Beauty and the Bandit

Gilbert Roland spends this episode of the Monogram Cisco Kid series frustrating evil-doing William Gould by chain-smoking and making love to a succession of lovelies, including Frenchwoman Ramsey Ames -- she spends the first quarter hour of the movie pretending to be a man. Being Gilbert Roland, he is remarkably successful in all these endeavors.

We're now in Old California, which may explain why Zorro's TV father, George J. Lewis is in this movie. He's a police captain who keeps trying to find and arrest Cisco.

Although the movie doesn't settle down to brass tacks until the last ten minutes, it's a fun, light-hearted romp for most of its length, and those last ten minutes are pretty scary. Gould is quite obviously a bad 'un, but he doesn't work too hard, spending much of his time sitting in a chair in a hotel, and a lot of the rest being a chuckling voice in the dark. Overall, it's a remarkably entertaining movie.