The Laramie Kid

Tom Tyler tells girl friend Alberta Vaughn that he put together two thousand dollars busting bronchos..... and then lost it all gambling. He vows to give up gambling, throws away his dice, and goes looking for money, but there are no rodeos around. Meanwhile, her father, Murdock MacQuarrie, needs a thousand so banker Al Ferguson won't foreclose. When the bank is robbed and Tom is misidentified as one of the robbers, he allows MacQuarrie to capture him for the $1000 reward. He's sentenced to five years on the chain gang, and Miss Vaughn goes looking for evidence of who really did the robbery.

It could have been a nice, quirky, comic western, given Miss Vaughn's work as a Sennett Bathing Beauty, but that's passed over so that Tom can do a daring leap from a wagon over a river, surrounded by enough extraneous footage to destroy any excitement. This is a 1935 B western, and the pace of editing is glacial, although cameraman Pliny Goodfellow -- great name! -- tries to speed it up with a few pan shots. But neither director Harry Webb nor editor Fred Bain are having any of it.

By the way, there's nothing about Laramie in it. Nor any reference to anyone called 'The Laramie Kid'.

"The Laramie Kid" (1935) is a paper-thin "B" oater with Tom Tyler, Alberta Vaughn, Murdock MacQuarrie, Al Ferguson, George Chesebro, 'Snub' Pollard, Steve Clark, and many others who rather standardly were in these Westerns. The saving grace of this one is the fact that Alberta Vaughn can act! Many leading ladies in the "B" outing oaters could barely speak a line and sound genuine. Vaughn is easily the equal, perhaps the better, of Tyler here. Her father is played by Murdock MacQuarrie, an early leading man and star in silent short subjects, but who definitely should have stayed in the silents as he acts his part as if he's playing in front of an audience on a stage rather than in sagebrush country with lots of air around him. He'd been doing Westerns since 1913, but his sound pictures ended with him generally playing judges or station masters and going uncredited. The other actors range from decent heavies to those who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. Tyler has a couple of decent fight scenes, but he wasn't nearly as good as, say, Bob Steele or John Wayne (who often was seconded by Yakima Canutt). Overall, the plot about the bank being robbed and then the train by the same gang, led, of course, by the bank manager, is so old and so common that I didn't care about the plot, just about Alberta Vaughn. She has a lovely presence and a lot of charisma. Of course, too, she's the same Alberta Vaughn who starred in dozens of silent comedy shorts and ended in dozens of "B" oaters, including a couple of John Wayne's. Tyler himself acquits himself in fine fettle, but the picture isn't any great shakes. By the way, isn't Laramie in Wyoming? That's 825 miles from Texas where the action takes place. There's never a single reference to Laramie, or a kid from Laramie, or if Tyler's from Laramie, or any other thing that references Laramie in the film. Where'd the title come from?

The Laramie Kid follows the great tradition of titles having nothing to do with the story in B or even lower grade westerns. It's from a poverty row outfit called Reliance Pictures and the film has nothing to do with Laramie, Wyoming, nothing to do with any kids in the film and lead Tom Tyler is not named the Laramie Kid. When you see this, you know the film is a stinker.

What we do have here is Tom Tyler and Alberta Vaughn planning to get married and start a spread of their own as soon as Tom can convince his prospective father-in-law that he's a reliable sort and will take care of Vaughn in decent fashion.

His cause isn't helped by getting picked up by mistake for a bank robbery and being sentenced to a road gang. But our hero escapes and of course with a little help from Vaughn finds out the real story behind the bank robbery.

Al Ferguson plays the town banker who has designs on little Nell aka Vaughn. All he was missing was the handlebar mustache and he would have been a perfect Snidely Whiplash.

Right up to television these poverty row studios churned these horse operas out by the gazillions. The Laramie Kid is a typical product with scant attention paid to plot and dialog and direction is surely lacking.