The Lucky Texan (Wayne) [DVD] [1934]

This early John Wayne western is my favorite, but this transfer is squashed down and cannot be altered. If you get it to a form where the characters are not compressed, then the sides of the frame are cut off. Get any other version but not this one. James Bryant Wiser.

Here's your chance to see John Wayne when he was a B movie maker, churning out 5 to 10 forgettable films a year with titles like "Born Reckless" (1930), "Arizona" (1931), "Texas Cyclone" (1932), etc. Then in 1939 he made "Stagecoach" with John Ford, and his new career as a major star began. Stagecoach earned 5 Oscars including Best Picture. Wayne followed up with "Dark Command" (1940) directed by Raoul Walsh, and then a series of war movies (e.g., "Flying Tigers" in 1942, "The Fighting Seabees" in 1944, "Back to Bataan" and "They Were Expendable" in 1945) and his classic westerns including "3 Godfathers" (1948), "Fort Apache" (1948), "Red River" (1948), "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949, "Rio Bravo" (1959), and "The Alamo" (1960) . Wayne was nominated for Best Actor for "Sands of Iwo Jima" (1949) and he would finally earn an Oscar for "True Grit" (1969).

This was the 3rd of 16 films Wayne made with Monogram/Lone Star Pictures. Monogram churned out films by the month, with little attention to detail or character development. Wayne said - "For any actor trying to get on in the business, working at Monogram was not a good career move. Most of the contract players there may have had regular work, but they generally didn't move up from there into the major studios - they went down and that's the direction I thought I was headed."

In 1934 alone Wayne made 9 films, all of them westerns. All but one included George "Gabby" Hayes" who was Wayne's sidekick in dozens of films from 1933 ("Riders of Destiny") to 1935 ("Rainbow Valley") when Hayes moved on to partner with Hopalong Cassidy and later with Roy Rogers and then Gene Autry. Hayes (1885-1969) made nearly 200 films between 1929 and 1950.

In this film, Hayes and Wayne are partners in a blacksmith shop and find a gold mine. And you get a chance to see Gabby act it up as a woman!

The villain of the piece is Wayne's long time mentor, stunt man, double, and good friend, Yakima Canutt (1895-1986). They first worked together on "The Shadow of the Eagle" (1932) and made dozens of films together. As Canutt became more hobbled from injuries, he turned to directing and had a successful career as a second unit director handling action scenes. Wayne gave him his first chance in "Dark Command" (1940). He went on to work on films such as "Ivanhoe", "Spartacus" "El Cid" and "Ben Hur".

BTW - this is a rare chance to see a stunt that doesn't work when Canutt (as Wayne) falls during a stunt.

Earl Dwire (1883-1940) appears but doesn't play a bad guy in this film as he did in many of the Wayne Lone Star films. Dwire ultimately made more than 150 films between 1921 and 1940.

Wayne's love interest is played by Barbara Sheldon (1912-2007) who made only 4 films of which this was the last.

The film was directed by Robert Bradbury (1886-1949), who was the father of another 30s western star, Bob Steele (1907-1988), who was a good friend of Wayne from their USC days (Wayne and Steel appeared in 6 films together between 1953 and 1970). Bradbury's other son, Bob's twin, dubbed the songs Wayne sung in the Monogram films (and he used the money he made to pay for medical school). Bradbury made more than 100 films between and 1918 and 1941.

FWIW - Bradbury's 1926 silent film "Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo" was Wayne's inspiration for his own 1960 Alamo film which he directed and in which he starred.

1934 was an OK year for films. The top box office slots went to "Viva Villa", "Cleopatra" and "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" and "It Happened One Night" was the big Oscar winner. That year "The Thin Man" series began, Karloff and Lugosi appeared in "The Black Cat", Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced in "The Gay Divorcee", Laurel and Hardy laughed it up in "Babes in Toyland", and Howard Hawks' "Twentieth Century" came out. There were no real major league westerns apart from the oat burners produced by Lone Star, but westerns were popular in serials, such as "The Red Rider" starring Buck Jones and "The Law of the Wild" starring Rin Tin Tin.

There's not much to see here except for historians of the western film and for people curious enough to wonder how "Gabby" Hayes looked without a beard and in a dress. Of course, stunts by Canutt in his young days are always good to see, and personally I never get tired of the young John Wayne.

The Lucky Texan (Robert N. Bradbury, 1934)

Seeing pre-Stagecoach John Wayne films is pretty rare these days. Thankfully, we have an independent TV station near me that's obsessed with all things Genre Western, and they've gotten their hands on a few scratchy old Lone Star reels featuring the pre-Duke Duke. This is the first one I managed to catch, a rather odd little comedy that defies description. Wayne plays Jerry Mason, a cowboy and co-owner of a blacksmith shop. His partner, Jake Benson (Gabby Hayes), discovers gold on the land, and Jerry and Jake start taking their haul to the local assay office. The guys who run the assay (Lloyd Whitlock and the ever-present Yakima Canutt) office realize our heroes are onto something good, and come up with a scheme to swindle Benson out of the land and frame Mason.

While The Lucky Texan uses all the trappings one is used to finding in the typical western (there are quite a few scenes that seem to exist for no reason other than to watch Wayne mount a running horse), it's not all that often you're going to find Gabby Hayes in drag. This one's not afraid to bend the mold a bit, though it never goes as far as breaking it. While it's in desperate need of restoration, at least given the print I saw, it's still quite enjoyable if you're into that sort of thing. ***