Riders of Destiny

I mentioned some time back that I picked up a cheap Mill Creek box set of John Wayne films, mostly from his Poverty Row days in the 1930s. Recently, I checked the listings services to see if any of the movies in the set were coming up on TV soon. One of them, Riders of Destiny, will be on StarzEncore Westerns tomorrow (March 26) at 10:05 AM.

This being another B western, don't expect too much from the plot. Wayne, as in The Man from Utah that I blogged about a couple of months ago, is being promoted as a singing cowboy type, although he didn't do his own singing and isn't really a cowboy. His character is Singin' Sandy Saunders, who at the start of the movie is on his way into town in the Antelope Valley, which could be anywhere although I would have guessed wrongly it was the Alabama Hills but it's actually Newhall, northwest of Los Angeles, according to IMDb. Anyhow, on his way in he runs across a sheriff who has just been shot, as the bad guys have robbed a stage.

In town, Saunders finds a population that is mostly at its wits' end. One man, Kincaid (Forrest Taylor), has obtained almost all the water rights, and is using that legal monopoly to charge exorbitant prices to the ranchers who live in the valley. In fact, Kincaid is intending to jack up the prices even further when the contracts expire soon, such that the ranchers won't be able to pay the charges and Kincaid can get the land at a bargain. The only farmer who has water on his land is Denton (Gabby Hayes when he was still credited as George Hayes); he's got a daughter Fay (Cecilia Parker) who is going to be the obvious love interest for Saunders.

Meanwhile, the townsfolk have written to Washington about the situation to find out if there's anything that can be done, and the folks from the Department of the Interior responded that they're going to send a man out to assess the situation. The only thing is, the locals haven't heard anything from Washington's man. It's not difficult for the viewer to put two and two together, however.

Denton has water, but it's not enough to provide all the irrigation to the other farmers, so he can only give them drinking water. But even that shipment is ambushed by Kincaid's henchmen (Al St. John before he was called "Fuzzy" and Heinie Conklin who are providing what is supposed to be comic relief). Saunders then gets the idea to work for Kincaid, leading to the ultimate resolution of the conflict.

Riders of Destiny has a basic B-movie western plot, and probably wouldn't be remembered if it weren't for the fact that this is one of John Wayne's films from when he was out in the wilderness between the failure of The Big Trail and his becoming a star with Stagecoach at the end of the decade. It's a serviceable western, which means that it's no great shakes, but it's not hopelessly bad either. And it's not as if audiences 90 years ago would have expected masterpieces from the B westerns. The one jarring thing to modern viewers will, of course, be the singing, which also does nothing to advance the plot.