The Man from Utah

Another of my DVD box sets is a Mill Creek set of public domain John Wayne movies. Recently, I decided to see if any of the movies in the set were coming up on TV soon, and a search of the listings sites revealed that The Man from Utah will be on StarzEncore Westerns at 8:00 AM on Saturday, January 8.

Wayne plays John Weston, who at the start of the movie is riding in on his horse to a town somewhere in the California/Nevada border area, as far as can be determined. More curiously, he's also singing, or at least he's being dubbed by a singer, although that goes nowhere as this isn't a singing cowboy movie. Wayne gets to town and makes an inquiry with the local marshal, Higgins (Gabby Hayes) about a job fighting forest fires. The bad news is, the last of those jobs has just been filled.

The good news is, Weston arrives in town just as a gang of bank robbers is pulling out of the bank trying to make their getaway. They get in a shootout with Higgins, who is clearly outnumbered, but Weston is able to get the drop on them and save Higgins' bacon. Higgins clearly likes that, and rides out after Weston to get him to come back to town where he's got another job lined up for Weston.

It seems that at the traveling rodeos, there's a group of people who might have an in with the promoter and are fixing the rodeo results so that they can keep all the prize money. And if there's anybody who appears to be able to beat these crooks, those people suddenly wind up dead of what seems like a snake bite. The rodeo is going to be going to a town in Nevada, and perhaps Weston could ride over there and sign up for the rodeo to figure out who the crooks are.

The Man from Utah only runs 50-some minutes, so it's not too difficult to determine who are the bad guys here. That would be Spike Barton (Edward Peil), assisted by Cheyenne Kent (Yakima Canutt, better known for his stunt work) and others. Their real plan is to rob the local bank of the take from the rodeo, which is expected to be substantial. Weston places a wager on himself to win the rodeo, and Barton suggests Weston throw the rodeo, induced by a wager on another of the competitors. Weston of course tries to win, getting the bad guys to show their hand with their method of eliminating the competition.

The Man from Utah is one of the many B westerns Wayne made at Lone Star in the years between the failure of The Big Trail and his redemption in Stagecoach at the end of the 1930s. It's not particularly good, but then it's a B western from the 30s, so you're not expecting the quality you'd get after World War II. There's a bit of stock footage from rodeos that's interesting, too.

The Man from Utah is the sort of movie that would be perfect for TCM's Saturday matiness block. It's nothing great, but an exemplar of the genre in a whole lot of ways.