Phantom Rancher

When Ken Maynard's uncle is murdered, he finds out that the old man was apparently a ruthless land baron and moneylender, who cheated and/or destroyed the other landowners in the area. Ken tries to make amends by pretending to go along with the gang that held sway over his uncle and by highlighting as the Phantom Rancher in order to help the put-upon farmers and thwart the bad guys.

As far as Saturday matinée westerns go, Phantom Rancher is okay entertainment, but not really very action packed in it's first half. When Ken puts on the mask though, things pick up and the climax is pretty good.

At this point in his career, Maynard was noticeably older and a bit heavier. However, he still had presence enough to pull off a decent performance, though he may have benefited from wearing a duster over his tight-fitted shirt.

Ken Maynard was 44 when Phantom Rancher was released in March, 1940. (The copyright date in the film is 1939.) His physical appearance was still strong and that of a classic western movie hero, although older and slightly heavier. In Phantom Rancher we see Ken Maynard on screen almost the entire time. His acting was top notch as it should have been. Unfortunately, Maynard's career in films was coming to an end as he worked himself down from the bigger movie studios to Colony Pictures for this movie. The once great Ken Maynard was making poorly put together movies while Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were the kings of the western genre.

The problem with this movie is the "phantom rancher" idea itself. No one can recognize the phantom as Ken Mitchell. He wears a simple mask and a cape, speaks with the same voice, and rides the same horse. Collins, the villain, is face to face with the phantom and never gets it. If there is a first rule of B westerns, it has to be "don't count the shots coming out of a six-gun." The same thing applies to the plot of this movie. You really have to be willing to let the story unfold unquestioned because the whole mask thing does not work in this movie. It is a major part of the plot, so you have to take it or quit watching.

Ken Maynard was known for his riding skills, but we do not really see any trick riding in Phantom Rancher. There is a great scene that has Ken as the phantom riding back to his ranch to avoid being caught, and as Tarzan gallops at full speed he takes the bridle and saddle off. Ken jumps off with the saddle and Tarzan jumps into his corral. This looks like something Ken Maynard would have done years before, but the scene is carefully edited to give that appearance. I suspect it was a good stunt double. The scene is short, but it is the kind of thing that makes B western heroes larger than life.

Dave O'Brien played many different types of roles in his career, and I am used to thinking of him in the Texas Rangers series. In Phantom Rancher he plays the part of the lead henchman. His character is the only one to suspect that Ken Mitchell is really the phantom rancher.

The Republic Lone Ranger serials, The Lone Ranger and The Lone Ranger Rides Again, came out in 1938 and 1939. Equity's The Adventures of the Masked Phantom, starring Monte Rawlins, came out in 1939. I wonder if there was a rush by the smaller studios to cash in on the "masked hero" franchise of the Lone Ranger that Republic appeared to have locked up. Columbia would later do the Durango Kid series, with Charles Starrett using a bandanna for a mask.

Some of the later movies in that series were a bit hard to believe.

Phantom Rancher is good and not good. Ken Maynard is wonderful in this movie. The gimmicky plot is the weakness. I do not want to discourage anyone from seeing this movie, but it is better not to expect much and be pleasantly surprised rather than to expect a great movie and be disappointed.

Ken Mitchell arrives to take over the ranch belonging to his recently deceased uncle, but when he arrives he finds himself hated by all the townspeople, since his uncle was trying to acquire all the ranches in the area, and then foreclosing all the mortgages that were being taken out. What Ken doesn't realize is that his uncle was working hand in hand with realtor Collins, who had a rancher, Markham, killed when he wouldn't sell his ranch to him, and now everyone in town (especially Markham's daughter Ann) believes Ken killed Markham. In order to right the wrongs his uncle did, Ken garbs himself as the Phantom Rancher, where he pays off all the ranchers who wouldn't accept Ken's charity as well as round up Collins and his gang. So-so western where nothing is really spectacular, but nothing boring. It could have used more action, but Maynard's persona helped carry it in dull spots. Rating, based on B-westerns, 5.

I've seen about a half dozen of the low budget poverty row B westerns that Ken Maynard made in the 1930s, and I am consistently amazed at how poor an actor he was. How did he ever get to be a leading cowboy actor? They say that he could ride pretty well back in the silents, but he doesn't do anything particularly impressive in these later sound films. Still, maybe he got the leads because he was big and could ride.

Phantom Rancher isn't as bad as some of the other Ken Maynard films I've seen, but it still isn't much. Some of the other characters refer to him a couple of times as a "young fella," where it appears to me that he's just as old as the other older actors.

And if that's not silly enough, there's a rather significant script problem in this film. At one point, one of the characters makes a remark about how the phantom had prevented the poisoning of a well, something that hadn't happened yet. Just a couple of minutes later, we then see that particular scene. No, it wasn't a flashback. At first I thought perhaps that when Treeline Films was doing the DVD transfer, they might have reversed two of the reels. But in those days film reels contained approximately 11 minutes of film, and the whole reversal only took about 3 or 4 minutes tops. Everything else was in a logical order. So, it looks like that was a genuine continuity problem in the original film. Maybe that's one reason why Colony Pictures didn't last very long.