Ride, Vaquero!

Tomorrow's (Aug. 4) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Howard Keel, and his day kicks off with one of those movies whose titles I'd seen show up on TCM several times over the years, what with the movie having been made at MGM, but never actually watched until the last time it showed up on TCM and I recorded it. That movie is Ride, Vaquero!, at 6:00 AM.

Howard Keel is technically not the star here, as we don't see him for several minutes and the bigger role goes to Robert Taylor. Taylor plays Rio Cameron, a man in South Texas not long after the Civil War who works for José Esqueda (Anthony Quinn) and is José's foster brother: it's mentioned later in the film that Rio was orphaned and raised by José's mom alongside José. Esqueda is the leader of a group of disaffected people who are probably old enough to remember the days of the Texas Republic, and possibly even when Texas was still part of Mexico. Esqueda expects a lot more Anglos to come pouring into this part of Texas, and worries what it will mean for their lands.

One such person is King Cameron (Howard Keel). He's recently gotten married to Cordelia (Ava Gardner), and plans on making a new life for the two of them as a rancher in the Rio Grande valley. He's even spent the money he's saved up on the land and, one presumes, a bunch of cattle. But on the way to their new home, he and Cordelia see smoke on the horizon. That smoke is from the small house he had built on the land before getting Cordelia, and King has no illusions about who's responsible for the fire.

So King goes into town in order to organize the Anglos into finally bringing some law to the area. Oh, there's a sheriff, all right, but he's not able to do much so the rest of the time it's up to the cavalry to save the day, as is going to happen multiple times over the course of the movie. Esqueda and Rio show up to the meeting, so everybody of importance in the movie knows what's up. The one person who wants all the violence to stop is the local priest, Fr. Antonio (Kurt Kasznar).

Cameron rebuilds, only for all his hired help to flee the place -- they know that Esqueda is going to burn them out again, and again, as long as it takes for the Anglos to get the message that they're not welcome. Rio is caught in the middle, and when Cameron catches Rio after a raid gone wrong, Rio actually starts working briefly for Cameron. Complicating matters is the fact that Cordelia finds herself falling in love with Cameron. There's more violence to come, as well as a showdown between Rio and José when Esqueda decides to raid Brownsville.

Ride, Vaquero! is a competently-made movie, but I think there are good reasons why it's not so well known compared to other classic westerns. In my opinion a lot of that has to do with the time when it was released, in 1953. There's nothing groundbreaking in Ride, Vaquero!, and other westerns, like the Anthony Mann/James Stewart collaborations or Budd Boetticher's stuff, were beginning to show a darker psychological edge to their heroes. Worse for Ride, Vaquero! is that came out two months before The Robe, the first movie released in the new wide-screen Cinemascope format. Being in the old Academy ratio makes Ride, Vaquero! look even more dated and lacking in vista.

Ride, Vaquero! is entertaining enough, and that's not a bad thing. But there is better, and more spectacular, out there.