Two-Gun of the Tumbleweed

Two-Gun of the Tumbleweed (1927)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

"Two-Gun" Calder (Leo Maloney) gets tired of his girl (Peggy Montgomery) being abused by the villain Darrel (Joe Rickson) so the rivals eventually have a showdown. This Western runs just 10-minutes, at least on the Alpha print that I watched so I'm not sure if this is the complete version or not. In someways I really hope it isn't because the story here is so poor and jumps around so much that it never really makes any sense. The film starts off by showing us Darrel threatening the girl and then we see the girl run off and get Two-Gun. Two-Gun then tracks down the bad guy, throws a few insults and the men square off in the showdown. This is your typical Western setting but Maloney, who not only played the lead but also directed, does very little with it. If you were to show this movie to someone and ask them to guess the year that it was made then I'm going to guess that the majority of people would say somewhere in the early 1910s. This film looks like the type of movie that was being made before D.W. Griffith changed all the rules because the editing is sloppy, nothing is coherent and worse of all is the fact that the cinematography is rather forgettable. As poor as the movie is, the final few minutes things do pick up and we get a nice shoot out at the end where the lights are turned out and the conclusion certainly isn't what you'd expect to see.

I looked at a Pathegram one-reel cutdown of a six-reel Leo Maloney western and that was a mistake. There's a gang, there's a ranch, there's riding around, there's grabbing the womenfolk and riding around with them. This goes on for five minutes until we are informed that Maloney has been captured by the bad guys and if Peggy Montgomery ever wants to see him again, a check will be fine.

Maloney, in the few movies I've seen him in, strikes me as the sort of B Western star who could ride well and outact a tree. He obviously was no dope, capable of getting Ford Beebe to write his scripts, casting well from Gower Gulch and directing them himself, but his cluttered compositions are distracting and whatever charm his movies may have had at greater lengths winds up looking like 5-year-olds playing Cowboys & Indian at this length. He died in 1929 at age 41, so we'll never find out if he could speak in the movies. Or sing.