Thanks for the memories!

Overrated

Must See Movie...

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The Lone Star westerns John Wayne made for Monogram Pictures became his cut-rate purgatory before stardom. Some go down easier than others; "Texas Terror" mostly just goes down.Sheriff John Higgins (Wayne) is fooled into believing he shot his best friend in a gunfight with robbers. It's decided the friend, an old man who happened to be carrying a wad of dough, was part of the robber gang, so Higgins is off the hook. He turns in his badge anyway."When duty makes it necessary to take the life of a man like Old Dan Matthews, then I'm through with duty," Higgins declares."Texas Terror" is the kind of movie where things happen abruptly. Coincidences abound unexplained. People deliver long exposition in the form of conversation, stiffly and at one point, staring directly at the camera: "I'll be so happy to get home. You see, I'm Bess Matthews, and I own the Lazy M," a woman tells a driver after he has presumably been driving her awhile.Bess (Lucile Browne) is the daughter of the slain man, and for some reason new sheriff Ed Williams (George Hayes, not yet going by his better-known moniker "Gabby") decides Higgins is just the man to help Bess get Pa's ranch up and running. Never mind the fact he supposedly killed her father. Is this sort of thing supposed to be a secret forever, or does Ed think they will laugh it off when she finds out?Wayne's Lone Star pictures were mostly sub-par films, often worse than that. But most of them do feature Wayne coming into his own as a solid anchor performer. Here, however, he seems flustered and bored. At one point, when talking to the second male lead, villain Joe Dickson (LeRoy Mason), he seems to forget the character's name, awkwardly stopping mid-line.Director Robert N. Bradbury plays with spatial reality a lot here. In the beginning, we see Higgins right behind the robbers, even shooting one off his horse. The wounded man stumbles into a house where Dickson shoots Dan Matthews. This would have been heard by Higgins, you'd think, except somehow now the guy is ten minutes behind, so he can be led to believe he shot Matthews himself in a later battle, never mind the corpse is lying in the middle of a room, not near a window.The film does have some grace notes. A milking contest brings some country charm, with lovable Fern Emmett as Bess's Aunt Martha going toe-to-toe with a competitive but amiable old coot. You also have a scene where rustlers threatening the Lazy M are set upon by local Indians who act at the behest of their friend, Higgins. The Lone Star productions were death on stunt horses, but nobody in the 21st century can fault them on their handling of Native Americans. Throughout Wayne's run there Indians are depicted as his wise and loyal friends.Whatever the intentions on view, the movie is so draggy, unbelievable, and lifeless I struggled to sit through it, short as it was. Even Hayes seems less invested in his character this time around. Wayne looks formidably scruffy for a while after leaving the sheriff's job, even sporting a beard for a while, but he is hemmed in by the same exposition-laden dialogue that does in everyone else. "Texas Terror" wound up more like Texas Tedium to me.

. . . the ways. First off, "Dan" is Bess' dad and John's foster pops. That makes John's Canoodling with Bess some sort of incest (but probably just a mild case, by Red Nape Standards). Second, John and Bess fall in love with each other while John is firm in the sincere belief that he himself blew Dan's brains out awhile back. (But Bess later eagerly surrenders her Virtue to the thug who actually DID do in Dear Old Dad, as this sort of Patricide-by-Sexual-Proxy seems to be a major plot requirement for Early Westerns.) Third, the downfall of Joe Blow's Crime Empire comes when the Martin Brothers pass two stolen ONE dollar bills from a random heist months earlier to pay their cover charge for the Annual Halloween Dance & Milking Contest, which indicates that the Police State of Texas has always monitored the exchange of all cash down to the last buck far more carefully than it follows the swapping, selling, or gifting of military assault rifles capable of gunning down at least 102 civilians even when the lone shooter is surrounded by platoons of heavily-armed S.W.A.T. cops.

Encore Westerns presented "Texas Terror" in November of 2014 and I was able to see it for the first time. That I had not seen it before surprised me, and that I got to see it this night gratified me: It is an excellent entry of the Lone Star movies.Robert North Bradbury wrote and directed and had a cast of good actors, including John Wayne giving an unusual performance, one that merely foretells even greater performances to come.Wisely, director and make-up and costuming allowed him to look like the "desert rat" he was supposed to be.His leading lady, the lovely Lucile Browne, was one of the ablest among his B-Western co-stars, a very, very watchable young lady who I wish had made more movies.Leroy Mason is, as usual, the chief bad guy, but he is such a smooth and good-looking guy, I wish he had had his own series with him as the hero.All the players, even as the most minor characters, are totally believable and usually likable, helping make "Texas Terror" an excellent B-Western movie that I highly recommend.There is a lot of story in "Texas Terror," with lots of good action, marred somewhat by (in my opinion) out-of-place stock shots that could have been omitted to the improvement of the still good movie.One complaint: Neither the film credits nor even IMDb tells us who played Chief Black Eagle. That is a shame, a slap in the face to him and to us, the viewers and fans. I hope someone somewhere knows who he was and corrects this terrible omission.

No need to spend much time deconstructing "Texas Terror." This was the depths of the Great Depression and John Wayne was lucky to find any work at all, even at Monogram. These things were turned out with blinding speed. I think there may have been a two-year period in which Wayne starred in eight of these poverty-row features.He isn't really "John Wayne" yet. He's tall, handsome, slender, slow, and graceful but doesn't project the indomitable and bulky masculinity of his later years. And he hasn't yet learned to reserve his strength. He throws his lines out as if proud to have memorized them.The girl in the picture seems to have less talent than Wayne. The smoothest performance is from George Hayes who hadn't become the caricature of "Gabby". He seems like the only seasoned performer in the cast.He's not, though. Yakima Canutt and gang did the stunts and they were very good riders. And the photographers included Archie Stout who was to win an Oscar for Wayne's "The Quiet Man" in 1952.The writers didn't need to spend much time on the script because the few words we hear are strictly functional, uttered only in order to advance the plot. Audio title cards."Seen anything of young Higgins lately?""Waal, he was in town to cash a few nuggets last week. Ridin' around with a heavy heart. Turned into a desert rat, you know."The story is perfunctory. Wayne blames himself for the death of an old friend during a hold up and, in part to redeem himself, helps his friend's newly arrived daughter to get the ranch up on its feet, ensnare the villains, and marries her. The stagecoach is a Model T Ford. There's a modern telephone. Lucille Brown wears 1935 clothes. But what do you expect?