by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Lightning
Carson Rides Again, a film made by Tim McCoy
as was working his way well down the Hollywood food chain. As a silent-era
Western star he had been under contract to MGM — where David O. Selznick had
cut his teeth as a producer by taking McCoy’s unit out to the conventional
Western locations and shooting two films at once, thereby giving the MGM
distribution arm two McCoy films for little more than it usually cost to make
one — and in the talkie era he’d been through Warners (where one of his
sidekicks was a then little-known actor named John Wayne), Columbia (where he
made his masterpiece, the 1932 pro-Indian Western End of the Trail) and by 1938, he was down to working at Victory
Pictures, an all-Western operation headed by producer Sam Katzman. The director
was Sam Newfield, whom I once referred to as “the Stephen King of directors,
who seemed more interested in how fast he could make them than in how good they
were.” The story was standard-issue Western stuff, though set in the 1938
present — automobiles and telephones appear in the story (though most of the
characters still move themselves about on horseback!) — and the American
Film Institute Catalog
indicates it as part of a “Lightning Bill” series and a sequel to a Tim McCoy
Western called Lightnin’ Bill (note the apostrophe instead of the final “g” in the first word of the
name) produced under different auspices — Excelsior and Puritan Pictures — and
with Sam Newfield directing but his brother Sigmund Neufeld co-producing with
someone called Leslie Simmonds.
The original Lightnin’ Bill is set in Texas, but in the interval between the
two films Lightning Bill Carson (Tim McCoy) has settled in San Francisco where
he’s become a federal agent for the Department of Justice. Only he gets a call
to come back to Jerome, a Western town near Los Angeles, where his sister
Katherine Smith (Jane Keckley) has summoned him to get her son Paul (Bob Terry)
out of a jam. It seems that bandits ambushed the car being driven by Paul with
$10,000 of the Jerome National Bank’s money he was supposed to transfer to a
larger bank in the city. The idea was to shoot both Paul and the other man in
the car, Gilroy (Wally West, a silent Western star whose career descended
faster than McCoy’s did, though he occasionally got character parts under his
real name, Hal Taliaferro), and steal the money, but when Paul escaped — albeit
without his gun — the baddies stole Paul’s gun with the intent of using it to
frame him for Gilroy’s murder. Carson arrives in Jerome and hits on a plan to
infiltrate the gang by posing as Mexican bandido José Fernandez — and his “Mexican” makeup is
relatively convincing though his voice isn’t (and it is a bit disappointing that the man who showed such
extraordinary sensitivity to Native Americans in End of the Trail is basically playing Mexican Stereotype #101 here)
— which he does by hanging out at the combination saloon and casino run by
Hagen (Slim Whitaker), beating the pants off of Hagen’s henchmen at poker
(don’t these guys know how to rig a game to take the sucker from out-of-town?), and ultimately
winning their trust enough that they give him the $10,000 they stole from the
bank so Fernandez can take it across the border and launder it. Carson is
interested in proving Paul innocent — when he caught Paul he sent him to L.A.
and told Tom Reynolds (James Flavin), his colleague from the San Francisco
office, to catch Paul at the general delivery window of the L.A. post office
and hold him until Carson could complete the job of rehabilitating his
reputation — but he also wants to find out who’s the big boss of the bank
robbers, who in something we’ve known all along since we’ve seen him planning the robberies turns out
to be bank cashier George Gray (Karl Hackett). But before Our Hero can find
that out, Chuck (Ted Adams), one of the members of the gang, traces him to the
barn behind the Smith home in which Carson makes his changes of identity, and
when the gang meets to steal $50,000 in payroll money from the bank, Chuck
shows up with the Carson clothes ready to “out” José as Carson, and there’s a
final shoot-out in which Carson uses his ability to do super-quick draws to
subdue the rest of the gang until the local sheriff (Frank LaRue) arrives with
a posse to take the baddies into custody.
Lightning Carson Rides Again is a pretty generic “B” Western for the period — a
lot of these films were set in
contemporary times and one critic ridiculed them as being set in a “never-never
time in which horses, automobiles and airplanes are equally important means of
transportation” (though this one doesn’t contain planes, at least) — and though McCoy is 47 he’s still a
believable action figure and, perhaps because Sam Katzman’s budget didn’t
extend to a lot of stunt doubles and breakaway furniture, the action scenes are
unspectacular but at least realistic. As Charles said, it’s odd to see a bar
fight in a Western that stays confined to the two people who start it and doesn’t “go viral” and sweep up everybody in the bar (or,
in the case of The Spoilers, outside the bar and onto the
streets); and only the final sequence, in which Carson ambushes one of the
baddies single-handedly with the old trick of suspending his hat against a rock
so he can sneak around to the bad guy while the baddie still thinks McCoy is
where his hat is, strains credibility. Though hardly at the level of End of
the Trail (an amazing movie that was
the first period-set Western to treat Native Americans sympathetically and
makes the case that the U.S. government systematically broke its treaties with
the Indians that otherwise wasn’t part of American discourse until Dee Brown,
Vine DeLoria, Jr. and Howard Zinn published their revisionist histories in the
late 1960’s and early 1970’s), Lightning Carson Rides Again is a competent, workmanlike Western featuring a
lot of behind-the-scenes people who would later go on to work for PRC (director
Sam Newfield and set designer Fred
Preble) or Monogram (cinematographer Marcel le Picard).
