6/10
"Oh I hope they don't shoot the cute one".
26 February 2011
Warning: Spoilers
Very odd, it seems like every reviewer on this board so far saw a different version of the film. My copy stated the picture in color at sixty seven minutes, but it was somewhat shorter and in black and white. The only song, if you can call it that, was a brief one liner with engineer Casey (Joseph Crehan) joining Roy and The Pioneers 'for old times sake'.

Speaking of Casey, watch the scene closely where one of the bad guys shoots him while running the train. Did that bullet do a U-turn in mid air? Another example of the impossible logistics these old time Westerns often relied on. But I'm not complaining.

Once the story gets underway, State Police captain Cookie Bullfincher swears in Roy as a deputy to solve a couple of crimes involving Roy's stolen cattle and a missing trust fund due Joan Andrews (Adele Mara), who's father was murdered twenty years earlier.

You know what's spooky? I watched another flick just last night where a woman turning twenty one the very next day arrives on the scene to claim her inheritance. Her father also died in a mine cave-in twenty years ago. The picture was "Topper Returns" from 1941. What are the odds?

Anyway, back to Nevada. Except for the early scene where Joan and her friend Toni Borden (Marie Harmon) take the stowaway cowboys on a joyride through the desert, the picture is played fairly straight with Andy Devine's character. He often plays a comedic sidekick to Roy, but here he was a pretty no-nonsense lawman. Still, when Cookie and Roy emerge from their jostling camper ride, they both have to clean up their flour-do.

What's never in question with one of Roy's pictures, the bad guys lose in the end. But you know, I have to question Roy's common sense sometimes, like boarding Farrell's (Grant Withers) down hill, runaway cattle truck and duking it out with him with nothing but mountain on one side and air on the other. Not the kind of chance I'd bet the ranch on, even if I were King of the Cowboys.

Say, does anyone know what happened to Toni?
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