Customer Reviews

The Lucky Texan [VHS]

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This early John Wayne western is my favorite, but this transfer is squashed down and cannot be altered. If you get it to a form where the characters are not compressed, then the sides of the frame are cut off. Get any other version but not this one. James Bryant Wiser.

Here's your chance to see John Wayne when he was a B movie maker, churning out 5 to 10 forgettable films a year with titles like "Born Reckless" (1930), "Arizona" (1931), "Texas Cyclone" (1932), etc. Then in 1939 he made "Stagecoach" with John Ford, and his new career as a major star began. Stagecoach earned 5 Oscars including Best Picture. Wayne followed up with "Dark Command" (1940) directed by Raoul Walsh, and then a series of war movies (e.g., "Flying Tigers" in 1942, "The Fighting Seabees" in 1944, "Back to Bataan" and "They Were Expendable" in 1945) and his classic westerns including "3 Godfathers" (1948), "Fort Apache" (1948), "Red River" (1948), "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949, "Rio Bravo" (1959), and "The Alamo" (1960) . Wayne was nominated for Best Actor for "Sands of Iwo Jima" (1949) and he would finally earn an Oscar for "True Grit" (1969).

This was the 3rd of 16 films Wayne made with Monogram/Lone Star Pictures. Monogram churned out films by the month, with little attention to detail or character development. Wayne said - "For any actor trying to get on in the business, working at Monogram was not a good career move. Most of the contract players there may have had regular work, but they generally didn't move up from there into the major studios - they went down and that's the direction I thought I was headed."

In 1934 alone Wayne made 9 films, all of them westerns. All but one included George "Gabby" Hayes" who was Wayne's sidekick in dozens of films from 1933 ("Riders of Destiny") to 1935 ("Rainbow Valley") when Hayes moved on to partner with Hopalong Cassidy and later with Roy Rogers and then Gene Autry. Hayes (1885-1969) made nearly 200 films between 1929 and 1950.

In this film, Hayes and Wayne are partners in a blacksmith shop and find a gold mine. And you get a chance to see Gabby act it up as a woman!

The villain of the piece is Wayne's long time mentor, stunt man, double, and good friend, Yakima Canutt (1895-1986). They first worked together on "The Shadow of the Eagle" (1932) and made dozens of films together. As Canutt became more hobbled from injuries, he turned to directing and had a successful career as a second unit director handling action scenes. Wayne gave him his first chance in "Dark Command" (1940). He went on to work on films such as "Ivanhoe", "Spartacus" "El Cid" and "Ben Hur".

BTW - this is a rare chance to see a stunt that doesn't work when Canutt (as Wayne) falls during a stunt.

Earl Dwire (1883-1940) appears but doesn't play a bad guy in this film as he did in many of the Wayne Lone Star films. Dwire ultimately made more than 150 films between 1921 and 1940.

Wayne's love interest is played by Barbara Sheldon (1912-2007) who made only 4 films of which this was the last.

The film was directed by Robert Bradbury (1886-1949), who was the father of another 30s western star, Bob Steele (1907-1988), who was a good friend of Wayne from their USC days (Wayne and Steel appeared in 6 films together between 1953 and 1970). Bradbury's other son, Bob's twin, dubbed the songs Wayne sung in the Monogram films (and he used the money he made to pay for medical school). Bradbury made more than 100 films between and 1918 and 1941.

FWIW - Bradbury's 1926 silent film "Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo" was Wayne's inspiration for his own 1960 Alamo film which he directed and in which he starred.

1934 was an OK year for films. The top box office slots went to "Viva Villa", "Cleopatra" and "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" and "It Happened One Night" was the big Oscar winner. That year "The Thin Man" series began, Karloff and Lugosi appeared in "The Black Cat", Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced in "The Gay Divorcee", Laurel and Hardy laughed it up in "Babes in Toyland", and Howard Hawks' "Twentieth Century" came out. There were no real major league westerns apart from the oat burners produced by Lone Star, but westerns were popular in serials, such as "The Red Rider" starring Buck Jones and "The Law of the Wild" starring Rin Tin Tin.

There's not much to see here except for historians of the western film and for people curious enough to wonder how "Gabby" Hayes looked without a beard and in a dress. Of course, stunts by Canutt in his young days are always good to see, and personally I never get tired of the young John Wayne.

The Lucky Texan (Robert N. Bradbury, 1934)

Seeing pre-Stagecoach John Wayne films is pretty rare these days. Thankfully, we have an independent TV station near me that's obsessed with all things Genre Western, and they've gotten their hands on a few scratchy old Lone Star reels featuring the pre-Duke Duke. This is the first one I managed to catch, a rather odd little comedy that defies description. Wayne plays Jerry Mason, a cowboy and co-owner of a blacksmith shop. His partner, Jake Benson (Gabby Hayes), discovers gold on the land, and Jerry and Jake start taking their haul to the local assay office. The guys who run the assay (Lloyd Whitlock and the ever-present Yakima Canutt) office realize our heroes are onto something good, and come up with a scheme to swindle Benson out of the land and frame Mason.

While The Lucky Texan uses all the trappings one is used to finding in the typical western (there are quite a few scenes that seem to exist for no reason other than to watch Wayne mount a running horse), it's not all that often you're going to find Gabby Hayes in drag. This one's not afraid to bend the mold a bit, though it never goes as far as breaking it. While it's in desperate need of restoration, at least given the print I saw, it's still quite enjoyable if you're into that sort of thing. ***

They don't make 'em like this any more, and I doubt they ever will again. This tall tale came in a 3-disc, 9 B-movie box set, called The Classic Tough Guys. The oddity in this collection is Houston's Beat the Devil, which has claims to being a good movie: Houston liked it, anyway. The others are, well, B movies; some of them might even be C movies. Two of them are Lone Star productions, featuring a young, athletic, guitar-toting and (would you believe it) singing John Wayne. I gather his singing was dubbed. Anyway, the better of these two is The Lucky Texan. There is something fondly endearing about this slice of the Old West. Cowboy fashions were different in the 1930s. Whatever happened to the obligatory ten-gallon hat? Somehow the characters and dress of these old fellows was otherwise more real and convincing than in later horse epics. The men actually looked as if they were used to working hard for a living. Life was much simpler and more gritty, and you can't help thinking that the way it's pictured is generally more authentic. In other respects a lot of the action is decidedly imaginative. When Duke is in a hurry to get on his horse, he doesn't mount it --- he flies on to it. That looked painful to me. There's a fair bit of fighting, which is fine: except that none of the punches connect. It doesn't matter, the guy who's taking the punch falls down anyway. The Lucky Texan is a grand story. It starts out as a tale of nefarious double-dealing by a couple of low-down ornery coyotes, and then, just after it's about half-way through, it turns into a sort of Wild West version of Charlie's Aunt. I was interested all the way through, and enjoyed several hearty laughs. I felt I was a young kid again, having a great time at the Saturday morning matinee. Why not watch it ? You might like it.

In "Lucky Texan" (1934), John Wayne plays Jerry Mason, who partners up with the old friend of his father, Jake "Grandy" Benson (George "Gabby" Hayes) on a gold strike. But as they work their claim in secret the local accessor, Harris (Lloyd Whitlock) and his henchman Joe Cole (Yakima Canutt), are trying to find out where the strike is so they can kill the old man. This one also has a rather funny chase scene that involves an early automobile and a railroad handcar, while the Duke is on a horse, that will have you thinking more of the Keystone Cops than John Ford, but it actually sort of works because these are really the sort of films you would want to see at a Saturday matinee.

Written & directed by Robert N. Bradbury, "The Lucky Texan" was the third of the poverty row Westerns that Wayne did for Lone Star between 1933 and 1935. As is usually the case with these B Westerns the attraction is both the young John Wayne before he fully develops his heroic cowboy persona and the stunt work of the legendary Yakima Canutt (the best one is where Mason leaps for a bad guy, misses, falls into a ravine, and ends up catching the guy at the other end). The print copy is less than stellar, but then it was not like they were working with first rate production values to begin with at Lone Star. I keep expecting these to be really bad, but they are more than halfway decent (so far).

The Lucky Texan has to be one of the highlights of John Wayne's career. Not only is the plot well explained, but it was also nicely written and flows well.
Synopsis: Mason (John Wayne), has joined his fathers gold mining partner, (George Hayes), to steak a claim up near their hometown. However, two very greedy storeowners would die to lay their hands on this gold claim, costing up to $20,000. One of them gets completely bested and turned in by John Wayne in the middle of the film, leaving the sheriff to lock up his own son! The climax is very exciting, with a car and horse chase to get rid of the threatening outlaws.
This is one of the early westerns not to be forgotten, as it it should be the pride of his Lone Star pictures and others.

Gabby Hayes in drag. Enough said