West of Cimarron

An anemic entry in the Skeeters series. Sure, there's lots of hard riding and chases. Even big chases with lots of horsemen. And a big explosion with a cool runaway wagon stunt. But it's still spiritless and by the numbers. It's the 41st of 51 oaters in the Republic series and the Mesquiteers were running out of steam. Some of that may be credited to Lester Orlebeck, a prodigious film editor but only occasional director at Republic.

Tom Tyler delivers the most joy in this outing, derived from seeing him do the majority of his own stunts, with several exceptions captured in wide shots and stunts obviously too dangerous to risk putting one of the stars out of commission.

It is also a pleasure to watch the horsemanship of Tyler and Bob Steele, who, by this point, had been in the saddle since silent films.

But the script is old stuff, three Civil War veterans coming home to Texas. (The Cimarron in the title is never mentioned in the dialogue.) The trio finds unscrupulous carpetbaggers are using bloated taxes to bleed locals dry. But holes abound, especially when people do something that makes no sense, only to be explained away with a quick line of dialogue.

An interesting angle never explored is that Stony Brooke fought for the north while Tucson Smith and Lullaby Joslin were confederates. Yes, this is a B-western concentrating on action, not characterization, but it missed an opportunity to highlight the bond and camaraderie that was a Mesquiteer trademark.

The Mesquiteers had been hard riding for six years by the time of West of Cimarron and had undergone a lot of cast changes. In the next year, 1942, the trio would experience another cast switch. Rufe Davis would leave. He said he could never shake off the shadow of Max Terhune. Davis said he was always being asked by regional distributors why he didn't have his dummy. Terhune was a ventriloquist and his doll Elmer was featured in all the early films. Davis was replaced by Jimmie Dodd. The next year, 1943, Republic pulled the plug on the series and The Three Mesquiteers rode into the sunset. Forever.