The Dawn Rider

Another interminable B-western starring John Wayne, from Monogram/Lone Star Productions and director Robert Bradbury. Wayne plays John Mason, a nice guy who's returned to his hometown to visit his dad just in time to see the old man get shot down during a robbery by masked bandits. Mason teams up with local tough guy Ben (Reed Howes) to find the bad guys, but things sour when they both fall for the same gal (Marion Burns). Also featuring Dennis Moore, Yakima Canutt, Earl Dwire, Joseph DeGrasse, and Nelson McDowell.

This is so routine as to become tedious, with the same badly-choreographed fight scenes and lengthy horse chases that occur in all of these Lone Star films. It was different seeing Wayne teamed with an equal instead of the usual Gabby Hayes type. This movie also suffers from having another terrible electronic keyboard score added to it sometime during the 1980's for a video release. Added to ostensibly endear it to younger viewers used to having a score throughout every movie, it really only serves to make a bad movie worse.

This is one of John Wayne's very early B-Westerns (1935), before he became a big "A-movie" star. The plot, which involves the Duke's father being murdered, and Wayne wounded, by robbers, is fairly standard by B-Western standards, but entertaining enough. The old black-and-white film was colorized in recent times, and the colorization was well done.

The Duke has not yet adopted his Harry Carey-taught style of talking, with occasional pauses in the middle of sentences, so he sounds a little different than the later John Wayne. The fight scenes are not done as well as they were in, let's say, Gene Autry's first starring film, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," released about three months later.

But the colorizers did study the script and insert ironic "plays on words" in a couple of scenes. When Wayne is told by a cowboy he's having problems with that there's "no need for lavender cowboys" or words to that effect, he's wearing a purple shirt. Later, when the same cowboy asks the Duke if he wants to continue a fight they were having, and Wayne says, "No," the other guy says, "Why? You yellow?" Yes, you guessed it, dear readers --in that scene, the Duke is wearing a yellow shirt.

And in an early scene where Wayne's opponent has whipped another cowboy, and begins firing his six-shooter at the man's feet to make him "dance," I thought of a scene in "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" where one of Autry's buddies gets the drop on three bad guys and tells them to "dance." One says, "Aww, we can't dance!" And the guy with the gun replies, "Anyone can dance if they're properly persuaded!" The bad guys begin cutting a rug immediately.

I wondered, "Did the director of the Autry movie pick up and use those two situations?" Because at one point in the Autry movie, a "bad guy" tells a singing cowboy Gene, "We don't need no lavender cowboys!"

Overall, "The Dawn Rider" is a good B-Western -- but "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" has better acting, and some great songs.

When Wayne is shot and his father murdered by armed robbers, he's nursed back to health by his friend's intended fiancé, leading to the inevitable love-triangle. Complicating things further is the fact that the killer is the girl's brother.

A decent entry in the series of Saturday matinée B-westerns that The Duke made as a contract star for Lone Star/ Monogram Pictures in the thirties, The Dawn Rider has several good action sequences and some okay melodrama.

The climactic showdown includes a well staged fistfight between John Wayne and chief heavy Yakima Canutt.

"The Dawn Rider" is one of the John Wayne films of his early Western period. That covers the early 1930s to 1939. From his start in silent films in 1926 to sound pictures, almost all of Wayne's roles were uncredited. And, even when talkies took over he still had some uncredited and minor roles. His first leading role was a Western in 1930, "The Big Trail." He got some minor roles in a variety of films, and his first break of sorts came when he began to get the leads in Westerns made by poverty row studios. Leon Schlesinger Studios and Paul Malvern Productions were the earliest, and by the time he became the leading Western star for Republic, he was well known and liked among Western film fans. Of course, his big break was the 1939 feature film, "Stagecoach," in which he had a supporting role but with a sizable cast of established and known actors of the day.

Well, in this film, Wayne is John Mason who goes on the hunt for the man who kills his father. Revenge and romance mix in "The Dawn Rider," when Alice Gordon nurses him back to health, and he falls for her but then finds out the man he is after is her brother, Rudd Gordon.

A plus in this and many of the Westerns made during the heyday of Western movies (1930s to the 1960s), is seeing the great stunt work of Yakima Canutt. Here he plays the Saloon Owner who's also in league with Mason's nemesis. As fits the trend with the poverty row studios, some of the leads, including leading ladies, don't have very long careers in film. So it was with Marion Burns who plays Alice. She made only a dozen films before her career ended in 1945. She did have three later TV series appearances.

There's a good amount of gun-slinging and fisticuffs, as well as horse riding in this film - all standard fare and traits of these early Westerns. But it's definitely a B Western all around.

When John Mason's father is killed, John is wounded. Attracted to his nurse Alice, a conflict arises between him and his friend Ben who plans to marry Alice. John later finds the killer of his father but goes to face him not knowing Ben has removed the bullets from his gun.

The dawn rider has a little more drama that the usual Wayne's Lone star westerns and features a good performance from Wayne - of course there's the killer stunts. Wagon going down an incline while Wayne is on the team of horses going in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, the bits in between the gunsmoke and hove clattering can be tedious with the drama and conflict over a woman. But still passable with some good acting.