The Topeka Terror

This is a fun, respectable B-western from Allan Lane before his days as Red Ryder and also before the Rocky Lane adventures. The film is definitely an action-packed, and has a decent story and a variety of interesting characters. The players do a good job, including the perennial bad guy Roy Barcroft. The fight scenes are notably well-crafted.

"The Topeka Terror" is a rip-snorting, action-packed Allan Lane adventure set during the western land rushes of the late 1880's. Republic seems to have taken care to make this a quality entry in the 1945 B-western corral, for the directing and production values are all done pretty darned well. The story is involving and easy to follow. This is Allan Lane just before he embarked on his Red Ryder stint and before his "Rocky" Lane persona took flight. He has a nice presence but doesn't seem to have quite the charisma here that he would later carry during those personas yet to come. But the rest of the cast is sharp, with several distinctive characters on the move. The always more-than-reliable Roy Barcroft does a fine job here as a scheming and sinister land swindler, and you just know he's going to have some kind of a showdown tangle with Lane before the show is over. And character actor Earle Hodgins... he has a lot of fun in his role (and so do we) as an apparently newly-minted dude lawyer who is not quite ready for prime time, using his new professional vocabulary in ways that confuse even himself. There is a lot of action in this film, including a spectacular runaway wagon rescue and a really big, all hands on deck saloon fight. In fact, there are several fight scenes, all of which are choreographed and performed very well. Be advised, however, that gun battles are the order of the day; Allan Lane picks off quite a few bad guys with his blazers...but all in a day's work I guess. And now for a final note about the music score: sometimes music in these 1940's B-westerns can be obnoxious and intrusive, but I found the effort here thankfully to be tempered and appropriate. So all in all, go into this one expecting to have fun... and you probably will.

Allan Lane plays a roving cowboy who seems to know an awful lot about the law regarding land claims in Topeka Terror. That knowledge is going to come in handy when he helps a bunch of settlers being swindled during the Oklahoma land rush of 1889. That is after he saves Tom London and his daughter and Twinkle Watts from a runaway team of horses.

Perennial Republic villain Roy Barcroft is on hand and I have to say his villainy reaches some new heights. Give the man credit where credit is due, he's got one great scheme to accomplish claim jumping on a truly large scale.

Stealing the film in whatever scene he's in is Earle Hodgins playing a dude lawyer who likes to doubletalk in legalese. Nice Republic western for Allan Lane.