The Dawn Rider

An American Western; A story about a man returning home to witness his father murdered. Giving chase, he is shot himself. He plans to track down the elusive robber, though his plan is complicated by his love interest, and vengeance. This Lone Star Productions oater doesn't have much lustre. The acting is a bit stiff in most scenese and there is very little character development. A modicum of intrigue helped the story along, otherwise this is efficient at best. Nonetheless, it has some fine stuntwork - the horse chases are marvellous.

"The Dawn Rider" is one of the John Wayne films of his early Western period. That covers the early 1930s to 1939. From his start in silent films in 1926 to sound pictures, almost all of Wayne's roles were uncredited. And, even when talkies took over he still had some uncredited and minor roles. His first leading role was a Western in 1930, "The Big Trail." He got some minor roles in a variety of films, and his first break of sorts came when he began to get the leads in Westerns made by poverty row studios. Leon Schlesinger Studios and Paul Malvern Productions were the earliest, and by the time he became the leading Western star for Republic, he was well known and liked among Western film fans. Of course, his big break was the 1939 feature film, "Stagecoach," in which he had a supporting role but with a sizable cast of established and known actors of the day.

Well, in this film, Wayne is John Mason who goes on the hunt for the man who kills his father. Revenge and romance mix in "The Dawn Rider," when Alice Gordon nurses him back to health, and he falls for her but then finds out the man he is after is her brother, Rudd Gordon.

A plus in this and many of the Westerns made during the heyday of Western movies (1930s to the 1960s), is seeing the great stunt work of Yakima Canutt. Here he plays the Saloon Owner who's also in league with Mason's nemesis. As fits the trend with the poverty row studios, some of the leads, including leading ladies, don't have very long careers in film. So it was with Marion Burns who plays Alice. She made only a dozen films before her career ended in 1945. She did have three later TV series appearances.

There's a good amount of gun-slinging and fisticuffs, as well as horse riding in this film - all standard fare and traits of these early Westerns. But it's definitely a B Western all around.

This is one of John Wayne's very early B-Westerns (1935), before he became a big "A-movie" star. The plot, which involves the Duke's father being murdered, and Wayne wounded, by robbers, is fairly standard by B-Western standards, but entertaining enough. The old black-and-white film was colorized in recent times, and the colorization was well done.

The Duke has not yet adopted his Harry Carey-taught style of talking, with occasional pauses in the middle of sentences, so he sounds a little different than the later John Wayne. The fight scenes are not done as well as they were in, let's say, Gene Autry's first starring film, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," released about three months later.

But the colorizers did study the script and insert ironic "plays on words" in a couple of scenes. When Wayne is told by a cowboy he's having problems with that there's "no need for lavender cowboys" or words to that effect, he's wearing a purple shirt. Later, when the same cowboy asks the Duke if he wants to continue a fight they were having, and Wayne says, "No," the other guy says, "Why? You yellow?" Yes, you guessed it, dear readers --in that scene, the Duke is wearing a yellow shirt.

And in an early scene where Wayne's opponent has whipped another cowboy, and begins firing his six-shooter at the man's feet to make him "dance," I thought of a scene in "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" where one of Autry's buddies gets the drop on three bad guys and tells them to "dance." One says, "Aww, we can't dance!" And the guy with the gun replies, "Anyone can dance if they're properly persuaded!" The bad guys begin cutting a rug immediately.

I wondered, "Did the director of the Autry movie pick up and use those two situations?" Because at one point in the Autry movie, a "bad guy" tells a singing cowboy Gene, "We don't need no lavender cowboys!"

Overall, "The Dawn Rider" is a good B-Western -- but "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" has better acting, and some great songs.

Another interminable B-western starring John Wayne, from Monogram/Lone Star Productions and director Robert Bradbury. Wayne plays John Mason, a nice guy who's returned to his hometown to visit his dad just in time to see the old man get shot down during a robbery by masked bandits. Mason teams up with local tough guy Ben (Reed Howes) to find the bad guys, but things sour when they both fall for the same gal (Marion Burns). Also featuring Dennis Moore, Yakima Canutt, Earl Dwire, Joseph DeGrasse, and Nelson McDowell.

This is so routine as to become tedious, with the same badly-choreographed fight scenes and lengthy horse chases that occur in all of these Lone Star films. It was different seeing Wayne teamed with an equal instead of the usual Gabby Hayes type. This movie also suffers from having another terrible electronic keyboard score added to it sometime during the 1980's for a video release. Added to ostensibly endear it to younger viewers used to having a score throughout every movie, it really only serves to make a bad movie worse.

The Dawn Rider has all the right elements for a great movie: a love triangle, loyalties between friends and relatives, revenge, right versus wrong, and a strong-willed hero. Packaged into an hour long cowboy package, everything was right for a great movie. As with nearly all B westerns the time and money required to make a great movie were not there.

As John Mason, Wayne never loses focus in his pursuit of his father's killer. At the same time he is oblivious to the yearnings of his best friend's girl, Alice Gordon. Alice is unaware of her brother's criminal doings. Ben McClure is suspicious of Mason when he is around Alice. Rudd Gordon needs to stop Mason before being revealed as a murderer. All the while Yakima Canutt oversees everything as the evil saloon owner.

While the story is very straight forward with no plot twists, every scene works toward the climax. While it may have been the intention of Robert Bradbury to do this, too often a cheap western got bogged down with mindless action scenes. The Dawn Rider holds up very well as a movie that clearly tells its story and gets to the point without losing the viewer.

John Wayne was a strong figure on screen by 1935. His trademark swagger and delivery was still in the making, but he was genuinely the John Wayne of legend by that time. It took another four or five years for Hollywood to notice, though.