Le cavalier de l'aube

Catch Nelson McDowell as the lanky black-clad undertaker at movie's start. He's got the only face I've seen that appears to be assembled in sections. The eyes go in one direction, the nose in another, while the mouth bounces around like a Kleenex in a windstorm. He's fascinating. I wish we would see more of him.

Other reviewers are right. This is an average Wayne entry in the Lone Star series. Buddies Mason (Wayne) and Ben (Howes) do play off one another well and I like the way they bond after their fist-fight. It's now a friendship based on mutual respect. And when they fall out over the same girl (Burns), we feel the loss. There's also Wayne doing his patented "gunman's walk" before he duels it out with Canutt and Moore.

However, there's not much stunt work or hard riding. But the biggest problem is Dennis Moore as the chief baddie. Catch that scene that pairs up Wayne in a 2-foot hat with Moore in a 6-foot hat. Too bad Moore just doesn't measure up. Then too, the locations don't get outside greater LA, so we don't get the usual great Southern Sierra scenery. But never mind, an ex-Front Row Kid like this old geezer still gets a thrill when that great Lone Star logo pops up on the screen. Yes indeed, the Duke rides again!

When Wayne is shot and his father murdered by armed robbers, he's nursed back to health by his friend's intended fiancé, leading to the inevitable love-triangle. Complicating things further is the fact that the killer is the girl's brother.

A decent entry in the series of Saturday matinée B-westerns that The Duke made as a contract star for Lone Star/ Monogram Pictures in the thirties, The Dawn Rider has several good action sequences and some okay melodrama.

The climactic showdown includes a well staged fistfight between John Wayne and chief heavy Yakima Canutt.

Another interminable B-western starring John Wayne, from Monogram/Lone Star Productions and director Robert Bradbury. Wayne plays John Mason, a nice guy who's returned to his hometown to visit his dad just in time to see the old man get shot down during a robbery by masked bandits. Mason teams up with local tough guy Ben (Reed Howes) to find the bad guys, but things sour when they both fall for the same gal (Marion Burns). Also featuring Dennis Moore, Yakima Canutt, Earl Dwire, Joseph DeGrasse, and Nelson McDowell.

This is so routine as to become tedious, with the same badly-choreographed fight scenes and lengthy horse chases that occur in all of these Lone Star films. It was different seeing Wayne teamed with an equal instead of the usual Gabby Hayes type. This movie also suffers from having another terrible electronic keyboard score added to it sometime during the 1980's for a video release. Added to ostensibly endear it to younger viewers used to having a score throughout every movie, it really only serves to make a bad movie worse.

Not being an expert on this genre I can't give The Dawn Rider an unqualified whoop or a hesitant snort either. I cut my eye-teeth on this type of B Western when a kid in the 60's - I've only seen a few hundred films like it since and it seems pretty much average.

Wayne looked a very smooth and supple 28 year old, swinging into saddles for countless horse races, sorry, chases, but he was a much better character to watch as the craggy icon he later became. He, and all the characters (and the story) in TDR are necessarily flat and undeveloped - the kids in the cinema at the time weren't interested in multi-layered portrayals of Tolstoy magnitude, and Lone Star weren't going to give 'em it either!

The DVD had new musical additions - I prayed for silence! But all in all a pleasant hour was spent by the TV at my ole homestead.

This film essentially begins with two cowboys named "Ben McClure" (Reed Howes) and "John Mason" (John Wayne) getting into a fistfight in the middle of a small town with John eventually coming out the winner. Being that neither man is the type of hold a grudge against a fair fight, after everything is said and done, they both become good friends. Not long after that, John steps into the freight office to see his father and, upon arriving there, finds that it is being held up by a number of armed thieves. To his great sadness and dismay, when his father puts up some resistance, the outlaws kill him right in front of John before leaving in a hasty manner. Quickly following them on horseback, John manages to kill at least one of the outlaws before he is also shot. Fortunately, Ben has followed close behind and manages to carry him to his house where a doctor and his girlfriend "Alice Gordon" (Marion Burns) are able to eventually get him back on his feet. What John doesn't know, however, is that Alice's brother "Rudd Gordon" (Dennis Moore) is the leader of the outlaw gang that killed his father and that this information is going to cause a number of problems for all concerned. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this short, Depression Era film suffered from a poor transition between scenes which gave the movie a rather choppy quality to it. The acting was also rather mediocre as well. Even so, it had an entertaining plot and, all things being equal, I have rated it accordingly. Average.