Hurry on down to Hardie’s

My fellow classic movie mavens are well aware that in the month of February (and first three days of March—except leap year), The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ runs their “31 Days of Oscar” tribute.  This event and “Summer Under the Stars” usually allows me to catch up with whatever I have squirreled away on our DISH DVR, and I was very much looking forward to watching the content (and slapping my favorites onto disc).

But…in the immortal words of Robert Frost: “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft a-gley.” (Who says this blog isn’t highbrow?  Besides 98% of the blogosphere, I mean.)

The good people at DISH decided to have a “freeview” weekend of HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime the weekend of February 17-20.  The following weekend, we were treated to free Starz.  The weekend after that, Encore.  And we just finished up a freeview of Epix this past weekend.  For a recovering movie nut like your humble narrator, this is an embarrassment of riches—particularly because when there isn’t anything on the schedule worth grabbing, there’s always On Demand offerings I can download.  I have been spending every free waking moment luxuriating in movies, movies…and more movies.

Laramie stars John Smith and Robert Fuller

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I went hog wild during the Encore freeview…because their On Demand features episodes of the classic TV westerns they offer on their schedule—this is how I was able to build my substantial Wanted: Dead or Alive collection back in December of 2015.   Encore Westerns on Demand has episodes of Death Valley Days, Laramie, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Tales of Wells Fargo (a recent acquisition), and Wagon Train—which presented me with a dilemma: which show do I download?

I eliminated Death Valley Days and Wagon Train right off the bat; I like both shows—but they’re not something I have to have.  I leaned heavily toward Laramie, particularly due to the piss-poor quality of the Timeless Media Group DVDs…but I’ve got a 30-day window with these downloads, and I didn’t think I could get all EW had in that amount of time (particularly since they’re 50-minute shows).  There’s DVR space to consider, too—I like to have enough of a “buffer” in case Mom (who learned how to work the DVR during her convalescence) wants to grab any Rambo movies or something with Jean-Claude God Damme.  (I don’t know why she insists on recording stuff with commercials…particularly since she hasn’t learned to fast-forward yet.)  So, it came down to either Wyatt Earp or Wells Fargo…and since all six seasons of Earp have been released to disc, I went with Fargo (its DVD release history is a little spotty).

Tales of Wells Fargo originally premiered as a December 14, 1956 episode of CBS’ Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, “A Tale of Wells Fargo”—with a teleplay by Frank Gruber from a Zane Grey story.  The producer of this episode, Nat Holt, had also produced the 1949 film that gave future Wells Fargo star Dale Robertson his first onscreen credit, Fighting Man of the Plains (Fargo creator Frank Gruber also wrote this screenplay…in addition to the novel on which it was based).  Holt had quite a time talking Robertson into doing “Tale” as a regular series—Dale initially didn’t think much of the script, and only agreed to commit to the pilot as a favor to his friend.  He never dreamed that the show would leap to #3 in the Nielsens in its second season (Tales of Wells Fargo officially premiered over NBC on March 18, 1957).  (Wells Fargo remained in the Top 10 in its third season, and continued to be a solid ratings performer until its final season in 1961-62.  More on this in a bit.)

I thought that by downloading all the Wells Fargo Encore Westerns had to offer, I could play a few for mi madre—a longtime fan of the show.  I know I mentioned this on the blog in the past (my previous experience with Wells Fargo was a single episode, “Jesse James,” which was on Timeless’ The Classic TV Western Collection) but my father used to tease my mother unmercifully about this series, derisively referring to the star as “Dale Roberts” and saying…well, I won’t repeat exactly what he said (it’s a little insensitive) but he hinted that Mr. Robertson was a few horses shy of a remuda.  I’ve watched 13 out of the 14 episodes in the first season (“The Silver Bullets” did not download properly, much to my dismay) and a couple from Season Two…and I don’t know why Dad kids Mom so.  Granted, I do not possess the sophisticated television tastes as my old man (and by “sophisticated television tastes” I mean shows about UFOs and cops placing people under arrest) but I’m finding Tales of Wells Fargo to be a pretty entertaining series.  It’s not a great show (there are superior western half-hours, like Gunsmoke and Have Gun – Will Travel) but it’s far and away better than The Cisco Kid or any other juvie oater you’d care to name.  Robertson didn’t consider Wells Fargo an “adult western” or a “kids western”—but a “family western,” assuming your family conducted private investigations for the Wells Fargo company for a living.  (That’s the premise in a nutshell: as Jim Hardie, Robertson chased down bad hombres who robbed the company’s stagecoaches or freight wagon in the 1860s/1870s/1880s, and brought the miscreants to justice.  This was quite a few years before the Wells Fargo company started committing fraud on a major scale.)

Hugh Beaumont as Jesse James

One of the aspects of the program that I’ve observed is its rather compassionate portrayals of its outlaw element: in the aforementioned “Jesse James” (07/01/57), future Leave it to Beaver dad Hugh Beaumont portrays Jesse as a very sympathetic sort, and in “Sam Bass” (06/10/57), rifleman Chuck Connors makes the titular bandit a jovial, happy-go-lucky fella (the real Bass was apparently also a “no worries” kind of guy).  (Connors also appears in the premiere episode of Tales of Wells Fargo, “The Thin Rope”—adding some interesting shadings to the villain.)  The nature of Hardie’s work dictated he make contact with many Old West legends, including Belle Starr (a nice turn by Jeanne Cooper), John Wesley Hardin (Lyle Bettger), Billy the Kid (Robert Vaughn), and Butch Cassidy (Charles Bronson).

Jack Elam

Of the episodes I’ve viewed so far, I was very impressed with “The Hijackers” (06/17/57); Hardie puts a premature end to his vacation by tracking down the son (Harry Holt, Jr.) of a wealthy man and his fiancée (Jacqueline Holt) and finds their trail leads to a ghost town, where they’re being held captive by Jack Elam and his gang.  There’s a beautifully done (and wordless) sequence in which Robertson and Elam play hide-and-seek in the abandoned burg, and when the closing credits rolled I was not at all surprised to see serials ace John English attached as director.  (The author of this one is N.B. Stone, Jr., later responsible for Ride the High Country.)  The following episode, “Stage to Nowhere” (06/24/57), is also first-rate; Hardie is escorting an outlaw (Walter Coy) to the hoosegow when their stagecoach is chased down by the man’s gang—also on board are a timid newspaper reporter (the ubiquitous Lyle Talbot) plus a woman (OTR’s Barbara Eiler) and her son (Bobby Clark), who have an important connection to Jim’s prisoner.

Michael Landon

You’ll spot a good many familiar future TV faces and veteran character thesps in these episodes of Tales of Wells Fargo: Michael Landon is not only in “Sam Bass” but “Shotgun Messenger” (05/07/57)—which I’d wager was the first time he worked with his future Little House on the Prairie co-star Kevin Hagen (as one of the bad guys, of course).  Some time back on Facebook, I made a joking reference to actor John Carroll being “the poor man’s Clark Gable” …and my social media compadre Christopher Snowden (the proprietor of Television Diary) responded that he always considered Dale Robertson to be quite Gable-ish.  When I concurred that I can definitely hear a Gable-ness in Robertson’s speech patterns, Chris observed: “[H]e's also there in scenes where Robertson's character is charming the ladies—chin down, and eyes uplifted as a big ingratiating smile spreads wide.  And all of these mannerisms are still in place twenty-odd years later, when he appears for short stretches on Dallas and Dynasty.”

The moustache helps a lot.  (From a 1965 TV pilot, Diamond Jim.)

William Demarest with star Robertson

In the fifth season of Tales of Wells Fargo, Earle Lyon replaced Nat Holt as the series’ producer; Lyon related in an interview: “I took over the last two years.  Dale Robertson called me one day and said he felt Nat was getting too old and couldn’t remember things.  Dale was pretty upset with the way things were going with the series.” NBC decided to side with the show’s star, and Holt’s inaugural season as producer went so swimmingly the network made the decision to not only expand Wells Fargo to an hour in Season Six but produce it in Living Peacock Color.  A cast of regulars was also added as Jim Hardie acquired a horse ranch near San Francisco (star Robertson was quite the horseman in real life) including future My Three Sons co-star William Demarest (as the stock crotchety ranch foreman, Jeb Gaine) and future Folgers’ pitchwoman Virginia Christine (as Hardie’s neighbor, The Widder [Ovie] Swenson).

Tales of Wells Fargo had stiff competition in its final season—it was scheduled Saturday nights opposite Perry Mason, and though it came in a respectable second, ratings-wise, the decision was made (the show was getting a bit expensive for the cost-conscious MCA/Revue to produce) to send it to the Old Syndication Retirement Home.  Star Robertson would later headline Iron Horse, another boob tube oater that barely hung on for two seasons, and J.J. Starbuck (1987-88), a Stephen J. Cannell creation that also resurrected Ben Vereen’s character of E.L. “Tenspeed” Turner (which he had played on the short-lived 1980 series Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, also created by Cannell).

Tales of Wells Fargo’s first and second seasons are available on DVD (Tales of Wells Fargo: The Complete First and Second Seasons); in addition, there’s a collection containing “selected” episodes from Seasons 1-5, and Tales of Wells Fargo: The Best of the Final Season in Color.  In looking at what I downloaded from Encore Westerns, neither seasons five or six seem to be in their package—perhaps they will air these in the future.  Wells Fargo plays much, much better than I had hoped…and later, I will make a small sacrifice to the satellite gods for allowing me to grab these episodes for the dusty Thrilling Days of Yesteryear archives.

B-Western Wednesdays: Hollywood Round-Up (1937)

In the world of the B-Western, there are only so many plots to go around.  You can only have a certain number of times when unscrupulous wealthy people want to rape the people’s land for precious minerals (or just take their ranches regardless of whether there’s gold, copper, silver, etc. present) or fighting Indians on the warpath or thwarting stagecoach hold-ups.  Occasionally, filmmakers who churned out oaters would get a little creative…and a popular diversion would be building the movie plot around the making of a B-Western.

The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ recently aired Scarlet River (1933) as part of their month-long tribute to Myrna Loy; this Tom Keene programmer features our hero as a cowboy actor who comes to the aid of real-life ranchers, and there are very brief cameos from RKO stars like Myrna, Bruce Cabot, Rochelle Hudson, and Joel McCrea.  A better example is a fun little Roy Rogers vehicle, Under California Stars (1948), in which Roy not only plays himself (he returns to his ranch after wrapping up shooting on his latest feature) but is joined by the likes of fellow Republic co-workers Monte Hale, Allan “Rocky” Lane, and Don “Red” Barry.

One of the Gene Autry features I managed to snag during our Starz/Encore/Movieplex “freeview” was The Big Show (1936); this western casts “America’s favorite singing cowboy” as both himself and a silver screen star named Tom Ford.  Gene doubles for Ford’s stunts in his pictures, and is pressed upon to keep impersonating the actor at the 1936 Texas Centennial celebration when Tom takes a fishing vacation.  Show is an entertaining little romp—one of the best early Autrys—though it does suffer from that irritating quality present in Gene’s films when the narrative must come to a screeching halt so that our hero (or someone else in the cast) can warble a song.

Mack V. Wright is credited as the director of The Big Show, and interestingly enough served as the production manager of a movie that’s quite similar to Show: 1937’s Hollywood Round-Up.  Round-Up features Grant Withers as Grant Drexel, the box office champ of Crown Pictures, a studio that specializes in cranking out oaters.  Though Drexel is the idol of many a kid who enjoys a Saturday matinee, in real life he could use some coaching in the social skills department…because he’s a bit of a prick.  When Carol Stephens (Helen Twelvetrees), an on-the-wane star is loaned out to Crown because she’s “box office poison” at her home studio, Drexel starts taking a few liberties during one of their love scenes.

Grant is soon set straight on this matter by Buck Kennedy (Buck Jones), the genuine article when it comes to cowboys…and a man who’s forced to demean himself as Drexel’s double to keep groceries on the table and oats in his horse Silver’s feedbag.  Kennedy has a thing for Carol himself, particularly after befriending her younger brother Dickie (Dickie Jones), and the romantic rivalry between Buck and Grant for Carol’s attentions eventually comes to a boil, prompting “the star” to have his stunt man fired.  Buck is only temporarily in the unemployment line, however; he’s hired by a rival studio to appear in their production…which includes filming a hold-up on the town bank.  The only problem is: the hold-up is real—the company are really a gang of outlaws, and they’ve left Buck holding the bag!

I like Dickie Jones, so I was kind of sorry to see him in The Grey Bar Hotel. (Why don't these things ever happen to She Who Must Not Be Named?)

I really believe Hollywood Round-Up to be a superior picture to The Big Show…primarily because there’s no musical numbers to slow down the action, and primarily because star Buck Jones is one of the most likable individuals to ever sit tall in the saddle.  Buck was one of the major assets in our Serial Saturdays presentation of Riders of Death Valley (1941), a chapter play that paved the way (along with the 1941 Columbia serial White Eagle) for the former silent movie hero to appear in a series of Monogram oaters known as The Rough Riders franchise.  (Jones was one of the many victims—close to 500 in all—who perished in the infamous Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston on November 28, 1942.)  Jones has been described as the middle point between Tom Mix and William S. Hart, and I find myself becoming more and more of a fan with each movie I see him in.  He has a wonderful sense of self-deprecating humor, and makes for a first-rate sagebrush hero without resorting to the moralizing of many of his peers.

TCM ran Hollywood Round-Up as part of a day-long feting of Helen Twelvetrees, who is also one of the movie’s pluses.  The scene where Helen’s Carol Stephens is told by Federal studio boss Lew Wallace (Eddie Kane) that he’s loaning her out to Crown is very well-done (Carol is visibly upset, and Twelvetrees nails it without being mawkish), and though despondent at first, Carol demonstrates she’s a trouper by showing her professionalism and making lemonade out of her situation.  (I’ll take a moment here to remind folks that if you’re interested in learning more about Ms. Twelvetrees you should check out fellow CMBA member Cliff Aliperti’s biography Helen Twelvetrees: Perfect Ingénue—available as an actual book or e-book at an Amazon near you.  Yes, I could use a check this month.)  Twelvetrees also has a solid chemistry with her leading man.

Hollywood Round-Up was comedian Shemp Howard’s first film for Columbia.  (Shemp plays Oscar Bush, the assistant director, and generates much mirth despite Scott Clevenger’s dissenting opinion.)  Howard was so well-received in Round-Up that he appeared in an additional Buck Jones vehicle, Headin’ East (1937) …and that started him on his long association with the studio—appearing in Andy Clyde shorts (often as Andy’s obnoxious brother-in-law) and The Glove Slingers comedies before starring in his own series of two-reelers and then replacing brother Curly in The Three Stooges.  I am not going to lie to you: I DVR’d this film solely on Shemp’s participation, and I’ll freely admit that I’m fond of it because he’s always welcome ‘round Rancho Yesteryear.  But Round-Up turned out to be a pleasant surprise, and it features familiar Columbia players in Kane and Monte Collins (perfect as Withers’ fast-talking agent).

B-Western Wednesdays: Heart of the Rio Grande (1942)

You might recall my mentioning earlier that Rancho Yesteryear was the beneficiary of a Starz/Encore/Movieplex “freeview” over the Thanksgiving holidays, and this allowed me to grab some goodies from both their respective On Demand outlets (for the record, I adore how Movieplex allows their movies to play all the way through—just like those on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™’s On Demand—because I’m kind of anal when it comes to closing credits) and the channels themselves.  I tried my darndest to grab The Lone Star Trail (1943) from Encore Westerns On Demand, but it vanished before my suckass Windstream connection could download it.  (Bill Crider got to see it, and mentioned in a recent comment that he may get around to reviewing it one of these days; I suggest we start picketing his blog immediately until he acquiesces to our demands…though I cannot stress enough the importance of staying on the sidewalk because he has a thing about people in his yard.)

While I was denied a dandy Johnny Mack Brown-Tex Ritter oater, I did grab a couple of Buster Crabbe-Fuzzy St. John PRC B’s and a slew of Republic-Columbia programmers starring “America’s favorite singing cowboy,” Gene Autry hizzownself.  (Including 1940’s Melody Ranch, which was reviewed back on the blog in 2011.)  So, don’t be surprised to see a few of Gene’s moon pitchers turn up in this Wednesday space in the future—including today’s entry, Heart of the Rio Grande (1942).

You’ll find when you watch enough B-Westerns that there’s usually a wealthy bidnessman character out to screw over the townsfolk until the hero steps in to put a smackdown on those shenanigans.  Heart has such a rich character, but he’s surprisingly benign when it comes to making life miserable for the disadvantaged; in this movie, Randolph Lane’s (Pierre Watkin—billed as “Pierre Watkins”) only vice is that he’s been a little delinquent in the parenting department—which is why his daughter Connie (Edith Fellows) is spoiled rotten.  The students at the private school Connie attends will be spending two months at the Smoke River Dude Ranch—accompanied by chaperone Alice Bennett (Fay McKenzie)—and Connie would rather make other plans.  Father Randolph exercises his parental veto and Connie is soon on a train heading West.

The Smoke River Dude Ranch is technically a horse ranch—but mismanagement from ex-foreman Hap Callahan (William Haade) has necessitated that owner “Skipper” Forbes (Sarah Padden) open the place up to tourists to pay the bills.  Hap never stops pissing and moaning about this…though it probably has more to do with the fact that Skipper has hired a new foreman in Gene Autry.  Gene and loyal sidekick “Frog” Millhouse (Smiley Burnette) meet Ms. Bennett and her charges at the depot (Frog immediately falls—literally—for Alice), just in time to see Connie continue on to San Francisco.  Autry and his horse Champion catch up to the Frisco Express, and he pulls her off the train because…damn it, she’s there to have fun.

Connie behaves…how should I put this?  Well, I’ll spell it out in case there are any kids in the room: she’s a proper P-I-L-L.  She steals a truck from the ranch to make another desperate bid for freedom but the vehicle has no brakes, and she ends up crashing it in a ditch.  (She insists on walking all the way back to Smoke River even though Gene offers her the use of Champion.)  Later, she marks up her back with lipstick to look as though she’s being whipped during her stay (she sends the photos to her father, and believe me, they will come back to bite her in the derriere).  When Gene gives Connie a lecture on doing things for others without expecting anything in return, the girl gets the bright idea to tamper with the cinch on Hap’s saddle so he’ll lose a riding contest with Autry.  (Connie apologizes when Hap is seriously hurt, and when Hap draws a gun on Gene during an exchange of fisticuffs, Autry tells him to hit the road.)

Eventually, Connie begins to understand that being a rich bitch will not win friends and influence people (well…maybe not in good ways), and she starts to enjoy herself at Smoke River.  Then her old man turns up, wanting to know why his daughter is being abused (those damn pictures!) …and Gene finds himself having to teach Papa Lane a lesson as well.

If you’ve expressed concern that all these teachable moments Gene must impart adversely affects his duties at the ranch…allow me to assuage your fears.  Gene likes nothing more than being a scold; there’s even a scene where he speechifies to some of the ranch hands (played by the Jimmy Wakely Trio, including Wakely and Johnny “Ten Little Bottles” Bond) that they should be spending their hard-working wages on war bonds instead of liquor and card games…because damn it, there’s a war on.  Gene’s tendency to be a bit bossy is one of the reasons why I prefer Roy Rogers’ movie western output—I’m not saying Roy wasn’t guilty of a little preaching now and then, but he seemed to conceal it better.

That having been said, I got a kick out of Heart of the Rio Grande.  I know, I’m on the record as affirming that my preference for Autry movies are the more adult ones he made at Columbia (with serials veteran John English directing), but Heart is a great little oater, and I think it’s due to the fact that the character played by Edith Fellows (whom you may remember from those Five Little Peppers movies) is more than just a one-dimensional brat.  Fellows really makes Connie unlikable in the early frames of the movie…and yet when she realizes what an unpleasant person she’s been, her conversion to regular gal is quite realistic.  (She and Gene become great pals—he even teaches her some roping tricks!)

I know you’re going to wonder if I’ve developed a fever—but the other kiddie thesp in Heart, Joe Strauch, Jr., also didn’t cause me to retch violently like I usually do (see She Who Shall Not Be Named).  Strauch has some amusing moments as Frog Millhouse’s younger brother Tadpole (that’s a joke, son!—he’s even decked out in the same “Frog” clothing, just a Mini-Me version)—a role he initiated in the Autry oater Under Fiesta Stars (1941) and continued in three additional Autry vehicles after that (Strauch also appeared in Beneath Western Skies [1944] with Smiley and Bob Livingston).  Strauch’s main movie fame was as George “Spanky” McFarland’s double in the Our Gang comedies—he even appears onscreen (as “Tubby”) in the Our Gang short Fightin’ Fools (1941).  When I was watching Heart of the Rio Grande, I heard what I thought was one of the female students refer to Frog as Tadpole’s father and had to run it back to make sure I hadn’t heard incorrectly.  (As it turns out, I did.  Frog is a bachelor, so that family arrangement would have been very interesting.)

Heart of the Rio Grande gets a few extra points for integrating the musical numbers much better than your usual Gene Autry outing; Gene performs Deep in the Heart of Texas (the movie’s original title was to have been Heart of Texas) and one of my favorites, I’ll Wait for You, while the Wakely Trio tackle a Johnny Bond composition in Cimarron.  Even Fellows is allowed a number (I’ve previously joked that she was Columbia’s answer to Deanna Durbin…though this is a Republic release) in Rainbow in the Night.  Directed by longtime film editor William Morgan (who helmed quite a few of Gene’s Republics, including Home in Wyomin’ that same year) and scripted by Lillie Hayward & Winston Miller (from Newlin B. Wildes’ story “Sure, Money Folks, But—“), Heart of the Rio Grande is a lovely little B-oater.  It’s available for purchase (I love how Gene’s westerns have been painstakingly restored) or for rent at your friendly neighborhood ClassicFlix.

B-Western Wednesdays: Johnny Mack Brown Double Feature - Man from Sonora (1951) and Outlaw Gold (1950)

There’s a reason why I tackled two entries for this week’s edition of B-Western Wednesdays.  I put one of Johnny Mack Brown’s Monogram vehicles in the DVD player (Outlaw Gold [1950]) last week and the moment the closing credits rolled, I completely forgot what the damn thing was about.  (This sort of thing doesn’t lend itself to good film reviews, by the way.)  And I felt guilty about this—though in my defense, I didn’t make the doggone movie—because I like generally like JMB, even in his “plump” period (this wasn’t my idea—I read it from a commenter over at the [always reliable] IMDb).  Brown is just a darn likable cowpoke; I’ve reviewed one of his Monogram features here previously and mentioned this anecdote:

…by all accounts from the people with whom he worked, Brown was the epitome of the true Southern gentleman.  He made many films with … Marshall Reed, who once related to a fan at a western film convention that Johnny would always tell his cast at the wrap: “Thanks for letting me make this film with you.”

For the record, Outlaw Gold finds our hero as a U.S. Marshal assigned to investigate a robbery involving government gold from Mexico, with the help of his deputy sidekick Sandy Barker (Milburn Monsante).  In the process of their search, the two men witness Joe Martin, the editor of Latigo City’s newspaper, and his daughter Kathy (Jane Adams) bushwhacked by assailants unknown.  Pretending not to know one another, Brown (as Johnny Mack Brown—the role he was born to play!) and Sandy agree to escort the Martins back to town; Johnny Mack will ride up ahead to interview some local ranchers and deputy Sandy continues on with Kathy and the injured Martin (shot in the arm by the desperadoes).

In Latigo City, Sandy wangles a job as a printer with the Martin’s paper…and Johnny, just arriving, is around long enough to witness Joe’s assassin finish the job with a rifle from an upstairs window.  Johnny soon finds himself accused of the deed!  Not to worry, Mr. Brown is eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, leaving him and Sandy to suspect that the man (George McDormand) who seemed mighty anxious to point fingers in the first place may be involved in some shady chicanery.

I don’t want to point fingers myself…but I suspect the reason why Outlaw Gold dissipates in the memory banks after one viewing is because apart from Myron Healey’s role as an ex-con named Sonny Lang (who’s harboring a grudge against Johnny Mack)—Healey manages to bring a little shading and nuance to what could have been a one-note performance—no one in the cast of Gold is a particular standout, nor is the plot all that memorable (though there is an amusing scene where Sandy produces the fruits of his first printing job—it looks like a ransom note).  The cast of Man from Sonora (1951), on the other hand, has a bit more “oomph” even though, like Gold, the plot of the film is little more than paint-by-numbers.

Sonora puts a twist on the hero’s occupation: Johnny Mack Brown (still playing himself) is a retired lawman who loses his valued horse “Rebel” to a gang of masked hombres who have just held up a stage on its way to Silver Springs.  (One of the men had to shoot his injured horse, and that’s why he “liberated” Johnny’s steed.)  Arriving in town, Brown gets reacquainted with his old pal Frank Casey (Lyle Talbot), who’s the law in Silver Springs, and Johnny tells the sheriff about the three men who put the snatch on Rebel.  Johnny’s got a hunch that one of the outlaws, Duke Mantel (Lee Roberts), is throwing a few back in the saloon, because of his loud, distinctive laugh (the masked man who swiped Johnny’s horse had a similar guffaw).  When Johnny enters the watering hole as the guest of Ed Hooper (House Peters, Jr.), Duke and his pal Pete (John Merton) start a little trouble…and Frank is forced to lock up both Duke and Johnny.

Hooper bails Duke out—Duke works for him as one of his “peelers”—and along with banker Fred Allison (Sam Flint), informs lawman Casey that his pal Johnny must vamoose out of Silver Springs; it’s all politics, you understand—Casey’s hands are tied in the matter.  This will prove most beneficial for Johnny Mack Brown; it will give him the opportunity to drop by Hooper’s spread and look for the missing Rebel.

There are a good number of serials/B-Western veterans in Man from Sonora: I always smile whenever I see John Merton onscreen (I read somewhere that whenever an oater or chapter play was being cast they took special pains to make sure Merton was on the list because he had several mouths to feed), and he’s in his element here as one of Peters’ henchmen.  Peters’ villain is a real piece of work, cold-bloodedly gunning down John and serial hero Dennis Moore (as a bad guy!) when things start to close in on him.  Phyllis “Gypsy” Coates, who also appeared in Oklahoma Justice (1951), is the banker’s daughter and kind of sweet on Johnny (there is no kiss at the fadeout, however, because Johnny has no use for wimmin folk despite always being courtly in their presence) …though as in Justice, Coates has very little to do.  Western veteran Pierce Lyden appears briefly as a harness salesman who draws his rations early (allowing Dennis Moore to impersonate him).

Both Outlaw Gold and Man from Sonora are present and accounted for on the Warner Archive MOD set Monogram Cowboy Collection Volume 1, which is also available for rent from the good people at ClassicFlix.  This past weekend, Rancho Yesteryear was the beneficiary of a Starz/Encore/Movieplex “freeview”—and I had hoped to snag a download of The Lone Star Trail (1943), a Johnny Mack-Tex Ritter Universal B-oater that I watched on Encore Westerns back in what I jokingly call my “carefree bachelor days” (before the ‘rents and I decided to share living space).  But I wasn’t able to get it off the On Demand in time.  Bummer.the doggone thing--because   And I felt guilty about this--though  credits rolled, I completely forgot what the damn thin