Billy the Kid in Texas

Billy The Kid In Texas, the second of six Billy The Kid movies starring Bob Steele, is a truly action packed P.R.C. programmer that I recommend to fans of the genre.

In this Billy wasn't a murderer at all but a framed man running from the law and doing good deeds much like The Fugitive decades later. The plot has Billy and his sidekick Fuzzy teaming up with Billy's brother to stop a group of bullying stickup men from robbing coaches.

Steele plays Billy with a macho demeanor and without much emotion in contrast to the squeaky clean Roy Rodgers, Gene Autry, and Tex Ritter, probably the only anti-hero of the nineteen-forties!

There's lots of blazing six-guns and rowdy fights along with a lightning fast pace that make this more entertaining than the average poverty row production.

Bob Steele takes on the role of Billy The Kid in Billy The Kid In Texas. With his short frame Steele was far more like the real William Bonney than most who played him on the screen. He was quite a bit older and in fact his name isn't even Bonney in this film. He's a Clark.

Whether it was Bob Steele or Buster Crabbe later on, we never see Billy doing any of the outlaw acts that made him an outlaw legend. He and whatever sidekicks he has are always doing good deeds when we see them.

In this episode after he robs a gang who just robbed a payroll and later stands up to the same gang in a saloon, Steele is made sheriff, but later finds his brother involved in the same gang. How to bring them to justice and extricate his brother from the jackpot is the issue Steele faces.

Lots of action cover some plot deficiencies, but fans of the smoking six guns won't mind at all.

I have no idea why Hollywood was so fascinated by a no-good jerk-face like Billy the Kid. However, despite his being a nasty villain, again and again, films were made depicting him as a hero. Buster Crabbe made about a dozen films as Billy, Bob Steele about a half a dozen and actors such as Robert Taylor and Roy Rogers also played the guy like he was pretty decent and not a dumb thug. In other words, the real Billy the Kid was nothing like the ridiculous image these films portrayed him to be.

In the previous Billy the Kid film I saw with Bob Steele ("Billy the Kid in Santa Fe"), Billy was an innocent guy who was set up by evil doers--making him look like a bandit when he really was an angel. And, much of the film consisted of Billy cleaning up a lawless town and catching the baddies. Well, this is EXACTLY the plot of "Billy the Kid in Texas"...except, of course, he's in Texas--a state the real Billy probably never visited (most of his adult life he lived in Indiana, Arizona and New Mexico). Historically speaking, it's all hogwash. But, the film is mildly enjoyable as is Fuzzy St. John's antics. Watchable but a history teacher's nightmare!

Steele rides head on Flash's (John Merton) Lazy A Ranch gang with a stagecoach robbery and then in town with a bar room brawl for the ages. The express local agent Mary Barton (Terry Walker) had several robberies and to make matters worse Billy the Kid may be the sheriff. Is hired hand Carleton Young also in with the gang? Wonderful movie with Bob Steele's great acting chops, legendary director Sam Newfield, Keystone Kops 'Fuzzy' St. John and the best heavy ever, Charles King.