Vigilantes of Dodge City (1944)

Directed by Wallace Grissell
Written by Anthony Coldeway and Norman S. Hall
Starring
- “Wild” Bill Elliott
- “Bobby Blake” (aka Robert Blake)
- Alice Fleming
- Linda Stirling
- LeRoy Mason

Nowadays, Red Ryder is a nobody, a name whose only association for most people is with a certain Daisy air rifle that’s guaranteed to put your eye out. But way back, waaaaay back, it was different. Red Ryder was a cartoon cowboy created by Fred Harman, a sharp-shooting peacable redheaded man who, with his juvenile Indian sidekick Little Beaver, was all the rage in the funny papers, and beyond. There were Red Ryder Big-Little books and Red Ryder lunchboxes and Red Ryder pocketknives and Red Ryder popguns and Red Ryder neckerchiefs and the aforementioned Red Ryder BB guns. There was also a radio show, and naturally, there were the movies.

Over thirty-five features and serials were made in the 1940s alone, with at least four actors occupying the role of Red Ryder (because anyone can be a redhead on black-and-white film stock), and three child actors playing Little Beaver (none of them Native American, of course), sometimes alternating between pictures. The main cast of characters remained constant, with Red and Beaver and Red’s sidekick Denver as horse ranchers, plus Red’s aunt “The Duchess” running the freight company, and her own sidekick Carol, who was at times the subtle and chaste love interest (subtle, because the strips and the features were aimed at children who responded to kissing with, “Ew, yuck!”). It’s a structural scheme scheme that fits right between the adventure serials then in their heyday, episodic but ostensibly with a narrative throughline, and the ongoing TV shows that began a decade later, with a stable cast of characters confronting a new crisis every week in installments that didn’t require any particular viewing order.

“How to treat women? Shucks, Little Beaver, you don’t need me to teach you that.”

In the present feature, Red is played by lanky “Wild” Bill Elliott and Little Beaver by Robert Blake (yes, THAT Robert Blake), introduced to the audience in the first shot as they literally step out of an oversized funnybook. And the story setup is thus:

Red, Little Beaver and Denver (Tom London) are breeding horses for army use at a ranch outside Dodge City, where The Duchess is proprietor of the Ryder Freight Line, the only such line linking two railroads. The freight line’s stagecoaches have been under a storm of outlaw attack recently, a fact we learn when Red hears gunshots and rides with Little Bear to interrupt an armed holdup and stagecoach chase. (Say what you will about cheap cranked-out westerns, but the Hollywood Machine back then was admirably set up to stage these things, right down to galloping horsechases and Indiana Jones-style leaping between moving animals and objects.) By the time Red gets there, he at least shoots down a couple of the outlaws, but both the stage driver and guard are dead, and the moneybag containing $40,000 for the bank in Dodge is stolen.

“Now I’m an easygoing sort, but the Duchess here is liable to chew off your face and suck the jelly from your eyeballs.”

The entire situation is the result of collusion between Mr. Jennings (LeRoy Mason), the banker, and Mr. Bishop (Hal Taliaferro), the insurer, who want to get their hands on the Ryder Freight Line for cheap; Jennings arranges for his own money to be stolen (and a hefty commission to stay with the outlaws), Bishop soon refuses to insure Ryder Freight, and the Duchess will be forced to sell out for pennies on the dollar. And we know all of this because Jennings and Bishop graciously talk it over between them for our benefit. (Look, the feature’s less than an hour long and aimed at children, so obliqueness really isn’t what’s called for here.)

But the Duchess is made out of stern stuff like her nephew Red, and still has no desire to sell out. Jennings figures that Red’s moral support (and his gunslinging skills) are keeping her afloat, so he arranges for his outlaws to run off and stampede Red’s herd of several hundred horses, just before the Army’s supposed to take possession. Then when Captain Glover (Stephen Barclay) arrives from Fort Grant to investigate, Jennings puts the suspicion in his ear — and all over town — that Red’s the kind of man who may have run off his own herd into hiding to defraud the government. And a man who would do that could also be behind some stagecoach robberies, too. Can Red clear himself in time to keep his aunt from losing her business too?

[accompaniment: "Dueling Banjos"]

One of the characterizations of Red Ryder was always that he was a “peaceable man,” which meant he’d use fists instead of a gun when he could, and shoot to wound or disarm instead of kill; and in keeping with that, Red manages to stay on the Army’s side by being trustworthy and obedient to authority, rather than hightailing it so he can look for the real culprits himself. Nevertheless, it’s a startling contrast between children’s entertainment of that era and the present day when you realize that over a dozen men get killed in less than an hour in a western adventure about a “peacable man.” I guess this kind of wantonly violent entertainment paraded in front of the children and youth of the ’40s explains why the ’50s were overrun with the social anarchy and violence that is the fruit of such depraved entertainment… What? The ’50s were a peaceful decade, and social norms didn’t entirely break down from the onslaught of violent so-called “juvenile” entertainment? Oh. Well, I’m sure my thesis about the entirely negative effects of violent entertainment is correct, so I’d better cherrypick some better evidence to support it.

“I wonder if I’ve got time for one of those ‘Yah-hoohoohoo!’ yells before I hit bottom?”

It’s fortunate that Little Beaver proves invaluable in breaking the case (he follows a colt, one of the few horses recovered from the stampede, until it finds its mother in the hidden canyon where the outlaws have hidden the horses they drove off). Because otherwise, his “speak-um heap big strange-um” diction would leave him a net detriment to contemporary audiences. (Annoying child sidekick AND patronizing ethnic stereotype!) Nothing in my research says how Little Beaver ever became Red Ryder’s “ward”; you’d think that some schooling would eventually be in order, but I guess everyone thought Little Beaver was cuter as a borderline illiterate.

One’s a banker; one’s an insurer. Together, they ~~fight~~ commit crime!

I have several more Red Ryder features in my screener stack to review, so I’ll hold off on any sort of grand summation on cultural entertainment patterns and trends. Instead, I’ll just say that it’s unassuming and largely inoffensive minor entertainment, in which nobody puts his eye out. (Let’s see how many times I try to recycle THAT joke over a string of Red Ryder reviews…)