California Gold Rush (1946)

Directed by R.G. Springsteen
Written by Robert Creighton Williams
Starring
- Wild Bill Elliott
- Bobby Blake
- Alice Fleming
- Peggy Stewart
- Russell Simpson

There are some mysteries man was not meant to know, and one of them is how a viewing audience is supposed to treat the continuity of a series of features like the Red Ryder movies which take a small set of characters and transplants them in each installment to a new locale which directly contradicts previous features. As you can tell from the title, the current movie takes place in California, which is where Red’s aunt “The Duchess” Wentworth (Alice Fleming) currently lives — which, in true Orwellian fashion means that she has ALWAYS lived here, and any reference to her previously being a grounded and well-established citizen of Dodge City or Las Vegas or Silver City will only earn you a trip to the reeducation camps.

And as in the majority of the Red Ryder features I’ve reviewed, it’s the Duchess who affords Red an entrance into the plot. Our story opens with a stagecoach robbery by a small band of masked men, led by a proudly unmasked hooligan named Chopin (Dick Curtis) who cheerily warbles away on his harmonica whenever he isn’t speaking. The haul from the stagecoach is pretty paltry — a few gold watches and some women’s petticoats — but they still leave behind them a dead man, son of the stagecoach line owner. They also leave behind a very disgruntled Duchess, who had been a passenger in the coach, and thus finds herself talking with the owner, Colonel Parker (Russell Simpson, looking very much like Lloyd Bridges’ long-lost brother) at the coachhouse about his ill fortunes. He’s lost three sons to bandits, and most of his drivers are getting gunshy, but schedules and such must be maintained if a stagecoach line is to win any contracts at all. (Peggy Stewart, who also appeared in Sheriff of Las Vegas (1944), here plays the Colonel’s daughter Hazel, because for some bizarre reason every Red Ryder movie has to feature a young and available woman in whom Red shows no interest at all.)

If people are passing you on both the left and the right, you’re in the wrong lane.

Fortunately, the Duchess puts her nose in and offers the services of her nephew. She writes him a letter, and…

Can I just break in here and remark on how, well, paranoid the plots of the Red Ryder movies are? Every one of them hinges on hypocrisy and conspiracy, with some crypto-criminal pillar of the community behind the nefarious goings-on. I guess that, being set in the late 1890s as the wildness of the Wild West was becoming tempered (and with white/Native conflict being functionally verboten in these movies), it wasn’t feasible to set Red up against more straightforward bandits or similar menaces. But the focus on organized crime (which is really what we’re seeing here) may be more a product of the era of production.

I bring this up because the Duchess drops her letter off with Mr. Murphy (Joel Friedkin), owner of the hotel in which she resides. And Mr. Murphy is The Boss of the stagecoach-robbing gang, as we soon learn when he opens and reads her letter in his office, in the company of Chopin. The reputation of Red Ryder shakes him, but he doesn’t dare simply destroy the letter unsent because the Duchess would only send another one. Instead, they hatch the following plan:

“Hah! My team’s up at bat first!”

A man in their organization, Felton (Kenne Duncan), has a brother by the handle of “The Idaho Kid” (all the more impressive states were taken) who’s looking for somewhere to hide out. Murphy suggests that Idaho come to town and lie in wait for Red Ryder as he answers the Duchess’ call. Then Idaho could kill Ryder, impersonate him, and work for the Colonel while simultaneously working for the gang. Idaho would have to kidnap an Indian kid on the way into town to play the part of Little Beaver. And what about when the Duchess sees that this isn’t really Red Ryder? Well, they’d keep the real Little Beaver as a hostage so she’d stay quiet.

Remember, this is supposed to be a better plan than simply destroying the letter.

Red dutifully heeds the Duchess’ summons from Blue Springs, Wyoming (no clue what he was doing there, but it was obviously something that he could drop in a heartbeat to travel to California) and he and Little Beaver walk right into the ambush. Unfortunately, the Idaho Kid (Wen Wright) isn’t really good at ambushes, so after a hearty fistfight with Red, Idaho ends up with a bullet in his torso. Between talking to Idaho’s kidnapped Indian kid (Dickie Dillon) and examining the effects in his pockets — a coinpurse with “The Idaho Kid” on it in big letters, and a copy of his own wanted poster — Red figures out that someone was planning to impersonate him. So he and Little Beaver ride on into town and make the proper arrangements; now the bad guys think that he’s Idaho, and that the real Little Beaver is being held somewhere out of town. Chopin even goes and taunts the Duchess with Little Beaver’s life so she’ll play along. So when the Duchess sets eyes on Red Ryder, who is actually Red Ryder, she has to pretend (with his whispered encouragement) to think that he’s the Idaho Kid, so that the bad guys watching won’t suspect anything — although she has to react subtly, so anyone else watching won’t suspect that Red isn’t who he says he is. Though he IS who he says he is, but… Man. I should do these reviews with a whiteboard. Nobody even mentions the fact that “Red” Ryder is so called because he’s a redhead, a trait which I don’t think the Idaho Kid shared. I guess that’s how people think when they inhabit black-and-white movies.

An imponderable: When Little Beaver grows up, does he become Big Beaver? Or just Beaver?

The charade doesn’t last all that long, though. Riding for Colonel Parker, Red foils a robbery attempt and is identified doing so by Chopin. Then through Felton, Murphy realizes that Red Ryder is indeed Red Ryder, not the Idaho Kid pretending to be Red Ryder. (Whiteboard!) So what do they do? Why, have Felton denounce Red to the sheriff as — HOLD ON. There’s a sheriff in this town? Just casually standing around the hotel? Where’s this lawman been during all the recent daylight raids on the stagecoach line within miles of town?

Whatever. Felton tells the sheriff (Tom London) that Red is actually the Idaho Kid. (In other words, when the people who thought that Red was the Idaho Kid impersonating Red find outthat he’s Red impersonating Idaho impersonating Red, they go to the sheriff that he’s actually Idaho. Holy cow.) Felton does this in the hearing of the Colonel, who has just sent Red to bring in a load of gold from the smelters under the radar (anachronism on my part) so the outlaws can’t get it. Oh, and Chopin and Mr. Boss have already kidnapped the Duchess and removed her luggage to make it look like she was in cahoots with “Idaho.” And that’s all it takes for the sheriff to deputize every able-bodied man to go out hunting for Red. Again, where were these amazing powers of law enforcement when one or two stage drivers were coming in dead from each run?

“Me?! Well, get a load of how HE’S dressed!”

So with Red pursued by both the outlaws and the posse, it’s time for a very uncommon occurrence in one of these movies: Little Beaver gets to do something! I mean, aside from comic relief, a function which he fills in this movie as much as in all of the rest; this time around, his main shtick is to stand behind Colonel Parker and mime along with him as the Colonel goes on one of his little cussing rants about schedules and such. (Relax; the Colonel’s worst expression is “Ding-dang it all!” You can fill in the more realistic Deadwood dialogue in your own imagination.) But this time, when Red is first robbed of the gold by the outlaws and then arrested by the posse, it’s up to Little Beaver to get Red free, and then to lead the posse to where the robbers have hidden themselves and the Duchess. Yay for little Bobby Blake!

“At last! A captive audience!”

As with most of the entries in the franchise, it’s a short and tight little feature, clocking in at 53 minutes. The brisk pace over well-worn Western territory means that nobody has to worry much about acting in between the fistfights and gunfights and horse chases.