Bar 20 Rides Again

Rancher George Perdue is secretly running a band of rustlers under the moniker Nevada, incorporating his obsession with the life and military strategies of Napoleon Bonaparte, as well as chess, in his mad dream of becoming an emperor of the west. When he tries to rustle off the stock of his neighbor, Jim Arnold, the latter writes a letter to Hopalong Cassidy to come, along with Red Connors, to help stop the outlaws. Johnny Nelson also goes to the Arnold ranch, but only to see Arnold's daughter Margaret, but he doesn't realize that Margaret is sweet on Perdue and his civilized manner (brought on more by her school days in Boston). In order to join Nevada's gang and get a better chance to attack the outlaw, Hoppy takes on the disguise and manners of Tex Riley, a card shark. Nevada lets Hoppy/Tex join and gives him his first assignment of killing the man who is responsible for the rift in his relationship with Margaret, Johnny Nelson. Hoppy is forced to shoot Johnny, while he is trying to work with Red, Arnold, and Windy (Hayes in his first appearance as the character) to round up Nevada's gang, while not being discovered for whom he really is. Another great entry in the series, aided immensely by Worth's portrayal of the sinister, yet prim and proper Nevada. A great scene in the film is when he tells Hoppy (as Tex) he can use him, while fondling a chess pawn in his hand. Boyd also plays the Tex role to the hilt, with a foppishness soon to be seen many times in later films. A good climax ends another winning film in the series. Rating, based on B westerns, 8.

I was surprised when I searched on YouTube for Hopalong Cassidy films. This is because in the 1950s, his films and those of many other famous B-western stars were hacked to pieces in order to get them to 54 minutes....the perfect length for a one-hour TV time slot. My surprise is that the films posted are the restored original versions in most cases...not the pared down TV ones. This is a blessing, as too many of Roy Rogers' pictures, for example, are only available now in the shortened versions.

As far as Hopalong Cassidy films go, "Bar 20 Rides Again" is a bit of a disappointment. Mostly this is because although Hoppy goes under cover to discover who the evil 'Nevada' is, this cattle rustling boss isn't really taken down by Cassidy at all. Instead, Hoppy mostly just hangs out undercover on this baddie's ranch until ultimately a posse of mad ranch hands arrive to stop Nevada once and for all. The only big plus is that in this film Cassidy meets Windy (George 'Gabby' Hayes) for the first time. Apart from this, a bit of a disappointment.

So often cast as a dour villain or stern-faced sheriff in his sound era westerns, J.P.McGowan here brings genial and knowing good humor to the role of foreman Buck Peters. He shows an easy authority among the ranch hands, then goes into ironic self-effacement when the dragon sister arrives. In his mid-fifties and getting heavy in build, with more than one hundred and eighty roles behind him (and that counts all his appearances in The Hazards of Helen as just one!), JP takes readily to the humorous business at the ranch which counters the serious purpose of Hoppy's mission as the film develops. Not a big role, but one that the Mulford fans would have insisted on being done to rights. As a much experienced producer of inexpensive but popular light dramas himself, JP may have enjoyed working for the veteran producer Harry Sherman. He would have enjoyed, too, the adroit and vigorous direction of the sole sequence in which he appears, set in front of the bunkhouse. All in all, the audience sees a different and happy side of J.P.McGowan, Hollywood's first Australian.

This the third of the Hopalong Cassidy series finds Hoppy going to the aid fellow rancher Howard Lang. But he's got to catch up with Jimmy Ellison who has a big head start. Ellison's likes Jean Rouverol the rancher's daughter, but she's getting a whirlwind courtship from an elegant English dude Henry Worth who is secretly behind all the rustling going on.

Worth proves to be one of the more interesting villains in the whole Cassidy series. He's got some rather high falutin' ideas on good living out in the west and surprisingly for an Englishman he admires Napoleon Bonaparte. His men are even exasperated with his ideas, but he is making them money. That covers a multitude of sins.

I swear Hoppy ought to keep Ellison on a leash with a muzzle. That young man is more headstrong and keeps getting into jackpots in every Cassidy film.

The guys have more than one reason to leave the Bar 20 to help a friend. Buck Peters's sister Ethel Wales is in for a visit and she has all the cowhands doing her interior and exterior decorating. Facing outlaws is better than living with her and her tasks.

Watch and see what I mean.

I wish I could have rated this movie higher. I like westerns in general, the half-hour Hoppy TV shows are OK, the first Hoppy movie (Hopalong Cassidy Enters) was fine.

This one, though, seemed cheesy, almost juvenile. The scenery was good, and the bad guy, whatever his over the top faults, was certainly interesting and different.

I'll give just some examples of the silly inferior quality of it: (1) Hoppy is going undercover as a card shark in order to join the bad guys' gang. When asked what he was doing at their hideout, he says he is after the James Ellison character (a friend of Hoppy), whom Hoppy lies that he wants to kill. The leader of the bad guys also wants Ellison killed, so they travel to a place where Hoppy is given a rifle to shoot Ellison, who is hundreds of yards away. So from that distance Hoppy makes a miraculous shot, just grazing Ellison's head, making him temporarily unconscious. (2) The scene with Buck's sister visiting was unfunny and completely unnecessary. (3) I always hate it when the good guy sets a fire to suit his purposes. Here Hoppy left a magnifying glass in the sun near some brush, that eventually ignites the fire, yet the bad guys can't reach it in time before it signals the good guys. Scenes like these make you cringe.