"The Devil's Playground" is a very flawed Hopalong Cassidy film. While I generally love these old B-westerns, in this case bad writing really hurt my ability to enjoy one of the Hoppy pictures.
When the story begins, Hoppy and his pals discover a woman who's been shot. They nurse her back to health and soon Judge Morton and his men arrive...saying the girl is the Judge's mentally ill daughter. But their story makes no sense and Hoppy is reticent to let them see the girl, though it hardly matters since she's apparently vanished from their cabin.
According to the young lady, she was shot by the Judge's men because she knows where some stolen gold is buried...and they want the gold. This makes sense for many reasons and it's pretty obvious the Judge is a scum-bag. So, after she disappears, Hoppy heads to town to talk to the Sheriff about this. Here is where the film starts to stumble...the Sheriff is the most unconcerned and incompetent character I can recall seeing in a film. Instead of investigating the Judge, he keeps wanting to lock up Hoppy and his men....and this pattern happened several times throughout the story. The worst time was AFTER the Judge pulled a gun on the Sheriff and threatened to kill him. After the Judge and his gang run away, the Sheriff doesn't want to chase after the Judge but tries to lock Hoppy and his partners up!!! Does this make any sense?! There's incompetence and there's the Sheriff has an empty skull and he's dumber than a tomato....which is this film.
Overall, not a bad idea for a film...in fact it's a good one. But the Sheriff character makes zero sense and only would have made sense if the Sheriff had been in league with the Judge. He wasn't...he was just tomato stupid. And, perhaps, the same can be said for the writer....expecting the audience to believe this! A decent story idea...ruined by a dopey character.
