Riders of Destiny

Early talkie in which John Wayne accompanied by George ¨Gaby¨ Hayes and a beautiful damsel face ominous enemies who attempt to take the water supply . Bad guy Kincaid (Forrest Taylor) controls the local water supply and plans to do in the other ranchers . Government agent Saunders (John Wayne) shows up undercover to do in Kincaid and to find out who is stealing water from the local farmers . Meantime, Saunders wins the heart of one of his victims , Fay Denton (Cecilia Parker) . Sanders meets Charlie Denton (George Gaby Hayes, this time without beard and he bears the comic relief , as usual), an old rancher , become partners and Sandy helps as well as secures water rights for farmers . Meanwhile , the nasty wealthy Land Baron seeks vengeance and take lands from poor farmers at exorbitant rates.

The picture gets thrills , Western action , shootouts , a love story , and several fights between Wayne and his enemies ; being quite entertaining and including some comical elements . It's a low budget film with good actors , technicians, mediocre production values , pleasing results and usually regarded as one of the best Westerns made by John Wayne during his ¨Lone Star¨ period . The picture packs brawls and fights in silent cinema style and and exciting pursuits . Nice acting by John Wayne as a young Singin' Sandy Saunders who finds himself involved with claim jumpers , powerful owners and ambitious guys . Very early Wayne has the Duke looking awfully young as an undercover agent securing water rights and he even sings some songs . Sympathetic performance from veteran George ¨Gaby¨ Hayes as short-tempered person , Gaby steals the show , as usual . One of the few sidekicks to land on the annual list of Top Ten Western Box office Stars, he did so repeatedly . In his early films, he alternated between whiskered comic-relief sidekicks and clean-shaven bad guys, but by the later 1930s, he worked almost exclusively as a Western sidekick to stars such as John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Randolph Scott. After his last film, in 1950, he starred as the host of a network television show devoted to stories of the Old West for children, The Gabby Hayes Show (1950). Mediocre cinematography by Archie Stout , a notorious cameraman with a long career . Being necessary an alright remastering because of the film-copy is washed-out . The failure of the original copyright holder to renew the film's copyright resulted in it falling into public domain, meaning that virtually anyone could duplicate and sell a VHS/DVD copy of the film . Therefore, many of the versions of this film available on the market are either severely and usually badly edited and/or of extremely poor quality, having been duplicated from second- or third-generation or more copies of the film . The motion picture was professionally directed by Robert North Bradbury who made various early John Wayne vehicles .

John Wayne played a great role in the super-production ¨The big trail¨(1930) but he subsequently fell in B series during the thirties . Most of them in ¨Lone Star¨ productions , usually directed by Robert N. Bradbury , such as : ¨Rough romance¨, ¨The range feud¨, ¨Texas cyclone¨, ¨Two-fisted law¨, ¨Ride him cowboy¨, ¨Big stampede¨, ¨Haunted gold¨ , ¨The telegraph law¨, ¨Somewhere in Sonora¨ , ¨The man from Utah¨ , The man from Monterrey¨, ¨The lawless frontier¨ , ¨West of the divide¨, Rainbow Valley¨ , The desert trail¨ , The dawn rider¨, ¨Lawless range¨, The Oregon Trail¨ , and ¨Born in the west¨ . In 1938 he participated in Republic series with ¨The three musketeers¨ replacing Robert Livingston and in which George Sherman directed 8 films . Later on , Wayne starred the hit ¨The stagecoach¨ by John Ford and took part in ¨A movies¨ such as¨: ¨Allegheny uprising¨, ¨Dark command¨, ¨The spoilers¨, ¨In old California¨, ¨War of the wildcats¨, ¨Tall in the saddle¨, ¨Flame of the Barbary Coast¨ and ¨Dakota¨ . And financed his first production : ¨Angel and the badman¨ . Subsequently , with ¨Red River¨ John rose at top box-office and after that , he starred many successes .

Please don't judge this film by the first 10 min.. John Wayne, alias Singin' Sandy Saunders, gets out his guitar in two spots, including the opening scene, and lip syncs to two very different sounding singing voices. Please spare us any more of this!

It's pretty bad when you have to hold up the stage in order to beat the bandits you know, from experience, are going to hold it up a little later and take the money being sent to you. But, that's the predicament striking blond Cecilia Parker found herself in when Wayne saw her horse shot out from under her by the stage driver. Seems the expected bandits were part of the same criminal outfit, headed by a Mr. Kincaid, as the stage drivers. Actually, their main racket was hoarding nearly all the regional water and selling it dear to the ranchers. The ranch owned by Gabby Hayes and daughter Cecelia has a well, the only other water source in this region. Thus, Kincaid especially wants to acquire this property for a full water monopoly, while threatening to cut off his water to the other ranchers unless they sell their land to him for next to nothing. Nice guy, Eh? Well, ole John has a plan how to get the ranchers out of this impossible situation. Kincaid falls for it like Cecilia falls for Wayne and vice versa. During the follow up horse chase of Kincaid by Wayne, poetic justice is served, and the valley ranchers presumably live happily ever after. See the movie to learn the rather unexpected details. Clever man, that Singin' Sandy Saunders. Clever, but sneaky.

At the risk of sounding like a complete anorak, I have to confess to a deep affection for John Wayne's Lone Star westerns. Every one has a mighty fine title, usually nothing much to do with the story being told. They have that addictive quality that other people find in today's soap operas. In both types, the plots are familiar and preposterous, the characters are off-the-peg, the acting is poor, the heroines are pretty, and the leading man looks good (especially on a horse in J.W.'s case).

Of all J.W.'s Lone Star films, this one is my favourite. It has all the virtues listed above, maybe not as developed as in some of the later films, but there nevertheless. I particularly enjoy the way a character is introduced in the first reel, made to disappear for most of the film, and reintroduced at the end. The heroine is delightful in jodhpurs, and the bad guy simply looks dastardly in them. Then there are the pistols that seemingly are deadly at several hundred yards. And an important prop is what I take to be a genuine stagecoach.

But this film has notable extras: "interesting" singing, some truly exciting stunt work, and a remarkably lyrical climax that I don't think Robert N Banbury ever came close to emulating again. It's so good that you'd almost believe that Ingmar Bergman had seen this film and been inspired by it as he started on Virgin Spring.

Note to students of film: it's probably a bad idea to try that suggestion on your teacher!

I recently purchased this film on a special triple bill DVD from an overly cheap discount store, in fact it was so cheap that the three movie disc cost me just one single pound of my hard earned British currency.

This film was both fantastic and atrocious in one. An exciting plot, but with laughable performances from the entire cast.

We know that all great actors have to start somewhere and the lone star westerns of the early thirties were what John 'The Duke' Wayne cut his teeth on.

To look at his work in his final film The Shootist in 1976, you can see just how much he had learnt over his 40 years in the business and what a great actor he did eventually become, but to look at his performances in these early days, you can understand why he spent most of the 1930's in relative obscurity.

Although Wayne looks uncomfortable throughout most of these films and his acting is wooden to say the least, it can't all be blamed on him.

These movies were the product of their day and cannot be judged by todays standards. Intended only as supporting features, these long forgotten studios turned out these 'B' movies by the shed load. Badly formed scripts with badly shaped characters must have poured though these fledgling studios like water through a hoop and with a stock company of actors who's style was still formed in the pantomime silent era, they were bound to be a bit cheesy. In fact if in 1933 there were Oscars awarded for the greatest achievement in over acting then this would be the motion picture with greatest ever hoard.

Wayne's character is a notorious gunman with a name that must have put the fear of God into whoever crossed his path, Singing Sandy Saunders.

Laugh? I damn near wet my pants.

And if that wasn't enough to give me the biggest gut wrencher of the century, then George 'Gabby' Hayes certainly iced the cake.

After an appalling song that sounded like two cats fighting over a piece of fish in a metal barrel, the great Gabby uttered the line, "Mmmm. I could listen to that all night." The line itself is worthy of side stitching surgery, but the look of peace and serenity on his face was just too much for the old chuckle muscles which then went on to explode.

I can honestly say that a truly inspired and well written comedy has never made me laugh as much as this film did.

However the story is a good one, with the corrupt businessman holding the town's ranchers to ransom over his monopoly in the water market with a view of buying up all the farms etc.

It survives today as nothing more than a nostalgic glimpse into the past, not only at a bygone era in cinema making, but as a chance to see a real Hollywood legend finding his feet. This alone makes it worth every penny of the thirty-three pence I in effect paid for it.

"Riders of Destiny" was the first of several westerns Wayne made for the Lone Star arm of Monogram Pictures between 1933 and 1935. In this entry, the producers try to make the Duke into a singing cowboy called "Singin' Sandy Saunders with hilarious results. Any Wayne fan knows that the Duke couldn't have carried a tune if his life had depended on it. His voice was apparently dubbed by Smith Ballew whose deep baritone sounds nothing like Wayne. Wayne looks awkward and uncomfortable in "performing" the musical numbers. Thank heavens the singing cowboy experiment soon ended.

As for the movie itself, it contains a standard "B" western plot of the fight over water rights between the villain (Forrest Taylor) and the local ranchers. Duke, of course plays the hero. He had not yet developed his on screen character and still looked like a poverty row cowboy.

Also cast in the film were George (pre-Gabby) Hayes as the heroine's father, Cecilia Parker as the heroine and Yakima Canutt as "one of the boys" who performs his "falling from the racing horses under the wagon" stunt while doubling Wayne. Both Canutt and Hayes would go on to appear with Wayne in most of the other entries in the series. Canutt, in particular would have a profound effect on Wayne's future development teaching him, among other things, how to move, fight and look comfortable on a horse.

As "B" westerns go this one isn't too bad, however, I have to give it a failing grade because of the "singing".