weezeralfalfa The first, by a decade, of 4 Hollywood films I'm familiar with, with a story centered around a large cattle drive northward out of Texas. The others are "Red River", "The Tall Men" and "Cowboy". They are all quite different from each other, and each is well worth a look, if you like epic westerns. This early film is typically disparaged as much the least of the 4. But after taking a look, I can say it certainly doesn't deserve this categorization. Some complain about the acting of stars Randy Scott and Joan Bennett, but I don't find anything terribly wrong. in a role tailor-made for Gary Cooper, Randy looks and acts the part well. Joan obviously is no cowgirl, but otherwise does fine. I would say this has the most complex plot and best balance of humor and drama of the 4 films, with the fresh aftermath of the Civil War playing a much more prominent part in the screenplay. We have 3 'old timers' to spearhead much of the humor: Walter Brennan, who returned to "Red River", Francis Ford: older acting and directing brother of John Ford is peg-legged 'Uncle Dud', and May Robson, as Joan's pioneer grandmother. We have busy character actor Robert Barrat playing the chief villain, Isaiah Middlebrack: an oily money-grubbing Yankee come to steal Texan land from landowners who can't pay all the new taxes on everything, including cattle. He plays it as a stereotypical gruff-voiced villain, come to prey on vulnerable women, especially. There's Robert Cummings; Scott's competitor for the affections of Joan. He's sort of the equivalent of Dunson in "Red River", pursuing the wrong choices to Scott's right choices. Through most of the film, Joan supports him, but after the failure of his venture to ally with Maximillian against the Juarez rebels in Mexico, and then his support of the new Ku Klux Klan anti-negro organization, she decides that he's a loser fanatic, and that Scott's character is a winner, with an eye for a realistic future. "Red River" provided another tall tale of the first cattle drive from deep in Texas to the new railhead in Abilene, KS. It too includes a stampede(but only one), several hostile Indian encounters, and conflicts between the principle characters. In some ways, it's more polished, but I think you will enjoy this film at least as much. The film starts out looking like it might turn into something more akin to the later Wayne-starring "The Undefeated", based on the historic attempt of General Shelby to join forces with Mexico's Maximillian, rather than surrendering to Union forces. However, Randy's persistence turned it into a "Red River" primer, instead.As in "Red River", the film cattle were nearly all Herefords, rather than the historical longhorns, which were nearly extinct, by then. The semi-wild longhorns were uniquely well adapted to do well on long drives in this climate, provided they weren't pushed too fast. Actually, before the Civil War, longer drives to California were undertaken to take advantage of high prices in the gold mining districts.The film begins with a steamboat arriving at the town of Indianola, TX. I wondered if this was a purely fictitious name, thus I checked it out. Turns out Indianola was a major seaport of the central Texas coast in this era, but was later wiped out twice by hurricanes and associated fires, thus abandoned as a ghost town. It's main competitor: Galveston, suffered a similar fate in 1900, but was rebuilt.Presently available as part of the Classic Western Round-up, volume 2 DVD set, along with "The Man from the Alamo", "California", and "The Cimarron Kid"

mark.waltz The defeated South tries to win back their dignity after the Civil War when smug Yankees begin a nasty little change called the re-construction. Brothers against brother during the war left many dead on both sides, and the resentments are strong. For elderly ranch widow May Robson, all she has is the massive cattle herds that the North tries to tax her on. Robson's granddaughter (Joan Bennett) is a belle on a mission: get arms to the surviving Southern soldiers so they can keep their own. Pretty crafty even against the more powerful North (obviously intent on humiliating their former enemy), the South hold on and even win sympathy as they deal with some pretty vindictive men.This is quite different than usual westerns in the fact that it presents a part of history almost entirely overlooked in film. The beautiful Bennett may seem more Brooklyneese than Texan but is still a force to be reckoned with as she fights feelings for two men-the rugged Randolph Scott and the more gentlemanly Robert Cummings who goes off on a secret mission against the re-construction. Robson delivers an entirely convincing portrait of an aging matron refusing to lie down and die after loosing almost everything. Supporting players include the likes of Walter Brennan, Raymond Hatton and Robert Barrat who add authenticity to the proceedings. The lesser known character actress Esther Howard has a memorable cameo as an obvious madam. A few homey ditties are tossed in (including a song with lyrics by Frank Loesser).The only problem is that the film tries too hard to cover too many issues in 90 minutes, including a brief mention of the Klu Klux Klan and their arrival in the declining town of Abilene. Had the story stuck to one or two themes and not (even briefly) mentioned important issues not explored, it would have been an even better film.

Brian Camp 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.

zardoz-13 Although "The Texans" beat Howard Hawks' "Red River" to the draw by at least a decade, "Arizona Raiders" director James P. Hogan's 92-minute, black & white saga about the first cattle drive to Abilene lacks both the cinematic polish and the passion of the Hawks' classic. Nevertheless, this above-average but predictable oater boasts a solid cast, sympathetic characters, several surprises, and some factual history. The bristling frontier action unfolds after the American Civil War as Reconstruction becomes the order of the day in Texas, and the carpetbaggers haul their freight into the state to tax the poor citizens into poverty. Randolph Scott makes an appropriately stalwart, fearless hero. A former Confederate private, he has endured his trials and tribulations, while a largely miscast Joan Bennett is every inch the heroine but rather narrow-minded in her attitude. Not only did she support the Confederacy during the war, but she also is prepared to support any hopeless effort to resurrect the Confederacy with the use of foreign troops under the command of the Mexican emperor Maximilian. Bennett has fallen in love with an idealist Confederate captain who epitomizes the South's refusal to grovel in any set of circumstances. Moreover, our heroine wants nothing to do with the scheming carpetbaggers. Indeed, she wants nothing to do with America and prefers to throw all her support to the Austrian monarch.Meanwhile, Texans suffer grievously under Reconstruction. The Scott character is the only individual who isn't reluctant to forget about the war and embark on a new life. At one point, the Scott hero states that he knew some good Yankees during the war and has decided to let bygones be bygones. The theme of change and how these former Confederates struggle to change with the times lies at the heart of action. When they aren't herding cattle, contending with carpetbaggers, and battling Comanche Indians, Scott and Bennett are battling with each other. As a carpetbagger who isn't easily dispensed with until he meets his match, Robert Barrat plays greedy Isaiah Middlebrack. He pursues the Confederates when they smuggles guns into the region and later goes after them with a troop of U.S. Cavalry when they try to take ten-thousand cattle to Mexico. "Ebb Tide" scenarists Bertram Millhauser, "Geronimo" scribe Paul Sloane, and "Black Legion" writer William Wiser Haines adapted author Emerson Hough's novel "North of '36." Mind you, these characters are every bit as desperate as John Wayne and company were in "Red River," but Scott doesn't have somebody like Montgomery Cliff to contend with and a secondary character dispatches the chief villain before Scott can finish him."The Texans" opens at a river landing in Indianola, Texas, in 1865, where paddler wheelers are unloading cargo and supplies. The defeated Confederate soldiers are informed that they are still classified as the enemy until they shed their southern uniforms. In fact, the Union authorities refuse to let the men in gray pass the toll gate until they change clothing. Meanwhile, Ivy Preston (Joan Bennett of "The Woman in the Window") is driving a wagon laden with boxes of farm implements when a Union sergeant halts her so he can inspect her cargo. Kirk Jordan (Randolph Scott of "The Last of the Mohicans") spots the cargo and knows that the boxes contain weapons instead of tools. He helps Ivy get out of town before the Union authorities can poke around in those boxes. While Ivy delivers the weapons to Confederate Captain Alan Sanford (Robert Cummings of "Saboteur"), Kirk has to fork over ten acres of land to buy an ill-fitting suit of clothes. Ivy returns to Indianola to pick up her grandmother, Granna (May Robson of "Bringing Up Baby"), and Granna's ranch foreman Chuckawalla (Walter Brennan of "Red River"), so they can all return to their sprawling ranch Boca Grande on the border.Everybody else seems pretty tame until these two show up, and Robson and Brennan steal the show. Brennan's character is intrigued with locomotives because he has never seen a train and wonders where they put the engines after dark. Granna is a headstrong woman with pioneering blood who refuses to buckle under any adversary. The two characters provide most of the comic relief in "The Texans," but the comedy doesn't overwhelm the drama. Kirk has to save Ivy's bacon again when the Union authorities, principally Middlebrack (Robert Barrat of "Baby Face"), arrests her and questions her not only about the stolen firearms but also a renegade Confederate officer Sanford. Granna has no use for Middlebrack. "There wouldn't be no enemy if there were scum of the earth like you. You with your plundering, murderous reconstruction." A riot enables our hero and heroine to escape from Indianola, and they ride back to Ivy's Boca Grande Ranch. The Preston women own ten-thousand cattle, and Ivy wants to drive the herd to Mexico to feed Southern troops working with Maximilian. Things, however, don't work out for Sanford. He eludes death in Mexico only to find himself back in Texas where the authorities want him for treason.The scheming Middlebrack decides to let bygones be bygones with regard to the stolen rifles. Nevertheless, he saddles up with a detachment of Union cavalry and rides out to Boca Grande. He informs the Prestons about the new tax on cattle. While they are plying Middlebrack with liquor and food, Ivy strums a guitar and sings a coded song to Granna about taking the cattle away. Middlebrack plans to count the steers the following morning, but Granna drinks him under the table and Kirk leads the herd out. Middlebrack wastes no time when he recovers and chases them. Middlebrack dies during an Indian attack when Kirk's cohort, Cal Tuttle (Raymond Hatton of "Undersea Kingdom"), kills him with his tomahawk. Of course, we don't see Middlebrack bit the dust. Not only does this diminish the statue of his villain, but also it undercuts "The Texans." If you've seen "The Undefeated," you'll feel yourself on familiar turf.