Red River Range (1938)

Excellent but underrated film

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Good cast, great William Lava score, and generally high production values -- marred only slightly by an obviously fake riding scene with young Sammy McKim -- raise this Three Mesquiteers programmer from the routine.Bob Livingston had been replaced at this point in the series by a very good-looking John Wayne as Stony Brooke, but Ray Corrigan and Max Terhune continued as Tucson Smith and Lullaby Joslin.Veteran Polly Moran made a great lady dude visiting out West, and the bad guys -- a large number -- were very believable.Maybe this is just exactly what we expect from the pros at Republic (I like the sound of that word) Pictures, but George Sherman's directing was actually above the average. He used a moving camera to excellent benefit and got some superlative performances out of, perhaps especially, Crash Corrigan, who was in great shape, and looked handsome and heroic, and gave a very credible performance.Three Mesquiteers movies after the very earliest entries were programmers and probably were never expected to be considered classics, but they are. In part because of the unfailingly high quality of casts and in part because of the generally good quality of story.There was a lack of consistency in the settings, this one being set at about the time of the filming, with cars and trucks figuring as prominently as horses.But it all fits; there is no anachronistic feeling.This is good stuff, and I recommend "Red River Range," which you can find at YouTube.

AMC just premiered this film on their network. One can see that it came from a well cared for 35mm print. It appears the picture and sound were digitally mastered. It looked great in all its sweeping black and white glory. It is the best print I have ever seen of this film and compares very favorable to the other prints of this series shown on AMC.Personally, I like John Wayne as an actor in this series of films as Stony Brook then the A pictures he would soon start to make. Who cannot like that corny dummy Elmer. There is a kind of humor in these movies made by Republic that I have never seen from any other studio. My gut feeling is that it is a Americana feeling, and I like that. As in PALS OF THE SADDLE, Wayne's character as Killer Madigan is right on target while being slightly offbeat and wonderful at the same time.Great music, sound effects,humor and a rousing adventure make this a nifty film.

One of the more enjoyable entrées in the Three Mesquiteers series is Red River Range which finds the boys working as government agents to stop some cattle rustling. Unbeknownst to John Wayne, Ray Corrigan, and Max Terhune the meatpacking industry has hired its own agent, Kirby Grant, to get a line on the rustling. That in itself was an interesting aspect of this film, the inflation of meat prices as a result of cattle rustling. One never does think of the economic hurt, those rustlers cause. Kirby's cover is blown before he can infiltrate and folks in the Red River country already know the Mesquiteers are coming. So Wayne and Grant switch places and Wayne poses as an escaped killer.The focus of the investigation is a dude ranch where some mighty strange goings on are occurring. Can't reveal what the scheme, but I assure viewers it's a lulu.A bit more comedy than usual in this film in the person of old vaudevillian Polly Moran, an amazonian tourist at the dude ranch with eyes on the Duke. Good thing the investigation was over as soon as it was because who knows what John Wayne might have had to do to keep his cover.

Any adventure of the Three Mesquiteers will be good, but Red River Range is not as polished as some of the other movies I have seen in the series. By polish, I mean that were continuity and script issues that I felt could have been handled better.Everything starts fine with a build-up of the importance of the Mesquiteers. When the town sends for one investigator to help the local sheriff find out who has been stealing the ranchers' cattle they end up with three! However, there is a switch along the way. The meat industry sends out its own agent to investigate what is happening to the cattle in the area. That investigator is Tex Reilly (Kirby Grant) who happens to be an old friend of the Mesquiteers. When he runs into the trio he explains that his face may be known to the cattle rustlers, so he trades places with Stony (John Wayne) and rides into town with Tuscon (Ray Corrigan) and Lullaby (Max Terhune). Stony investigates Tex's lead by masquerading as escaped murderer who falls in with the rustlers. That makes a total of four people working as Mesquiteers. From there the adventure unfolds! There were a few things that made me feel the quality was lacking in this movie. In one scene Tex refers to "the kid" before any kid has been mentioned or seen. In the next scene Tuscon and Lullaby meet Tommy (Sammy McKim). A scene must have been edited from the film or the scenes were edited out of order. Another thing that is really minor but noticeable is the lack of development of the main bad guys, Payne and Hartley (William Royle and Perry Ivins). They are taking/giving orders throughout the movie, but they never come across as really strong villains. The last thing to complain about is something that I perhaps should not mention, but it was significant. Red River Range recycles a plot element that I remembered from a Gene Autry movie, Public Cowboy No. 1 which was released in 1937. In that movie the cattle rustlers butchered the cattle on the range, buried the hides and waste, and moved the beef out in refrigerated trucks. That is repeated in this Mesquiteers adventure. Complaining about re-using plot elements in a B western may be a bit like complaining about 14 shots coming from a six shooter without reloading, but what seemed to be an original twist on cattle rustling in one movie reeked of plagiarism in the next. To be fair to Red River Range there is a plot element that I have not yet seen anywhere else. Vacationers at a dude ranch are taken out to rustle cattle as part of the everyday activities without knowing that they are helping real cattle rustlers.Perhaps I have nitpicked too much because over all Red River Range is worth viewing.