Down the Wyoming Trail

This installment of the Tex Ritter franchise must have been made for kids'. After all, the plot is extremely simple, folks behave like total idiots and it has a Santa Claus angle! As a result, it's the sort of western adults would be best to avoid.

When the film begins, Tex Yancy (Tex Ritter) arrives in Wyoming right in the middle of a cattle rustling epidemic. The baddies are stampeding the elk which, in turn, cause the cattle to stampede. The locals seem to have no idea how to handle this--mostly because they turn out to be idiots. In fact, just about EVERYONE in this film is stupid! Want an example? FIrst, Blackie, the trusted foreman, turns out to be evil! What a shock...a guy named Blackie is evil!! Second, Tex is supposed to dress up as Santa and pass out presents. The baddies find out about this and one of them dresses like Santa as well. And, after the baddie kills someone, EVERYONE believes Tex is a killer. Hello folks! It was a disguise and he was wearing a beard--this is NOT definitive evidence that Tex is a murderer! And, to provide equal time to the stupidity of the baddies, when Tex escapes prison (because the locals are going to string him up), the baddies welcome him--not remembering B-western cliché #3 (when the good guy escapes from prison, he is only POSING as a bad guy). Combining all this and the Christmas and cute little kid angle (yep, there is Jerry the cute kid), it's really hard to take this film seriously at all.

The bottom line is that there were thousands (perhaps billions) of B-westerns made and because of that, there are many, many better films you should watch first. Then, after you've seen every single one of these, only then is it worth seeing this silly film.