La ruée sauvage

Cute as a button Joan Bennett and cute as a button Randolph Scott make for a lovely early western in the aptly titled The Texans. Set in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, it once again illustrated how wonderful it would have been if a man with a natural Southern accent had been cast in Gone With the Wind, instead of other actors who couldn't have been bothered to put one on.

This movie deals with carpetbaggers and the terrible way the South was treated after the war. If you don't like that message, rent a different movie that favors the Yankees. Joan and her tough-as-nails grandmother May Robson run an illegal route through the back country so people can bring cattle, whiskey, or other supplies through without getting taxed. Scottie joins the trail, lured in part by the money and in part by her appeal. You'll also see Walter Brennan, Robert Cummings, and Robert Barrat in supporting roles; the latter won a Hot Toasty Rag nomination for his hilarious performance.

With stiff competition in the music department, The Texans won the Rag award for its groundbreaking theme. Before 1938, western movies just used old standard tunes as the background music. Gerald Carbonara wrote a beautiful, heart-tugging theme that was the granddaddy of all the lovely western themes we know today. This movie has been forgotten through the decades, but if you like to see obscure flicks, check out this cute one. You'll definitely have enough eye candy to see you through.

Enjoyable movie. Sorry to be picky, but some continuity problems. Scott has to sell his land for a badly fitting suit to be able to leave town, even though he is wearing a gold ring. Bennet, Robson and Brennan go home, Scott rides up the same day and has a whole new buckskin outfit. Bennet and co are still wearing same clothes, where did Scott get his? Great scenes of cattle driving and river crossings. Robson is magnificent. Interesting historically to think that Bennets character thinks the French and the Mexicans can revive the South. Robert Cummings is always good, very young in this and not a lot alof screen time.

Somewhat Rare in 1938, a Big Budget Western with Plenty of Plot Involving the Post Civil-War Angst in Texas.

Randolph Scott in His Earlier Years before Maturing into the Granite Faced, Unshakable Moral Hero He would become in the Final Act of a Long Career.

Here He is a Fresh Faced Ex-Confederate that has a Progressive Attitude Concerning the War and is Ready to Forgive and Forget Unlike Most of the "Texans".

The North has its Villains Portrayed here by Carpetbaggers and Alcoholic Fat-Cat Politicians and Eager Plunderers.

Joan Bennett, a bit Miscast, but Pretty and Pretty Set in Revenge against the "Yankees" at All Costs.

The Highlight of the Movie is the Cattle Drive with one Fiery Sequence an Exciting Eye-Popper that is Late Thirties Hollywood Showing its Stuff.

Overall, the Themes would be Revisited in Future Better Westerns, but this is Worth a Watch for its Early Experiment in the Genre.

A Good Cast, quite a bit of Humor, and some Sprawling Outdoor Action make it quite an Entertainment.

It was the Period when the Studio System was Peaking.

This was the Type of Achievement that could Showcase the Movie Machine Approaching High-Pop-Culture-Art from a Conglomerate of Cooperative Creators.

With the U.S. Calvary on his tail, ex-Confederate Randolph Scott braves the elements and leads a massive cattle drive through Indian territory in order for his hard-case employer (and potential sweetheart) Joan Bennett to avoid paying the nasty carpetbagger government's new cattle tax.

The first thirty minutes of the film, with it's blistering portrait of reconstruction, is so grimy and claustrophobic that it comes as a bit of a relief when Scott and the boys (and the girls) hit the trail. In fact, they lay it on so thick that Randolph Scott's character comes off a bit silly when he voices his support for a reunified country!

Some slow spots help keep this from being one of the best of Scott's early Paramount vehicles. However it's probably one of the best produced, with some excellent photography and really well-staged action sequences. The scenes depicting the crossing of the Rio Grande and their battles with angry Comanches are particular standouts.

The end is a bit of a forerunner to Red River!

THE TEXANS (1938) offers some great second unit action scenes in its simple tale of a cattle drive from Indianola, Texas to Abilene, Kansas. We see hundreds of head of cattle forced to swim across the Rio Grande, followed by the cowboys' struggles with such obstacles as dust storms, snow storms, prairie fires, Indian attacks, and pursuit by the U.S. Army. These sequences are quite spectacular, but they're somewhat undermined by the awkward dialogue scenes between the stars. Randolph Scott stars as an ex-Confederate soldier whose idea of taking the cattle to Kansas to keep them from being confiscated for back taxes by the Carpetbagger administrator is taken up by rancher Joan Bennett and her team of cowboys-turned-rebels-turned-cowboys-again. Scott is supposed to be a war-hardened vet trying to survive in Reconstruction Texas, but he comes off as way too cleancut and restrained. The actor needed at least another decade to develop the kind of seasoning that made him such a sturdy western star in the late 1940s-to-early 60s (THE DOOLINS OF OKLAHOMA, SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, THE TALL T, et al). Joan Bennett is terribly miscast here and plays it as if she's in a romantic comedy. Despite having to run off with the cattle with no time to pack her things, she somehow manages to conjure up a parade of fresh feminine fashions along the way and arrives in Abilene with a spanking new dress and bonnet, a new hairdo and fresh makeup. She's never remotely believable as a rancher and frontierswoman who'd kept her spread thriving during the war.

On the other hand, May Robson, as Joan's rough-hewn pioneer grandmother, is appropriately fierce and participates in the action as closely as anybody in the film. (She was near 80 when she made this!) SHE should have been the star. And Walter Brennan is his usual dependable self as the ranch foreman, Chuckawalla. Robson and Brennan are often together and the drama scenes benefit considerably when they're on screen. Raymond Hatton is another old hand at this kind of thing and he appears as Cal, Scott's frontiersman sidekick. The problem is, he literally arrives out of nowhere. When we last see Scott at the end of the opening sequence, where he's fought Union soldiers and helped Bennett escape with a shipment of rifles meant for die-hard Southern rebels, he's alone, unarmed, unhorsed and wearing an ill-fitting new suit of clothes that cost him everything he had. In the next scene, he shows up in a fresh buckskin suit, riding a horse, armed with pistols and rifle, and accompanied by Cal, with no explanation of how these things materialized or where Cal came from. Gaps like this tend to disrupt the storytelling for me.

One of the problems is that the credited director, James Hogan, worked mostly in B-movies and had a largely undistinguished career at Paramount. Why couldn't the studio have gotten one of their more experienced hands, like Henry Hathaway (LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER), to helm an important western like this? After all, no less a showman than Cecil B. DeMille had made the comparably budgeted western saga THE PLAINSMAN for Paramount two years earlier. To go from DeMille to Hogan in two short years demonstrates a distinct impairment of studio judgment. In any event, as another reviewer here pointed out, THE TEXANS compares most unfavorably with a later film that told a similar story, Howard Hawks' RED RIVER (1948).

This film introduced the gentle, melodic western song, "Silver on the Sage," sung in the film by Bill Roberts (as "Singin' Cy") and written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, Paramount's ace in-house songwriting team. (The pair also gave us the title song of the Hopalong Cassidy western, HILLS OF OLD WYOMING, a year earlier.) I first heard "Silver on the Sage" when it was used on the soundtrack of the 1981 drama, BUTTERFLY, the score of which was composed by Ennio Morricone. I don't remember how the song was used in the film, but the BUTTERFLY soundtrack album featured Johnny Bond's rendition of it.