Twisted Triggers

Hal Talliafero (here credited as Wally Wales) is a disappointment to his father, J. P. Lockney. Hal is willing to forgive ex-convict William Bertram, and thinks that Bertram's daughter, Jean Arthur, is good enough to work, despite her disgraceful antecedents. When Talliaferro is locked up overnight because of a misunderstanding, his father kicks him off the ranch. After a few weeks, almost starving, his horse repossessed by the livery stable, he's walking to a distant ranch looking for work, when he runs across Art Winkler. Winkler tries to rob him, but he has nothing, so they agree to be partners, and because Talliaferro wins a deck cut, they decide to find work rather than people to rob.

It's a pleasant enough B western directed by Richard Thorpe near the beginning of his career. That was the way into the system for directors as well as actors in the late silent era. You could do short comedies, and work your way up, or B westerns, and likewise. For actors, it seemed to depend on whether you had a horse or not. And just as it seems that every screen comic, no matter how bad, got a shot at leading a series of short comedies, every cowboy actor seemed to get a shot at being a leading man.

And so did Talliaferro. It didn't last much past sound coming in, and by 1937, he ceased to be credited -- when he was credited -- as Wales. His more than 200 screen credits include about 5 non-westerns, almost invariably for Poverty Row productions. His last credit was in 1952, when the B western was dying. He passed on in 1980 at the age of 84.