Rancher Bill Thompson (Steve Darrell) returns from a
business trip to Tucson…and boy, does he have some swell news for his son Dan (Jay
Kirby)! Janice (Christine Larson), the
pretty little gal at his side, is now his new mom…and no one should be
surprised that Dan takes this bulletin with all the enthusiasm of a proctology
exam. It’s mostly due to Janice being
old enough to be his younger sister, but that don’t make no never mind to Bill:
they’re married, and if Dan doesn’t like it he can lump it.
Dan doesn’t like it, and so he vamooses from the ranch—bitter
about the fact that his pop has reneged on his promise to bequeath him some of
the horses they raise on their spread.
Ranch foreman Jimmy Wakely (himself) and chief-cook-and-bottle-washer “Cannonball”
(Dub Taylor) ride into town in an attempt to patch things up between father and
son. Actively working against this
reunion is stepmother Janice, who’s really a conniving little rhymes-with-witch
out to take Bill’s fortune. She’s
assisted in this endeavor by her brother Les (Leonard Penn) …who isn’t her brother at all! (Quel plot twist!) The scheming pair cleverly frame Dan for his
father’s murder, and it’s Jimmy (once again) to the rescue.
The fifty-three-minute length of Partners of the Sunset (1948)—and if you can figure out how that
title connects with the plot of this movie, the phone lines are open—makes it just
slightly longer than your run-of-the-mill episode of a typical TV western. This doesn’t make it a terrible movie, you
understand—it’s just that the overall presentation covers a lot of all-too-familiar
territory. Boyd Magers at Western
Clippings gives this Jimmy Wakely programmer two stars, which seems
about right…maybe I would bump it up half-a-star. It’s painless to take, and Jimmy sings a couple
of nice up-tempo ditties in It’s a
Beautiful Day (Wakely sings and curries his horse as his bandmates
accompany him on fiddle, guitar, and steel guitar—the way country music should
be) and Press Along to the Big Corral.
The pluses in Sunset
include a very good performance from Christine Larson, who’s a cut-above your
usual B-Western ingénue—particularly when she’s fluctuating back-and-forth
between sweet-as-apple-pie wifey and wicked stepmother. She’s joined in her villainy by Leonard Penn
(as Les, the “brother” who has difficulty keeping his hands off his sis), and
between the two of them they are ruthless in their intentions to make sure Dan
swings for fratricide (Les is really responsible for the vile deed, hitting
Bill with one of those figurines that folks used to keep around the house for
just such occasions).
You also can’t go wrong with having Dub Taylor as your
sidekick if you find yourself in the occupation of singing cowboy; there’s a
running gag throughout Sunset where “Cannonball”
is desperately trying to catch an elusive fish (“Ol’ Smokey”) that will produce
a stray chuckle or two, and Cannonball also gets some funny lines. (Jimmy: “What’s
with the funny look?” Cannonball: “I always
look this way!”) The rest of the cast is
dependable if not remarkable; the only name I recognized other than Wakely’s
and Taylor’s was Marshall Reed, who was a regular on TV’s The Lineup (a.k.a. San
Francisco Beat). Marsh plays a
bad hombre who agrees to help young Dan swipe those horses from his pa’s ranch,
and winds up in a well-shot saloon donnybrook with Jimmy (well…more like Jimmy’s
stuntman, Bob Woodward). (Reed’s
character connects right on Wakely’s button in one scene, which made me laugh
out loud.)
Directed by master journeyman Lambert Hillyer (who helmed a
previous Wakely vehicle covered in this space, 1949’s Gun
Law Justice) and scripted by B-Western veteran J. Benton Cheney (I see
Cheney’s credit on a lot of episodes of The Cisco Kid before I watch those Trackdown
episodes I DVR off of Heroes & Icons), Partners
of the Sunset is little more than a passable time-killer from one of the
silver screen’s most engaging sagebrush presences...but that don’t make it all
bad, as a cowpoke once explained to me.
It’s on DVD, available for
purchase or rent
on the Warner Archive MOD set Monogram Cowboy Collection: Volume 1.
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