Texas Rangers, Hollywood style
Hollywood
loved the Texas Rangers. Of course silver screen Rangers were all noble and
there were no incompetent, brutal or racist men among them. Mike Cox, in his
book The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco
Peso, 1821 – 1900 (Forge, 2008), lists no fewer than 118 movies from 1910
to 1995 featuring Texas Rangers. Zane Grey’s best-seller The Lone Star Ranger of 1915 had been a seminal work of Ranger
mythology; it was a silent movie twice (1919 with William Farnum and 1923
starring Tom Mix) and a talkie in 1930 with George O’Brien as lead. Buck Jones
starred in The Texas Ranger in 1931.
In 1935
Walter Prescott Webb published his book The
Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, extolling their virtues in
glowing terms. This will give you a flavor:
The real Ranger has been a very
quiet, deliberate, gentle person who could gaze calmly into the eye of a
murderer, divine his thoughts, and anticipate his action, a man who could ride
straight up to death. In fatal encounter – the last resort of a good officer –
the Ranger has had the unhurried courage to take the extra fraction of a second
essential to accuracy which was at a premium in the art and the science of
Western pistology.
Webb’s
Rangers were thus gentle, telepathic killers. But his writings were very
influential and it is certain that King Vidor and co-writer Elizabeth Hill
(Mrs. Vidor) had read him. Vidor was looking to make an epic, big-budget patriotic
Western the following year, Texas’s centennial. He produced, directed and
co-wrote with his wife the motion picture The
Texas Rangers; it was thus a personal project. The resulting movie (like the Zane Grey tale, it would be remade, so the legend has been durable) was by
modern standards a corny whitewash but still, it has its points.
French poster rather good
The story is
one of three happy-go-lucky outlaws, Jim, Sam and comic-relief Wahoo.
They rob stages humorously and exchange badinage. But they get separated, and
Jim and Wahoo, hard up and jobless, join the Texas Rangers, while Sam goes it
alone, leading a gang of rustlers. When they run across Sam again (he's rustling), Jim’s plan is to get the inside information
on gold shipments and the like so that Sam and his bandidos can steal them.
Wahoo is the
first to get religion. He likes it in the Rangers and doesn’t want to be a
badman anymore. Jim has no truck with this and continues his nefarious
collaboration with Sam until he too realizes that he is more Ranger than outlaw and he
makes a deal with Sam, now known as the Polka-Dot Bandit, under the terms of
which each will leave the other alone as both go their separate ways.
That’s fine
until Ranger Jim is sent on a mission to capture Polka-Dot…
That’s about
the plot. Of course there’s a girl for Jim to romance, the Rangers Major’s
daughter, Amanda, and there’s a feisty orphan boy, Davy, whom the compadres
rescue from an Indian attack on his family’s cabin – he now lives with Amanda. Neither
Jim nor Davy wants anything to do with girls and civilized domesticity at first but
both are eventually worn down and subdued.
They got Fred
MacMurray to play Jim Hawkins (no relation to RLS). He was a Paramount contract
player who had risen to stardom and in 1935 he had played opposite Claudette
Colbert, Katharine Hepburn and Carol Lombard, but he had never done a Western,
so it was something of a risk. He acquitted himself well, though, and was
quite convincing as both a light-hearted outlaw in the first reel and the tough
Texas Ranger later in the movie when it gets much darker and more serious. MacMurray would go on to
make eleven more Westerns (see for example Gun for a Coward or Face of a Fugitive) and was surprisingly good in them. The Texas Rangers part had originally been
intended for Gary Cooper, though, and while Fred may make a fair fist of it, he
was no Coop.
Fred rides the range with Jack Oakie
Sam McGee,
the outlaw pard who would go on to be the bandit king Polka-Dot, was played by
Lloyd Nolan. Nolan had also found success at Paramount, getting two lead roles
in 1935 and starring with James Cagney and George Raft – gangster movies were
his thing. The Texas Rangers was his
first time in the saddle too. He would go on to get a biggish part in Wells Fargo with Joel McCrea the
following year but would only do five Western movies in his career, though he
became a regular on Western TV shows in the 50s and 60s. He’s not terribly
convincing as bandit chief, I fear, though he does try for a certain
charming-rogue style with a hint of steel beneath.
Lloyd Nolan as the Polka-Dot Bandit
As for the
comic-relief Wahoo Jones, that part went to popular comedian Jack Oakie. Oakie
had been a big-name star of comedies and musicals through the end of the silent
era and into the talkies (despite being functionally deaf). His contract with Paramount
was not renewed in 1934 but he occasionally worked for the studio in a
freelance capacity and had starred with Clark Gable and Loretta Young in the
1935 The Call of the Wild. He
certainly makes the most of his role as Wahoo.
As they rescue a kid in the first reel and are kind to him, the outlaws are obviously goodies
These three
were joined by Jean Parker as Amanda. Yet another in her first Western, she
would go on to do quite a few – she would be Molly in The Gunfighter in 1950.
So the cast isn’t
bad, though by no means Western specialists.
Gabby Hayes
is a corrupt judge, amusing as ever.
Some of the black
& white photography, by Edward Cronjager, is very good (Cronjager was a real artist). The locations
were in New Mexico, in fact, not Texas, but never mind. There’s also some
stirring music by Gerard Carbonara – though the intro and outro ballad is cheesy.
I actually
prefer the 1949 color remake, Streets of Laredo, mainly because it starred William Holden, who was an outstandingly
good Western actor. But still, the original The
Texas Rangers is well worth a watch. It almost made three revolvers. Might have made four with Coop as star.
Wahoo and Sam, outlaw buddies, later on opposite sides of the law