Cyclone Fury

Mark Roberts has gotten a government lease and a contract to supply 300 wild horses to the Army every month, and is shot dead by Clayton Moore and his henchmen. His contract is inherited by little Louis Lettieri, and it's up to Charles Starrett to make sure that matters turn out well. Smiley Bunette is along for comic relief and if you look closely, you can spot Merle Travis in one of his four movie appearances as a backup musician before he made a name for himself.

The shrinking market for B westerns had forced some major economies on the series and Columbia had responded by using stock footage and cutting in major sequences from earlier Durango Kid movies. The editing is very good, but if you look closely, you can see that the film stock doesn't match perfectly. Still, it's an amusing entry in the series.

It was also the last movie that Clayton Moore released before he hit it big on the small screen. This came out on mid-August of 1951. The following month, THE LONE RANGER made the switch from radio to television. After fourteen years of movies, Moore was finally a star.