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I love this movie so much

To me, this movie is perfection.

Boring

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

An encounter with Frenchman Leo Carillo gives riverboat operators Richard Dix and Preston Foster the idea to start a ranch by buying property already inhabited by wild cattle, that had multiplied on the un-worked land during the Civil War. Things go well for awhile, until Carillo shows up to take what he believes is owed him, leading to misunderstandings with the neighbors that leave Foster acting more and more tyrannical.I'll give the filmmakers credit for managing to squeeze an epic tale into eighty-one minutes and nine seconds, on a low budget, but the ambitious, episodic script is just too loose for it's own good. The producers should have spent some extra money to develop it more.Still, it's an entertaining enough time-filler, thanks to the colorful performance by Carillo, better known for his role on TV's "The Cisco Kid" and a spectacular, action-filled final act.Foster's pretty good at playing bitter SOB's and Dix is a likable actor, as is Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, who plays an ex-whaler/cowboy. They're worth watching too.

A pretty decent movie about life on the Texas-Louisiana border in the years immediately following the US Civil War. Richard Dix and Preston Foster play Dan Taylor and Paxton Bryce. As the movie opens, they're former Confederate blockade runners running a river boat carrying freight up and down the Sabine River. They run into Dominique Beauchard (Leo Carillo), an unscrupulous Louisiana cattle rancher who rounds up loose cattle in chaotic post-war Texas and runs them across the river to Louisiana. Taylor and Bryce realize the potential of cattle ranching and so give up their riverboat and start buying up land in Texas. This becomes the start of their "American Empire." Foster is really the key to the movie. Dix may receive top billing, but all he does is play off Foster. Foster's Bryce is the character who changes and grows. He has his big dream, gets married to Bryce's sister (Frances Gifford) and they have a son (Merrill Rodin) and heir to the empire. But along the way Bryce changes. Building the empire becomes all that counts. He clashes with the other ranchers in the area by refusing to let them run their cattle over his land, and he blocks progress that would have benefited them all by refusing permission for a railway right of way across his land. The end result is ongoing conflict between Foster and the ranchers, and even between Foster and Taylor, who doesn't like Bryce's way of doing business. Eventually, even his family life falls apart because of his greed. In the midst of it all Beauchard doesn't disappear but remains a thorn in Bryce's side. Providing a few chuckles throughout are the exchanges between Sailaway (Guinn Williams) and Runty (Cliff Edwards), who work for Taylor and Bryce on both the riverboat and at the ranch.All this leads up to a pretty good gunfight at the end (which is really the only extensive gunfight in the movie) and, of course, to Bryce's eventual redemption and reconciliation with those he's pushed away. It all works pretty well. It's obviously a lower budget type of movie and there's nothing fancy about it, but it's good fun and pretty quick. 6/10

This turned out to be a fairly entertaining Western, as well as an interesting analysis of a once forward thinking individual whose aging conservatism turns rigid. Paxton Bryce (Preston Foster) winds up coming full circle by the film's blazing finale, having had to endure the alienation of those closest to him. You can figure out fairly early how this one's going to go even though the happy ending is tempered by the loss of Bryce's young son.Richard Dix is top billed as Bryce's long time friend and business partner Dan Taylor. Taylor's sister happens on the scene to provide the romantic interest as Bryce's future wife Abby (Frances Gifford). The film doesn't spend too much time developing that relationship, but that's not the central focus. The story has more to do with the regular expansion of the partners' land holdings and cattle business, with Leo Carrillo providing the foil as a hustling cattle thief. Except for the fact that he's the villain of the piece, he plays it pretty much the way he would as the Cisco Kid's sidekick Pancho in the 1950's TV series. He may not mangle as much of the English language here, but his temperament and mannerisms make it difficult to see him as the bad guy he's intended to be.Guinn Williams delivers in the comic relief role as 'Sailaway', a name derived from his free wheeling riverboat days with Bryce and Taylor. I've always enjoyed his roles in movies starring Roy Rogers, John Wayne and Errol Flynn, though here he's not in the usual sidekick role. Instead, he's a loyal employee of the two river men turned ranchers, who gets his kicks by verbally sparring with his buddy Runty (Cliff Edwards). Sailaway helps make the save near the end of the story when he gets wind of Dominique Beauchard's (Carrillo) plans to raid the town of Riverford. By that time, the opposition of the local ranchers to Bryce's restriction of his range land is about to get ugly, and becomes the turning point in bringing Bryce back to his senses.Though the open range theme had been done time and time again in 'B' Westerns of the Forties and Fifties, the formula still works well here. It reaches a rather dramatic but sad climax when Bryce's seven year old son dies from injuries suffered in a cattle stampede trying to enforce his father's rigid rules. I don't believe I've ever seen an element as harsh in service to a film of the era before. It works, but one can't help feeling that maybe they could have come to a happy ending without the loss of Pax Jr.

I'm sure that the folks on the Texas/Louisiana border must have had a a good laugh or two when Paramount's B picture unit inflicted this one on the war time public. Very simply the area along the Sabine River where the film opens is cotton country just like the rest of the Deep South or at least the Deep South was post Civl War. No big cattle empires there, they're much farther west in Texas, farther than Richard Dix and Preston Foster could ride to set up their empire.The film begins with the two of them partners in a riverboat and when Leo Carrillo tries a theft of their services by not paying them for hauling his cattle, they keep the cattle. And that's the beginning of the big Ponderosa like ranch they start.Along the way Foster marries Dix's sister played by Frances Gifford and feuds with his much smaller neighbors. They also have some further run ins with Leo Carrillo.Anyway, us easterners who like westerns usually don't bother with geographical trifles and it's still a good western from the production mill of Harry Sherman who produced all those Hopalong Cassidy westerns for Paramount. The climax is a blazing, and I mean that literally, gun battle that should have maybe been used on an A production.But I wouldn't have any but western fans look at it.