À l'ouest des montagnes

This was the fourth of the sixteen Wayne Lone Star series. I must respectfully disagree with those on IMDb who rate it highly. I thought it was one of the worse in the series. It has all the bad elements of the series, bad acting, convoluted and dull plot,anachronisms (telephones, automobiles and women in 1930's clothes). Only the stunt work is excellent, providing the five or six interesting moments.

At one point, Wayne turns to the bad guy and says that he's acting like a character out of a dime novel. He's exactly right. The bad guy and the story are stereotypes even for 1933.

The series seems to move between films that basically follow straight stereotypical Western stories and films that provide funny and clever twists on the stereotypical stories. This one is played straight and thus only has interest for cinema or Western historians. The other type ("Riders of Destiny" and "the Star Packer," for example) are still quite entertaining 75 years later.

West of the Divide finds the Duke as a man searching for his younger brother and at the same time the people who kidnapped him and murdered their father.

The film opens with a piece of good luck coming their way in the person of the dying gunman Gatt Ganns who's been hired by Lloyd Whitlock to kill rancher Lafe McKee. Of course Whitlock is once again a villain in the Snidely Whiplash tradition who not only wants the ranch, but also has evil designs on McKee's daughter Virginia Brown Faire.

In reviewing B westerns, sometimes I have a tendency to reach back to those 19th century morality plays so popular in that era. Whitlock in fact even laughs like a villain in one of those plays. For reference you should see the Irene Dunne-Allan Jones version of Showboat to see just the kind of drama they used to put on then. It survived in the B western, John Wayne's as well as other's.

Wayne of course by the end solves all the problems concerned and the villain gets his just desserts. We can't say how though.

The Duke pretends to be the recently deceased Mr. Ganns to get the goods on the bad guys along with sidekick Gabby Hayes. He discovers a young kid being raised by one of the outlaws. Interesting in this B western set firmly in the 19th century morality play tradition, we also have a topic so very gingerly touched on as child abuse. A rather adult theme for a western or any kind of picture at that time.

Wayne was just beginning his stay at Monogram Pictures Lone Star westerns, this was his third. Monogram had a stock company to rival the much better one of John Ford. Note how for the next three or four years, the casts are just about the same in every Wayne western at that studio. It gets hard to keep these in chronological order, I wouldn't be surprised if a few of these weren't shot simultaneously.

The best you can say about the Monogram films is that they kept John Wayne employed, not something easily said during the Depression. And they beat those serials he did for Mascot. West of the Divide will never be on any John Wayne fans top 10 list.

Frequently used story gets a good presentation here in "West of the Divide," and the excellent cast helps ensure high quality.

Young John Wayne and grizzled George Hayes start with what I learned in college theater-history classes was called a "feather-duster" scene, where characters -- such as a maid, with a feather-duster -- tell the background of the story, today called "the back story."

It's kinda corny, but isn't too damaging.

Probably even in 1934 what was about to happen was predictable, but, before that predictable ending, enough happens in between it should hold the viewer's interest. It held mine.

When the hero meets the leading lady, there is no poor-writing instant romance. In fact, there is no real contact. It's an unusual boy-meets-girl.

That girl is Virginia Faire Brown, who is shown with 74 credits, although she never rose to be a major player and certainly not a star. But she is very attractive, even elegant, with an unusual dark-haired beauty.

Her character's father is played by the veteran Lafe McKee. The sheriff is by that veteran, and very talented actor, who didn't, alas, often enough get to show just how good an actor he was, Earl Dwire.

Chief bad guy is played by "Loyd Whitlock," who is usually known as Lloyd Whitlock, a very busy man with more than 200 credits!

OK, good story, great cast ably performing, lots of riding scenes, and a no-music-track realism that should keep you pinned to your seat. And if you want to see it, there's a good print at YouTube.

This early John Wayne western sees Wayne playing Ted Hayden, a man who was left for dead as a boy when he father was killed. In the opening scene he discusses this with the man who looked after him. As they talk a man staggers towards then; he lives just long enough to hell them he has drunk water from a poisoned well. He is carrying papers that identify him as Gat Ganns, a wanted killer who was hoping to work for a certain Mr Gentry; the man who now owns the Hayden farm. As Hayden looks rather like Ganns he takes his place and sees Gentry about the job. It turns out Gentry is trying to acquire a neighbouring ranch and wants 'Ganns' to kill the owner... he also has designs on the owner's attractive daughter. Hayden is determined to find a way to save them. He also learns the truth about who killed his father.

While this isn't exactly a great western it is rather fun. The plot may be fairly predictable but it provides some decent action; this includes fist fights and some solid horse stunts. In most films of this sort the attractive leading lady quickly falls for the handsome hero but here she doesn't even meet him till quite a way into the film... he finds her earlier but she is unconscious. There are some fairly weak points; the opening involves quite a coincidence and Hayden doesn't look particularly like Ganns; certainly not enough that anybody shown the photograph on the wanted poster, as Gentry was, would believe he was Ganns. The acting is decent enough; John Wayne is solid as Hayden and Virginia Brown Faire is suitably sparky as Fay Winters, daughter of the ranch owner Gentry had feelings for. Lloyd Whitlock was a solid bad guy although the character was almost a pantomime villain. Overall this isn't a must see but it is fun if you enjoy westerns and have an hour to kill.

WEST OF THE DIVIDE (1933/34), a Lone Star Production released by Monogram Pictures, with story and direction by Robert N. Bradbury, stars John Wayne in his third low-budget western for the studio. Though not as classic as his latter westerns as STAGECOACH (1939) or THE SEARCHERS (1956), this minor production clocked at 54 minutes, which could have been an episode to an hourly western television series in later years, is actually not that bad. As with all his Lone Star productions (1933-1935), all resembling early talkies of the late 1920s, and lacking underscoring, the plot and action sequences along with the youthful presence of John Wayne, still learning the ropes as a movie cowboy, somehow make up for it.

Rather than having a five-minute prologue to the situation involving the central character as a 12-year-old boy, production values save time and cost by opening the story revolving the now adult Ted Hayden (John Wayne) accompanied by his friend, "Dusty" Rhodes (George "Gabby" Hayes, minus his beard that would later make him famous) resting out in the wilderness discussing the murder of Hayden's father when he was a boy. Left for dead, Ted is said to be found and taken in by Dusty, who, after two years under his care, has brought him back to heath. Ted also has a little brother whose mother died at the time of his birth, and wants to find him. During this reminiscing of the past leading to both men returning to the scene of the crime, Ted and Dusty notice a man stumbling to the ground, dying after drinking poisoned water. Finding an envelope on his person, they find the deceased to be Gat Ganns, a wanted killer with a $5,000 reward for his capture. Convinced of Ganns association with Jeffrey Gentry (Lloyd Whitlock), the man who bought his father's ranch, to be responsible for his father's death and brother's abduction, Ted, who bears a close resemblance to the deceased, poses Ganns to work under Gentry to see if his hunch is correct. In the meantime, Gentry, losing his bid to buy the ranch belonging to Fred Winters (Lafe McKee) and his daughter, Fay (Virginia Browne-Faire), schemes to get that ranch regardless. He has two of his henchmen to follow and rob Fay of the $3,000 for bank deposit to ruin for father financially. Accidentally shot while hiding in an abandoned barn, Fay is later found unconscious by Ted, who takes her to Doctor Silsby (Philip Kieffer) for treatment. Having found her money, Ted deposits it for her in secret at the bank. Now working for Gentry to do away with Winters, Ted later saves Spud (Billy O'Brien), a 12-year-old boy from a runaway coach and from the brutal whipping by his brutal father, Butch (Blackie Whitford. The closer Ted gets to his father's murder, the more his life is in danger. Other supporting players include Yakima Canutt, Earl Dwire and Horace B. Carpenter.

As with many of Wayne's early westerns, he bonds well with his co-stars, Virginia Browne-Faire, and youngster, played by Billy (billed Billie) O'Brien, another good reason the film works so well. Even with lack of production values, it still has charm. Chances are the plot summary had been used earlier or later with other western actors, but it's John Wayne, better known as "The Duke," who's the reason this and other his early westerns have remained watchable long after its theatrical releases.

Distributed on video cassette in the 1980s, the decade where this and other of Wayne's Lone Star westerns frequently played for a while on public television, WEST OF THE DIVIDE, also available on DVD, has had its cable television presentations, namely American Movie Classics (1996-2000) and Encore Westerns. Beware of prints with new and poorly constructed underscoring used during opening and closing credits, along with scoreless scenes that would be rough sledding for viewers to stop watching long before the movie comes to a close. (**1/2)