William Colt McDonald's western novels tracked all the way back to 1929. By far his most famous creations were the Three Mesquiteers, three cowpokes who righted wrongs in the Wild West. Basically it was the Three Musketeers on horseback, although technically there were four Musketeers in Alexander Dumas' novels. Hollywood wasted very little time in adapting his 1934 novels Powdersmoke Range & Law of the Forty-Fives into major motion pictures, with Harry Carey Sr. as 'Tuscon' Smith.
These first Mesquiteers films arrived in 1935, the same year Republic Pictures was born from a merger of Consolidated Film Laboratories, Monogram Pictures, Mascot Pictures and other odds and ends. It should come as no surprise that John Wayne had worked at Monogram and Mascot in the 30's. One of Republic's money-making ideas was to launch a western series based on McDonald's Three Mesquiteers characters.
Ironically the Duke was on his last days as a B-Western actor when he took the role of Stoney Brooke, alongside Ray 'Crash' Corrigan as Tuscon Smith & Max Terhune as Lullaby Joslin and his dummy Elmer. I remember Corrigan as the dashing Navy man from the Republic serial "Undersea Kingdom"; I watched that as a kid in the third grade--in re-runs--on TV! Nope, no way was I young enough to have seen those in theaters! Thanks to this, 'The Purple Monster Strikes!', 'Captain America' and others, I grew to love them old-time serials from a young age.
But I'm forgetting the Duke. Between 1936's The Three Mesquiteers to 1943's Riders of the Rio Grande, Republic released 51 pictures in the series, films usually under an hour long which mixed modern settings and traditional cowboy iconography such as cattle drives, gold strikes and horseback rides. Nine teams of actors filled the three main roles over the years. Since it was the 1930's, bankers & lawyers usually stood in for the villians. As Stoney Brooke, Duke had a woman in every ranch.
Duke's first Mesquiteer outing was 1938's Pales of the Saddle, which opens, oddly enough on a World War One battlefield. The plot involves foreign agents trying to smuggle chemical agent monium to Mexico for use in making poison gas. Stoney stumbles into the murder of a government agent at his hotel, and finds himself accused of the murder by the dead man's partner Ann (Doreen McKay).
They say Duke was a natural actor and you can see it written all over his face: "Christ, not another movie where I'm the guy falsely accused of a murder I didn't commit an' someone else has to save my bacon!" It's actually not the first time this has happened in his B-westerns. This time it's his pal Lullaby posing as the sheriff who sneaks him out of the hotel.
Ann forces Stoney (Duke) to go undercover in a dark jacket and three-day-old beard, which kind of suits him. Be on the alert for the cliche spy with the narrow German face and thick eyeglasses. By the time Ann brings back the 81st Cavalry, the Mesquiteers pretty much had things wrapped up.
The next film, Overland Stage Raiders (also from 1938) involves bandits holding up gold shipments until our heroes decide to ship the gold out by airplane. When the plane goes missing, it's up to the Mesquiteers to track it down. This was a curious creature involving gangsters, posses, buses, train-robbers, and another good-lookin' dame in Louis Brooks--yeh, the famous silent film starlet in her final picture. She'd traded in her page-boy haircut for shoulder length style, and she's still a knock-out.
This was basically a cookie-cutter series with recyclable plots, backdrops and cardboard characters, which nonetheless made for an exciting ride. In all fairness, these films were very popular in their day, serving as a considerable career boost thanks to the great exposure on the marquee. Duke starred in eight of these films between 1938 to '39, and after this he never had to work in a B-western again.
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=94354367336495840#editor/target=post;postID=2320453163811859533;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=2;src=postname
https://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-robbins/range-feud-1931/201884166534528
No comments:
Post a Comment