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Riding through the desert, a song on his lips (yes, he is a
singing cowboy in this one), John Wayne finds a sheriff shot in the back
- but not killed, & he learns of some great injustice (off-screen
though, the audience just has to guess). Later, he sees Cecilia Parker
(masked though) holding up a stagecoach & helps her escape, for,
according to her, she just steals her own property before anyone else
can ... a claim which proves to be true when Wayne overhears a
conversation between the stagecoach drivers and some crooks. Soon Wayne
gets the whole picture, about greedy landgrabber Kincaid (Forrest
Taylor), who owns the only dam of the valley, about ranchers who are
about to be bought out of their own country for ridiculous prices, &
about already 2 sheriffs having disappeared in the desert (supposedly
killed). Of course. Wayne stands on the side of the honest ranchers,
helping to get them water from Gabby Hayes' (as Cecilia Parker's father)
well - the only source of water besides Kincaid's dam, but suddenly,
when the price is right, he seems to change sides & now talks
Kincaid into blowing up Gabby's well - with disastrous results for
Kincaid, actually, for the water from the blown up well fills a creek
running through the whole valley with water but drying out Kincaid's
dam. After a short chase, Kuincaid ends his life when jumping into the
creek on horseback.
This was the first of 16 consecutive Westerns Wayne did for Monogram,
all of them fast paced actioners, with great outdoor-scenery (filmed by
Archis Stout) & great stunts (done by Yakima Canutt) & many of
them featuring more or less the same supporting players. This one
though, tries to make Wayne one of the (then pretty popular) singing
cowboys - though his singing voice wasn't even his own voice. In the
first scene already, Wayne seems pretty uncomfortable with the singing
& playing guitar on horseback, his voice & his lips being
terribly (& I mean terribly) out of synch, while he's holding
the guitar as if he has never seen one before. In a later scene,
director Bradbury would put Wayne's singing to better use, when he, at a
duel, sings a sombre tune before shooting his opponent Earl Dwire's both
wrists - a scene that's genuinely creepy.
Al St.John by the way, who plays a comical henchman here, was a
former Keystone Cop & would later sport a beard to become Fuzzy, the
comic sidekick of B-Western greats such as Bob Livingston, Bob Steele,
Buster Crabbe & Lash La Rue. Incidently, St.John would also play
Stoney Brooks of the 3 Mesquiteers
in an early adaptation of
William Colt McDonald's cowboy trio in Normandy's
The Law of 45's (though he's called Stoney Martin in this one) of 1935,
a role that Wayne would later play in 8 features of Republic's 3
Mesquiteers-series from 1938 to '39.
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