"The Old West" offers a few curious elements for Gene Autry fans; for one, it looks like he learned a few judo throws for that stable fight against the bad guys. The other was seeing Dick Jones in the role of a villain, something I hadn't seen before. Jones doesn't really have the face for a villain, nor the voice or body language to be a nasty henchman. As a pair, Jones and House Peters Jr. had me going WHAT!?!? when they agreed to come back to Saddle Rock after the mob that wants to hang them cools down. And they came back!!!
The story is told in somewhat of a flashback style, though it needn't have since the action looks like it all might have happened just the day before. It's always curious to me why these old Westerns from the 1930's and '40's often had a father of a youngster who looked more like they should have been the grandfather. In fact, stage driver Jeff Blecker looked like he could have been Gene's father, even though the actor playing his character, Louis Jean Heydt, was only two years older than Autry.
The story itself contains a fairly common plot element, with bad guy town boss Doc Lockwood (Lyle Talbot) challenging Gene for the right to supply horses to the Southwestern Stage Lines. Doc feels his ranch raised horses are superior to Gene's trained wild mustangs, but it turns out there will be a ringer in the outcome. Gene's pal Pat Buttram is on hand as Panhandle Gibbs, and when the two main opponents fall out of the race with complications, (read that as their wagons got wrecked), Panhandle comes up the winner by default.
Even as a kid, I could never understand why as the noose starts to tighten for the film's main heavy, he winds up shooting the guy who starts to spill the beans, and with a room full of witnesses including the story's hero. That's exactly what happens here, with Doc Lockwood plugging his boy Pinto (Dick Jones), who's behind bars! How does he figure he'll get away with that one?
I guess that's why you have to take a lot of these old oaters with a shaker full of salt, and focus on the entertainment value, not the credibility of the story. A couple of years later in 1953, Republic Pictures put out a film starring Rex Allen in a picture that also had a competition at it's center to decide on a winner for a government mail contract. It's called "Iron Mountain Trail" and would be of interest to anyone who enjoyed this picture.
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