Riders of the Sage

Bob Steele is one of my favorite "B" heroes, but this farrago (there's no way you could call it a motion picture) ranks as my number one candidate for Worst Western of All Time. The editing, both visual and sound, is totally inept, the script amateurish, the direction abysmal. No wonder both Carleton Young and Jimmy Aubrey chose to hide their contributions under pseudonyms. Admittedly, hero Bob Steele does his best, but his is a hopeless struggle against overwhelming Poverty Row odds in the rags and tatters of director/producer Harry S. Webb's z-grade "presentation". The heroine, Claire Rochelle, is really hard done by. Not only does her role make little sense, but she is unflatteringly costumed and photographed in this tired, juvenile and oddly fragmented story which proceeds at a snail's pace to its inevitable conclusion via an inept series of jerks and jumps, which are themselves interrupted by unexpected full-screen inter-titles.

"Riders of the Range" is a terrible B-western, and it's a shame as I usually love Bob Steele films and have watched most of his films. But I could not get past the sheer incompetence of the production-- it is third-rate throughout and looks like a movie made by complete amateurs. For example, when the film begins you see a lot of random stock footage accompanied by music that doesn't even come close to fitting the action. Then, out of the blue, you're treated to "Swannee River" with its racist lyrics as a prologue appears on the screen. While I don't particularly care for this sort of exposition explaining the film, this movie really cocked it up, as throughout the movie it was interrupted by these textual explanations as to what was happening, who was involved and the like. It was almost like seeing intertitle cards on an old silent film! The bottom line is that I really wonder if the studio (if you could call it that) just took footage from various Steele films and spliced them together--along with the explanatory text. It's a dull and inept film, full of scenes that might just have been made up of retakes and scrapped footage.