L'Héritage du chercheur d'or

This has always stood out from the (star) pack for me, almost wholly because of the scenery and the sympathetic photography. The screenplay storyboard is plain to read as you're watching, stilted dialogue ending abruptly at scene ends, trip wires pulling down horses galore, a rope yanking a shot baddie offa his horse, reflecting mirrors directing light at the subjects etc.

The usual Golden Age convention leftovers from Edwardian times are also apparent - suspicion of murder falling naturally upon the head of a person of mixed parentage, the handy ethnic minority (French) ready to be the bad guys to a man, beautiful heiresses innocent and untarnished by money etc. Plenty of chasing about, silent fight scenes, an undeveloped love affair, hair-raising stunts with various stuntmen and stunthorses and a confusing climax.

OK - but I still love and recommend this one!

Within the first 10 minutes of The Trail Beyond, John Wayne gets a chore from a friend to locate the friend's friend and his daughter in the Canadian woods, meets another friend Noah Beery, Jr. from college, gets innocently involved in a murder and is fleeing up to Canada with Beery.

There's almost as much canoe paddling as horseback riding in The Trail Beyond for our intrepid heroes. They've got to keep on the move from the Mounties who are looking to extradite both of them to America and Wayne's still got his mission on his mind.

And if that ain't enough they get involved in a feud between the Hudson Bay Company local trading post owner, Noah Beery Sr. and some French Meti trappers. They're the bad guys and as another reviewer remarked their accents are pretty bad. Like Pepe Le Pew.

Other than Island in the Sky, I believe this might be the only John Wayne film with a Canadian location. Even though they got no farther to Canada than the Sierras in California.

What this film does give, is an opportunity to see both Noah Beerys, senior and junior in the same film. I saw that they have about seven screen credits jointly and this I believe is the only one available on VHS and DVD. Furthermore for once the senior Beery is not playing a bad guy.

So while this one won't even make the top Fifty of John Wayne's films for all those reasons it might be worth a look.

For me, the movie was (a) poor but (b) fun.

"Poor" because the directing was lame, the dialogue was hard not to chuckle at, the fight-scenes were definitely proto, and the plot meandering.

But still it was "fun" because here was young John Wayne giving it his all, jumping off cliffs, diving into every body of water he could find, and fighting Bad French Guys. And it's fun to see such a young, naive movie, so endearingly but sincerely lame, trying hard to do nothing but entertain. And for me, a lifelong lover of Mammoth Lakes, it was fun to see Crystal Crag, and a shot down at Twin Lakes from below Lake Mamie described as "a bend in the river."

I just wish it had been color!

John Wayne heads to Canada to find the niece of his father's best friend and bring her home to him. On the train north he meets an old college buddy (Noah Beery, Jr.) who gets into trouble, so the two wind up leaping from a speeding train. This is in the first four minutes! Later, they find the girl but get mixed up with mounties, villains with bad French accents, and a fight over a goldmine.

Of all the cheapie westerns John Wayne made early in his career, this is one of the best I've seen. The stunts, by the great Yakima Canutt and Eddie Parker, are outstanding. Cool to see Noah Beery Sr. and Jr. in the same movie together. The Mammoth Lakes area location shooting is a HUGE plus. They usually shot these cheapies in the same old bland ordinary places. The change of scenery makes a world of difference. The Archie Stout photography helps a lot, too. It's a simple but entertaining oater. At just under an hour, I see no reason you shouldn't check it out.

Stuntman Yakima Canutt, in a 1978 interview,had no problem recalling 1934's "The Trail Beyond." He recalls it as... "the one where John, Eddie Parker(stuntman) and I stayed wet more than we were dry" and said he told producer Paul Malvern to count him out of any more films where people spend most of the time paddling canoes up and down a river, and just call Buster Crabbe instead.

"The Trail Beyond" was easily the most water-logged Wayne film until he lost encounters with an octopus/octopii in "Reap the Wild Wind" and the later "Wake of the Red Witch." Within "The Trail Beyond", Canutt, Parker or Wayne(and sometimes all three because of close-ups)leap off a train into a lake;paddles up the river in a canoe; leaps off a bluff and swims to a canoe; paddles up the river a second time and jumps in the water to swim back and upset LaRocque's canoe; jumps in the water from a bank to prevent a canoe from going over the falls and, in general, is wet more often than dry.

In the department of Be Careful What You Wish For, an IMDb commentator writes an informed and loving piece about the California locale of this movie, and then wishes it had just been shot in color. One viewing of the colorized video version may have left him him thinking his beloved countryside looked very well and better in Archie Stout's b&w original photography.

A distraction may have been the reward poster on John Wayne, as "Gat Ganns" from his earlier "West of the Divide" that shows up on the wall of Beery's "Waninosh House" trading post (which also shows up in "The Man from Utah"), but a much larger distraction was Robert Frazer's and Earl Dwire's attempts at French accents, or whatever accent they tried to employ.

And the reward posters aren't a "goof." Monogram and resident-art director E. R. Hickson didn't go in much for redecorating standing sets. Those posters showed up for years in later Monogram westerns post 1937.