Rex plays it for laughs
There were so many ‘programmer’ Westerns
in the 1930s and so many screen cowboys, that it is difficult to remember them
all. All the big studios were churning out B-Westerns by the dozen and there was a host of minor
outfits too, some of them real two-bit affairs. If we take the year 1935 as a
typical example, there were an astonishing 148 Westerns released. William Boyd,
Jack Perrin, John Wayne, Gene Autry, Johnny Mack Brown, Ken and Kermit Maynard,
Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele, Bill Cody, Tom Tyler, Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, the list
goes on and on – you could certainly add to it.
One of the most prolific was strapping Rex
Lease, who had first appeared in Tim McCoy silent oaters in the late 1920s
and coped with the move to talkies as the decade ended, starring in B-Westerns
for Poverty Row studios. In 1935 alone he was in six. He slipped back a
bit in the 1940s, playing second fiddle to the likes of Roy Rogers, and later
took smaller and smaller parts. He did Western TV shows in the 1950s and
altogether in his career made over 160 Western appearances, the last one being
an episode of The Life and Legend of
Wyatt Earp in 1960. He died in 1966.
A young Rex Lease
A typical mid-30s Rex Lease offering was
Fighting Caballero, a low-budget 60-minute
black & white picture made by Weiss Productions in conjunction with Argosy Production
Corporation (no relation to John Ford’s Argosy) and released by two outfits,
Superior Pictures and First Division. Names like superior and first division
were expressly designed to mask the reality…
A B-Western. I mean, really B.
To be fair to Rex, he did have a certain
flair or panache about him, and he liked hamming it up. He had the ideal
opportunity in Fighting Caballero
where he plays a Mexican bandit (who isn’t really, of course) and naturally he
finally gets the gal. The lady in question is Dorothy Gulliver, who, like Rex,
appeared in a great number of Westerns, though her career was in decline (as
Rex’s would soon be). She had worked with the likes of Jack Hoxie, Hoot Gibson,
John Wayne and Wild Bill Elliott but by 1933 she was reduced to being billed
only as ‘Girl’ in King Kong. She was
pretty, and she isn’t at all bad (within the very tight limits of a lousy
production and script) as an insect collector from back East who is, natch, more
than she purports to be.
Dorothy in her heyday
It’s set in the 1930s on the Tex-Mex
border, though it’s that strange time-warp 1930s that B-Westerns of the period often
inhabited where automobiles and people in contemporary dress co-exist with pistol-packin’
cowboys. There are some bad buys counterfeiting US dollars (a very common plot
line) and they have to be foiled.
Rex has a singing sidekick, Pedro (the
equally unMexican Earl Douglas) and a lot of the plot is played for laughs.
Chief comic is old-timer Alkali Potts, played by Milburn Morante (it could have
been Fuzzy Knight, Gabby Hayes or any of a number of the type, though the
studio probably couldn’t quite afford them). The IMDb bio of Morante tells us
that he was “a prolific character actor, both in slapstick farce and as comic
relief in westerns, notably as sidekick to Buzz Barton in a series of oaters
made between 1926 and 1929. As visual madcap comedy waned with the advent of
sound, Milburn confined himself almost exclusively to playing grizzled
prospectors, tramps, bartenders and more town drunks than one can throw a
whiskey glass at. On occasion, he essayed the odd seedy second string villain
and was last gainfully employed in several episodes of The Cisco Kid (1950).” He is quite amusing, actually.
Milburn does the comic relief (again)
One of the baddy henchmen is Hal
Taliaferro, who was born in Wyoming and raised on a Montana ranch, knew horses
and worked as a wrangler for Universal - so a proper cowboy - breaking into Westerns in the silent
20s under the name Wally Wales. In retirement he became a landscape painter.
Franklyn Farnum (no relation to Dustin
or William) is the bartender. Farnum, I’m sure you know, was a famous cowboy
lead in the 1920s but with the advent of sound he dropped down the pecking
order, ending up, like Rex (and Jack Perrin and many others) doing bit parts in
Western TV shows in the 50s.
Rex is (pretending to be) Mexican bandido Joaquin
The picture was written and directed by
Elmer Clifton (so there’s no one else much to blame). Clifton had worked with
DW Griffith and had appeared in The Birth of a Nation (but then, who hadn’t? It’s a bit like The Iron Horse in that respect). He’d been directing since 1917,
doing some quite big-budget stuff, but guess what? Yup, his career was on the
wane. Well, these Poverty Row studios were where such people washed up. He had
been fired by Fox in 1924 after a fatal accident on his set.
I suppose moviegoers watched Fighting Caballero and many like it and
smiled briefly before completely forgetting it. Today, we Westernistas can look
at these pictures with some affection. Though heaven knows, if you are a
discerning cinéaste, do please steer clear.
A later Rex
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