La ruée sauvage

After the Civil War, the former Confederates of Texas are suffering under harsh taxes, ill treatment and corruption by the Federal Government during the Reconstruction era. Texas ranch owner, Ivy Preston accompanied by her grandmother Granna and her old ranch foreman, now the trail boss, Chuckawalla is trying to move her cattle to market to sell them. The carpetbaggers are not only trying to seize her cattle without payment but want her ranch as well for their own ends.

A Confederate veteran named Kirk Jordan ( Randolph Scott) who has had enough of war and convinces her to drive her cattle to Abilene, Kansas rather than Mexico but he is upset with her when he learns she wants to use the money to help the South continue fighting.

The Texans is a solid western set around the aftermath of the Civil War and the carpetbaggers (its depiction is really well done, quite grim). It has a healthy mix of humour, adventure and action, namely in some exciting sequences where the cattle driving are braving the elements through conflict such as Comanches and carpetbaggers. Joan Bennett plays the heroine and she's quite breezy, Randolph Scott is Randolph Scott and is solid but it's May Robson as "Granna" who steals the picture. There's a little love rivalry thrown in with Scott and Cummings vying for Bennett. I wonder who gets the gal. Ah! That's a no brainer. There's some slow bits and too many subjects are shoved into his running time but overall a solid western.

Cute as a button Joan Bennett and cute as a button Randolph Scott make for a lovely early western in the aptly titled The Texans. Set in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, it once again illustrated how wonderful it would have been if a man with a natural Southern accent had been cast in Gone With the Wind, instead of other actors who couldn't have been bothered to put one on.

This movie deals with carpetbaggers and the terrible way the South was treated after the war. If you don't like that message, rent a different movie that favors the Yankees. Joan and her tough-as-nails grandmother May Robson run an illegal route through the back country so people can bring cattle, whiskey, or other supplies through without getting taxed. Scottie joins the trail, lured in part by the money and in part by her appeal. You'll also see Walter Brennan, Robert Cummings, and Robert Barrat in supporting roles; the latter won a Hot Toasty Rag nomination for his hilarious performance.

With stiff competition in the music department, The Texans won the Rag award for its groundbreaking theme. Before 1938, western movies just used old standard tunes as the background music. Gerald Carbonara wrote a beautiful, heart-tugging theme that was the granddaddy of all the lovely western themes we know today. This movie has been forgotten through the decades, but if you like to see obscure flicks, check out this cute one. You'll definitely have enough eye candy to see you through.

Enjoyable movie. Sorry to be picky, but some continuity problems. Scott has to sell his land for a badly fitting suit to be able to leave town, even though he is wearing a gold ring. Bennet, Robson and Brennan go home, Scott rides up the same day and has a whole new buckskin outfit. Bennet and co are still wearing same clothes, where did Scott get his? Great scenes of cattle driving and river crossings. Robson is magnificent. Interesting historically to think that Bennets character thinks the French and the Mexicans can revive the South. Robert Cummings is always good, very young in this and not a lot alof screen time.

THE TEXANS (1938) offers some great second unit action scenes in its simple tale of a cattle drive from Indianola, Texas to Abilene, Kansas. We see hundreds of head of cattle forced to swim across the Rio Grande, followed by the cowboys' struggles with such obstacles as dust storms, snow storms, prairie fires, Indian attacks, and pursuit by the U.S. Army. These sequences are quite spectacular, but they're somewhat undermined by the awkward dialogue scenes between the stars. Randolph Scott stars as an ex-Confederate soldier whose idea of taking the cattle to Kansas to keep them from being confiscated for back taxes by the Carpetbagger administrator is taken up by rancher Joan Bennett and her team of cowboys-turned-rebels-turned-cowboys-again. Scott is supposed to be a war-hardened vet trying to survive in Reconstruction Texas, but he comes off as way too cleancut and restrained. The actor needed at least another decade to develop the kind of seasoning that made him such a sturdy western star in the late 1940s-to-early 60s (THE DOOLINS OF OKLAHOMA, SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, THE TALL T, et al). Joan Bennett is terribly miscast here and plays it as if she's in a romantic comedy. Despite having to run off with the cattle with no time to pack her things, she somehow manages to conjure up a parade of fresh feminine fashions along the way and arrives in Abilene with a spanking new dress and bonnet, a new hairdo and fresh makeup. She's never remotely believable as a rancher and frontierswoman who'd kept her spread thriving during the war.

On the other hand, May Robson, as Joan's rough-hewn pioneer grandmother, is appropriately fierce and participates in the action as closely as anybody in the film. (She was near 80 when she made this!) SHE should have been the star. And Walter Brennan is his usual dependable self as the ranch foreman, Chuckawalla. Robson and Brennan are often together and the drama scenes benefit considerably when they're on screen. Raymond Hatton is another old hand at this kind of thing and he appears as Cal, Scott's frontiersman sidekick. The problem is, he literally arrives out of nowhere. When we last see Scott at the end of the opening sequence, where he's fought Union soldiers and helped Bennett escape with a shipment of rifles meant for die-hard Southern rebels, he's alone, unarmed, unhorsed and wearing an ill-fitting new suit of clothes that cost him everything he had. In the next scene, he shows up in a fresh buckskin suit, riding a horse, armed with pistols and rifle, and accompanied by Cal, with no explanation of how these things materialized or where Cal came from. Gaps like this tend to disrupt the storytelling for me.

One of the problems is that the credited director, James Hogan, worked mostly in B-movies and had a largely undistinguished career at Paramount. Why couldn't the studio have gotten one of their more experienced hands, like Henry Hathaway (LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER), to helm an important western like this? After all, no less a showman than Cecil B. DeMille had made the comparably budgeted western saga THE PLAINSMAN for Paramount two years earlier. To go from DeMille to Hogan in two short years demonstrates a distinct impairment of studio judgment. In any event, as another reviewer here pointed out, THE TEXANS compares most unfavorably with a later film that told a similar story, Howard Hawks' RED RIVER (1948).

This film introduced the gentle, melodic western song, "Silver on the Sage," sung in the film by Bill Roberts (as "Singin' Cy") and written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, Paramount's ace in-house songwriting team. (The pair also gave us the title song of the Hopalong Cassidy western, HILLS OF OLD WYOMING, a year earlier.) I first heard "Silver on the Sage" when it was used on the soundtrack of the 1981 drama, BUTTERFLY, the score of which was composed by Ennio Morricone. I don't remember how the song was used in the film, but the BUTTERFLY soundtrack album featured Johnny Bond's rendition of it.

Some of today's viewers might be a bit put off by what they see as racism in the beginning. Just remember not to judge other times by the current time in which you dwell. Black Union soldiers did make themselves unwelcome in post Civil War South. Carpetbaggers did go to the South to take advantage. The South WAS desperately poor after the war and unfair taxes were levied. These are historical facts which do not take sides. The writer took the facts and the attitudes, of both sides, and wove them into this story. Randolph Scott as a former Confederate who wanted the country reunited instead of taken over by Mexico. He said that all Yankees were not like the ones pushing their way around Texas, as he had met them in the war. The Union officer felt the same about many former Confederates. The movie showed this as the beginning of understanding between former foes. The acting was good. Perhaps one of Scott's better performances. Mae Robson was great and reminded me of Beula Bondi. Robert Cummings (well before his TV successes) was the former Confederate officer who could not accept the loss of the war. Joan Bennett was beautiful as the center of the love triangle between Scott, Cummings and herself. Character actors brought the film along quite well as they often do - Walter Brennan, Raymond Hatton, Frances Ford, Robert Barrat, Harvey Stephens. And there was Richard Denning with a small speaking part before his Mr. North fame. There was a most believable fight scene in the streets between Union troops and former confederates. It was well directed. There was an action scene of wagons, horses and cattle running from brush fire set by Indians that was very well done considering this was before digital special effects. The movie moved along nicely from the very beginning with plenty of Western excitement. Be sure to catch this Western if you get the chance. Although it has some twists and turns, it is still a good old fashioned Western.