Westwärts!

An American Western; A story about a boy who saw his parents murdered and his younger brother kidnapped by a gang of cattle thieves and bandits. Years later, after forming a vigilante group, he sets out to find his long-lost brother. This is a low-budget B-movie with low production values that show. It has a simple, straightforward, and serviceable plot, but it keeps up the tension on a main note of mystery. John Wayne plays the grown-up crusader and leader of cowboys with a penchant for a singalong. The editing was clumsy, which made the verbal exchanges in many of the scenes awkward, but it is directed competently otherwise, and it has some good location photography.

This wonderful example of the early B western is tarnished by some pitiable horse falls that would not be tolerated in today's films. Two scenes in particular show the poor animals somersaulting and going down in a horrendous heap, sometimes on top of one another. Even knowing that the movie is over 70 years old; the sight of the poor animals in such distress still made me heart sick. The Running W appears to have been used liberally in this picture, which is otherwise well acted and produced. John Wayne gives an excellent performance along with a strong supporting cast, while the Owens Valley and Alabama Hills outside Lone Pine provide a realistic backdrop to the story.

It is not a special film, but it is amusing and, considering a so early Western, it is perhaps the best movie of this genre until the end of the 30's (if you do not include among Westerns Chaplin's Gold Rush and The Pilgrim and Harrol Lloyd's An Eastern Westerner). There are good Wersterns in the 40's (The ox-bow incident and The red river), but not in the 30's (personally, I do not like Stagecoach, and perhaps only The Plainsman is in the same level among the Westerns I have watched from the same decade). An entertaining Western with a coherent story and with no apology to murdering "those evil savages" was not something common in cinema those days. So, there is a great merit here.

Separated during an attack on their family's covered wagon, one boy is taken and raised by the murderous bandits, while the other becomes a man (John Wayne) and leads a group of vigilantes against the outlaws and his own brother.

In 1935, the Lone Star unit was sold by Monogram to the fledgling Republic Pictures, who gave producer Paul Malvern a bigger budget to work with and it really shows.

While this has basically the same formula as Wayne's earlier work for Lone Star, the production values are far greater, with some really nice photography, excellent locations, and a nice little stunt-filled finale. It's always good to see Glenn Strange play a good guy too.

Thrown in are some decent songs, including another odd lip-sync performance from the Duke. Also pretty goofy is the dedication at the beginning of the movie, a salute to the vigilantes of the old west!

Newborn Republic Pictures utilizes the solid directoral ability of Robert Bradbury, and the presence of John Wayne along with Yakima Canutt and his troupe of stuntriders to produce this strongly scripted film of 1860s vigilante efforts to rid the Far West of outlaw bands that were involved in widespread robbery and cattle rustling. Bradbury, whose skill with Westerns dates back to the early silent period, directs and edits with a solid awareness of suspense, building his typically short scenes with sparse and, at times, stilted dialogue and an eye for proper cast placement which makes excellent use of defined personalities such as Wayne, Frank McGlynn Jr., and Glenn Strange, and gives particular value to the hard-riding stunt performers, who are splendid throughout this well-made (and musical) adventure filmed in California's Owens Valley, at the base of the Sierra Nevada.