Randy Rides Alone

Tomorrow, August 3, is the day in Summer Under the Stars for one of Hollywood's most outsized stars, John Wayne. TCM has a fairly broad selection of his films, at least in terms of career range from the Poverty Row days through to almost the end of his career, although most of the content this time out is westerns. I happen to have one of the Povery Row westerns airing tomorrow on an ultra-cheap Mill Creek box set: Randy Rides Alone, at 9:00 AM. Not having done a post on it before, I decided to watch it so I could do a post now.

John Wayne plays Randy, and as you can guess, the movie starts off with him indeed riding alone into a town where he immediately stops at the saloon of one E.D. Rogers (referred to as Ed in the movie although it sure looks like there are periods on the sign) to get a drink at the bar where he hears a piano player. He discovers that there's a player piano, and that the bartender and everyone else in the bar has been shot dead, slumped over the bar in a scene that's somewhat surprising for 1934. He sees a wanted poster, with the eyes shot out of it and a handwritten note informing the sheriff that this is what's awaiting him. Randy rips the handwritten note off the poster and saves it, which is a bit of obvious foreshadowing

The sheriff walks into the saloon, together with the posse that he's deputized, which includes a man named Matt the Mute (George "Gabby" Hayes before he was called Gabby) and, finding Randy, immediately assume that he's a likely suspect in having killed the barman, being caught in flagrante delicto and all that. As part of the arrest, Matt the Mute wants to "say" something, which he has to do in handwriting. We see the message, and it's obvious to the viewer that it's the same handwriting as the message on the poster. If Randy had known about Matt the Mute, he might have left the message on the poster for the sheriff to find and put two and two together. Instead, Randy gets arrested and put in jail. Matt the Mute goes to his hideaway and reveals that his moustache is a disguise.

After all that, a woman comes out of a hiding place in the saloon, opening up a hidden trapdoor in the floor in front of the bar. In the chamber is a strongbox, and it doesn't take much to figure out that this is what the shooter was looking for. Indeed, Matt tells his men that the safe was empty. He also gives us the exposition that the woman, Sally (Alberta Vaughn, an actress I don't think I'd heard of before since she never made it past B movies and retired a year after making this movie) is the niece of Ed Rogers. Matt and his men are looking to take over Ed's bar, since it will give them control of everything that goes through the valley for 20 miles on either side, and that includes gold shipments.

Sally comes to visit Randy in prison, where he reveals that he's actually an agent from the shipping line sent to check up on the place, and it's going to be his job to help find the killers. But Sally releases him from the jail in a way that's rather illegal. Randy's going to have to go rogue to stay one step ahead of the sheriff and find who really committed the crimes.

Randy Rides Alone is a 52½-minute B movie, and while that certainly shows in the production, it's also not bad for something that was never conceived as anything more than a Poverty Row B western. Granted, I don't think anybody would remember it if it didn't star John Wayne, but that says more about the modern viewer, I think, than the film itself. Definitely one to watch as an example of what those B movies were like.