Valley of the Sun (1942)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

RKO obviously made this 78 minute film as the extra attraction for double features. This Western is better made than a lot of RKO's second B pictures.James Craig and Lucy have some spark as a couple. The plot makes sense. There is even some humor. The script writers do pretty well.There are some action moments between the humor and the romance. This is worth watching just because it is Lucy doing something different. This is still quite a few years before Lucy and Desi would buy the RKO studios in the 1950's and make it into a television juggernaut. Lucy gets to stretch her comic acting here, long before her blossuming into a full fledged comedian. There are some silent folks like Billy Gilbert who appear in this one. This is 3 years prior to Lucy and Buster Keaton giving her comedy lessons at MGM in 1945. Still, you see the basis of her talent in this one.

Am still wondering why this 1942 film got the name that it did. It was idiotic to say the least and diminishes the brutal way the Indians were treated in the 1880s and before.With Lucille Ball in it, you would know that the film would turn to comedy which was probably the best part of this inane film.Part of the picture is the attempts by James Craig, who tried to help 3 Indians accused of stealing what was really theirs and winds up with a prison sentence, along with Cedric Hardwicke to break up the impending marriage between the Ball character and Dean Jagger. Some of the antics used to do this were funny especially throwing those itchy aunts down on Jagger at the wedding scene.It doesn't take Ball long to realize that she is making a mistake and that her true love has become the Craig character.This is one hour and nineteen minutes of sheer nonsense.

Valley Of The Sun is an offbeat comic western that stars Lucille Ball in a role you would normally see Dale Evans do over at Republic with Roy Rogers. But Lucy and the rest of the cast acquit themselves well under the handling of director George Marshall.Lucy runs the Busy Bee Cafe in Yuma where she's all set to marry Indian agent Dean Jagger who makes a nice living cheating the Indians. That was a great racket in the old west and who's to complain as they don't have the right to vote as yet. Army scout James Craig cares however, but he's had to bust jail after helping a couple of falsely accused Apaches escape.In making his escape Craig runs into both Lucy and Jagger and then has a dual mission to stop that wedding and get some justice for the Indians. Do you doubt he will succeed?This western moves at a really nice clip with the comedy some of the rough house kind like Jagger having a stagecoach run over some cactus to dislodge Craig who is riding by hanging on to the boot. Nevermind though Craig pays him back good in stopping that wedding and I won't reveal how. George Marshall was one of the great comic directors from the last century and never gets the due that he should. This minor picture for RKO shows him at his best.I remember back in the day in New York City when I was a kid, Valley Of The Sun was run frequently on WOR TV as they owned the entire RKO Library. It seems to have fallen out of favor in the past several years though for reasons I can't explain. This is a really fine film.

Not being a particular fan of westerns, I watched this primarily because I wanted to see Lucille Ball in something other than an "I Love Lucy" or "Lucy Show" type of role. Here she plays Christine Larson, owner of a saloon in the Arizona Territory in 1868 who's about to be married to the unscrupulous local Indian agent (Dean Jagger.) Ball's performance was OK - nothing really more than that; she didn't blow me away. It succeeded for me in that the role was very different from what I'm accustomed to seeing her in - there was very little of the outrageous physical comedy she later became famous for, although the movie tried to maintain a gently amusing feel throughout. (A typical funny line - "there's two ways to deal with women - and no one knows either one of them!") I didn't find the story all that compelling, although I appreciated that the Indians were shown as the victims of the Indian agent. There's typical shootout action and a lot of horses - your typical western in other words. As to Christine - we pretty much can guess from the beginning how her planned marriage is going to end up; it's just a question of how she's going to get there. If you like westerns, this would be a pretty typical one with a bit of humour thrown in. If you're not big on the genre, this will be lacking. I'm not big on the genre. 3/10