The Dawn Rider (1935)

I pulled my John Wayne box set out of cold storage recently because it's got a bunch of short B movies on it that I hadn't blogged about before. Last night, I sat down to watch another of them, the 1935 version of The Dawn Rider.

John Wayne plays John Mason, who is visiting one of those stock old west towns that even has an establishing scene of one man making another dance to gunshots. But the reality is that Mason's father lives here, working for the Wells Fargo-like stagecoach/delivery company, and young Mason would like to see his father again. On his first few minutes in town, Mason gets into a fight with Ben McClure (Reed Howes), but it's the sort of fight after which the two fighters become friends.

It's also a good thing that Mason came to town now to see his father, because he's not going to have too many more chances to see Dad. In fact, he's not going to have any more chances, since a gang of outlaws holds up the station, killing the elder Mason in the process. John tries to chase after the bandits, but the only evidence he's able to get is that one of them was wearing a polka-dot bandana. Worse, for his troubles, he gets shot.

But unlike Dad, the younger Mason lives, because without that, we'd have even less of a movie than we get here. Mason gets taken to the home of Alice Gordon (Marion Burns), who nurses him back to health. And as you can probably guess since Wayne and Burns are the two top billed players in this story, they're going to fall in love. This even though Alice is already engaged to... Ben McClure. Worse, when Alice's brother Rudd visits, Mason finds that Rudd is wearing a polka-dot bandana.

The Dawn Rider is predictable and utterly unoriginal, but it's also the sort of movie that wasn't expected to be very original. At best, it might have been the bottom of the bill at movie theaters that weren't affiliated with the studios; more likely it would have played as part of the Saturday matinee. Young boys of the day probably would have enjoyed the stunts and the gunfights, although I don't know how much they would have cared for the perfunctory love story. Somehow I have the feeling today's young people would find it terribly old-fashioned, since it's so low-budget and, of course, in black and white.

None of the above paragraph is meant to be taken as suggesting that The Dawn Rider is a bad movie. I think it succeeds in doing what it would have set out to do in 1935, but those would have been extremely modest aims. Apparently the movie was remade about a decade ago with Christian Slater taking on the John Wayne role; I haven't seen that version.