Les Loups du désert

An American Western; A story about a boy who saw his parents murdered and his younger brother kidnapped by a gang of cattle thieves and bandits. Years later, after forming a vigilante group, he sets out to find his long-lost brother. This is a low-budget B-movie with low production values that show. It has a simple, straightforward, and serviceable plot, but it keeps up the tension on a main note of mystery. John Wayne plays the grown-up crusader and leader of cowboys with a penchant for a singalong. The editing was clumsy, which made the verbal exchanges in many of the scenes awkward, but it is directed competently otherwise, and it has some good location photography.

It is not a special film, but it is amusing and, considering a so early Western, it is perhaps the best movie of this genre until the end of the 30's (if you do not include among Westerns Chaplin's Gold Rush and The Pilgrim and Harrol Lloyd's An Eastern Westerner). There are good Wersterns in the 40's (The ox-bow incident and The red river), but not in the 30's (personally, I do not like Stagecoach, and perhaps only The Plainsman is in the same level among the Westerns I have watched from the same decade). An entertaining Western with a coherent story and with no apology to murdering "those evil savages" was not something common in cinema those days. So, there is a great merit here.

This wonderful example of the early B western is tarnished by some pitiable horse falls that would not be tolerated in today's films. Two scenes in particular show the poor animals somersaulting and going down in a horrendous heap, sometimes on top of one another. Even knowing that the movie is over 70 years old; the sight of the poor animals in such distress still made me heart sick. The Running W appears to have been used liberally in this picture, which is otherwise well acted and produced. John Wayne gives an excellent performance along with a strong supporting cast, while the Owens Valley and Alabama Hills outside Lone Pine provide a realistic backdrop to the story.

first, we got people singing a song like watching a play on a stage. then the funny things showed up one by one. by watching this 1935 film i was unable not to think about what the hongkong shaw brothers did to their Chinese kung-fu movies, always with stupid screenplays, weird attires, costumes, hairdos, make-up, terrible acting... pretentious and unrealistic dialog.....all of those horrible arrangements shown in shaw brothers kung fu movies were accidentally matched this pathetic western genre b movie. all the people in this pioneering westward movie wore nice, clean and ironed costumes, even in gunfights, good guys led by john wayne were riding on white horses, wearing white shirts, while the bad guys' horses were just a mixture of different colors. there were so many laughable and pretentious scenes and dialog in this horrible film.

Newborn Republic Pictures utilizes the solid directoral ability of Robert Bradbury, and the presence of John Wayne along with Yakima Canutt and his troupe of stuntriders to produce this strongly scripted film of 1860s vigilante efforts to rid the Far West of outlaw bands that were involved in widespread robbery and cattle rustling. Bradbury, whose skill with Westerns dates back to the early silent period, directs and edits with a solid awareness of suspense, building his typically short scenes with sparse and, at times, stilted dialogue and an eye for proper cast placement which makes excellent use of defined personalities such as Wayne, Frank McGlynn Jr., and Glenn Strange, and gives particular value to the hard-riding stunt performers, who are splendid throughout this well-made (and musical) adventure filmed in California's Owens Valley, at the base of the Sierra Nevada.