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Simply A Masterpiece

Fantastic!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Sarah Padden a tough old frontierswoman and rancher calls on an old friend Buck Jones a US Marshal to investigate rustling in her area. When you call on one Rough Rider you get three as Marshals Tim McCoy and Raymond Hatton come to help also.The situation is a bad one as a lot of the ranchers are mortgaged to the hilt to the town banker Walter McGrail. So you know he has to be the one behind the rustling with a couple of other partners. Bankers were popular villains in those years. One thing about McGrail that kind of tickled me. When the jig is up and the Rough Riders are closing in, McGrail's instinct as a banker kind of tickled my funny bone.You'll have to watch Riders Of The West to find out.

Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, and Raymond Hatton are called in to solve a series of sometimes deadly cattle rustling incidents, all involving ranchers indebted to the local bank.An okay entry in Monogram Pictures' Rough Riders series, this is a little more plot-heavy than the average poverty row western programmer. Once again, action and gun-play take a backseat to undercover sleuthing, with the Riders' well-used tactic of disguising themselves as separate strangers in order to work different angles of the case. McCoy manages to outshine his co-stars yet again.Always fun to watch is Charles King, playing a heavy for the umpteenth time in a B-western.

"Riders of the West" was the seventh of eight Rough Riders films to come out of Monogram Pictures. The stories brought together the aging cowboy trio of Buck Rogers, Tim McCoy and Ray Hatton who usually met up at some point in the movie to thwart assorted villains and desperadoes. In this one, the boys are summoned by rancher Ma Turner (Sarah Padden), who's cattle have been stolen. The set up is a familiar one as local ranchers lose their herds to rustlers, they can't make their mortgage payments, and the crooked banker forecloses on their property. The cast of villains will be a familiar one to fans of 'B' Westerns, with Harry Woods as crooked saloon owner Duke Mason, and Walter McGrail as larcenous banker Miller.Probably because they were getting older, the picture's heroes didn't engage in a lot of physical action, though Buck Jones can still put the hammer down when he's astride his horse Silver. Usually, Jones would take on an under cover assignment, but this time it's McCoy who impersonates a special investigator from the Cattlemen's Association after hijacking the real one away from a stagecoach holdup. The bad guys hoped to stop him from arriving at Red Bluff to complete his mission. Curiously, after learning that Investigator Dodge was hidden away in Ma Turner's hayloft, we never see him again. I wonder if he's still up there?Though Monogram planned to continue the Rough Riders series, World War II intervened and Tim McCoy returned to active duty. Jones and Hatton made one more film as their characters Buck Roberts and Sandy Hopkins in "Dawn on the Great Divide". Hatton continued portraying the character Hopkins for Monogram as the sidekick for their new star Johnny Mack Brown, using themes that were developed to be used by the Rough Riders.

"Riders of the West" was another in Monogram's "Rough Rider" series starring Buck Jones, Tim McCoy and Raymond Hatton. It's not their best feature but the chemistry between the three stars makes it enjoyable nonetheless. It boasts a good cast of supporting players, some of which in my opinion, were miscast.The story is that old "B" western standby of the bad guys rustling the local ranchers cattle in order to force them to mortgage their ranches with the villainous banker.First we have the crooked banker, Miller (Walter McGrail), the crooked saloon owner, Duke Mason (Harry Woods - minus his signature mustache), the crooked rancher, John Holt (Robert Frazer), the crooked sheriff (Lee Phelps) and the "henchies", Hogan (Charles King), Slim (Tom London), Red (Bud Osborne) and Kermit Maynard as "one of the boys".There's the son of the villainous rancher, Steve Holt (Dennis Moore) romancing Hope Turner (Christine McIntyre) daughter of the feisty old Ma Turner (Sarah Padden) who sends for the Rough Riders. Milburn Morante is also along as Joe, the storekeeper.Jones doesn't go under cover in this one but McCoy poses as the Cattlemen's Association Investigator and Hatton as a snake oil salesmen. Before long the "boys" identify the trouble makers and bring them to justice.This film, like others in the series contains little in the way of action. There's the usual shooting the gun out of the villain's hand sequences but no fisticuffs. The casting of Walter McGrail was a mistake. I mean they had Harry Woods in the cast. He was one of the baddest of bad guys ever to ride out of Gower Gulch. He has little to do in this one except play second banana to McGrail.The producers also had Charlie King in the cast but he too has little to do, as does the veteran Tom London, and Bud Osborne doesn't even get to drive a stagecoach. Some veteran observers might remember Christine McIntyre as foil for the Three Stooges.In spite of its faults, it's still a thrill for me to watch these three veteran stars (all went back to the silents) perform together.