Prairie Badmen

Medicine show owner Ed Cassidy, daughter Patricia Knox, son John L. Buster, and Al St. John as an Indian meet up with Buster Crabbe. After about twenty minutes of fooling around in this 55-minute B western, they meet up with a plot. Five years earlier, Cassidy had gotten a map leading to four bars of gold from a dying man. He hasn't done anything about it -- I imagine he was waiting for the cameras to roll -- and now there are bad men after the map and bullion.

I liked it. Almost every B western has very few actual plot points, and almost all of them are the same ones, so two reels of watching St. John fall out of a hammock and Buster sing a song is a pleasant change. Director Sam Newfield simply has cameraman Robert E. Cline record the proceedings, while preparing for some pretty good lighting in the scene where the bad guys are beating up Buster. St. John does a 108 in the fight scenes, and one of the baddies does an actual neck kip.