose
eevill scheme is to get control of the bank so he can then get his greasy
fingers on all of the ranches in the valley (Cameron is carrying a lot of these
people on the bank’s books, and they won’t be able to settle up until after the
fall cattle drive). Daggett sends Tex
and Dusty to Red Rock Canyon so that those two goons can terminate the banker
with extreme prejudice, making it look like a suicide. They’re able to coerce Cameron into signing a
suicide note, but before they can continue with their foul deed Clint comes
riding up with deputy Larry Harrison (Jack Perrin). There’s a shoot-out; Deputy Larry is gunned
down…and if that robbery deal wasn’t bad enough Cameron has a murder rap to
beat. (Not one of his better days.)
The last time we visited with R-K-O cowboy star George
O’Brien on the blog was when his offbeat oater Gold Raiders (1951—with the Three
Stooges!) was reviewed on B-Western Wednesdays in 2012. Best known among classic movie fans for his
John Ford Western silents (The Iron
Horse, 3 Bad Men) and the F.W.
Murnau masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two
Humans (1927), by the time the movies started to talk O’Brien had a new
career as a cowboy star—he inked a contract with independent producer George A.
Hirlman in 1936, and those B-Westerns were subsequently released by R-K-O. Then R-K-O decided to eliminate the
middleman, and O’Brien began to make programmers for the studio directly.
I caught Trouble in
Sundown (1939) on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ some time
back, and all I can say is that it better take care if I find it’s been creeping
‘round my back stairs. (Hey…when was the
last time you read a blog post with a Gordon Lightfoot reference?) All seriousness aside, I’ll state up front
that it’s also available on a 3-DVD set entitled the George
O’Brien Western Collection…but having not viewed it in that fashion,
I simply have to go by what I DVR’d from TCM.
Their print is in better shape than it should be, though its opening
titles are a little rough (I strongly suspect the film’s negative got the
“Movietime” treatment that a lot of the entries in the R-K-O library received
when they sold many of these titles to TV).
Despite the shabbiness afforded its opening titles, Sundown is not a bad little B; O’Brien
is a real two-fisted he-man hero, and he doesn’t have to resort to any fancy
Dan singing or strumming a guitar (well, he’s got Ray Whitley to do that: Ray
sings Prairie Winds and Home on the Prairie with the Phelps
Brothers). Chill Wills is never my first
choice as a comic relief sidekick but he’s easy to take, and Rosalind Keith is
sweet as George’s girlfriend (the wrap-up to this one suggests that the two of
them will be tying the knot).
Sundown’s strengths
include a really first-rate supporting cast: you’ve got Ward Bond paying his
dues as one of the henchmen, and Cy Kendall—known for his villainy in serials
like The Green Hornet (1940) and Jungle Queen (1945)—doing that
voodoo that he do so well as the unscrupulous Daggett (his name should have
given him away). (Also, too: Cy is
billed as “Cyrus W. Kendall”—nice goin’, podnuh!) There’s a plethora of veterans in this one as
well: John Dilson, Lloyd Ingraham, Tom London—it’s a casting call for a Lone
Ranger episode!
I also enjoyed how George rounds up the bad guys in this
one—I won’t give it away, because if you haven’t seen it you should—a very
clever plot twist courtesy of Oliver Drake, Dorrell McGowan, and Stuart E.
McGowan (from a story by Charles F. Royal).
B-Western director David Howard directed this and several other entries
in the O’Brien franchise, keeping things moving like any good traffic cop.
The original title of this oater was A Knight in Ghost Town—which I actually like better, and it would
have spared you that lame joke I made several paragraphs earlier. I really dig the R-K-O Westerns because even
when they were forced to skimp on the budgets…they always have a professional-looking
sheen.
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