Texas Lady

Texas Lady marked Claudette Colbert's one and only western and I think this RKO film was probably something that they might have had Barbara Stanwyck in mind for. Colbert though she gave a decent performer really is not a western type. I suspect she wanted at least one on her film resume and took Texas Lady which was an inflated B film.

After learning the game of poker for years, Colbert takes Barry Sullivan on and beats him handily. Sullivan, a gentleman riverboat gambler had cleaned out her father who had embezzled money and then lost his ill gotten gains at the poker table and promptly killed himself. After restoring the family honor, Claudette goes to Texas where she's inherited a newspaper.

The paper is the paid for rag of the owners of the local Ponderosa, Ray Collins and Walter Sande. Claudette starts agitating for a railroad spur to come to town. But that will mean less dependency on the cattle barons and new people settling. The plot here has certain similarities to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Claudette also gets some attention from fast draw deputy Gregory Walcott who kills a couple of small ranchers in the service Collins and Sande.

In the meantime Sullivan comes to town as his reputation is shot to all heck on the riverboat scene. Being both southerners to the manor born they find a lot in common.

Texas Lady was a decent enough western, but it looks like it was edited considerably down and a lot of the story doesn't really make sense. And Colbert is just not well cast in westerns. But her fans might like it. It sure is a far cry from the comedies she did in the Thirties and Forties.

This was Claudette Colbert's second to last theatrical feature and if this was the quality of scripts she was being offered at that time it's no wonder she stayed away six years between this and Parrish. First of all she belongs in some urbane urban setting not the Old West and try though she might she is out of place there. Additionally she and Barry Sullivan, always a dull leading man no matter his costar, go together like oil and water sharing zero romantic chemistry. The script is ordinary and the direction not terribly exciting plus the film is soft and fuzzy with over-bright color. If you like Claudette or westerns it's okay but don't expect anything above the routine.

On the way to a small Texas town to claim the local newspaper as her inheritance, Prudence Webb stops off to fleece a infamous gambler (Chris Mooney) in revenge for him winning a lot of money off her father – a debt that eventually led to his suicide. On arriving in the town, Prudence finds that the paper is run by Clay Ballard who denies that the paper was ever signed over to Webb's father and refuses to give up ownership. Prudence turns to the law and quickly makes enemies in the town by using the court system to claim her inheritance and wins her case. With the town's powerbase against her, who'd have expected that it would be Chris Mooney who would come to her aid?! And so goes the story with this fairly run-of-the-mill western that is strangely coloured and lacking anything special to really justify watching. The basic plot sees a bit of romance set against a back drop of a stranger in town causing a conflict with the bad element and, yes, it is delivered as flatly and unimaginatively as that summary suggests. The basic characters don't really add anything of interest and I did struggle to really care about any of them mainly because they were fairly cardboard and uninteresting. Of course, this being a b-movie sort of affair then it is maybe a bit unfair to be harsh on it because all it is aiming to do is fill time and provide a bit of entertainment and not much else. In that regard the film does alright – with poker games, fights, shoot outs, horse riding and action; none of it is anything special of course but it just about does enough to be distracting.

The cast pretty much match this with average performances all round. Colbert is OK but never made a lasting impression on me; she seems to enjoy the lead role and she matches the material. Sullivan should have been the slick man of the film and brought a spark to all his scenes, instead he is rather bland and only really has chemistry with Colbert in his opening poker scene. Support is nothing special at all and the "baddies" never really made much of an impact and thus didn't feed the tension within the narrative.

Overall this is a fairly average film with nothing special to really recommend it for. The story is OK and is delivered with enough stuff of entertainment value to make it passable and distracting on a wet Sunday afternoon but there are much better westerns than this around.

My how the mighty have fallen. Roles must have gotten mighty hard to come by for an actress of Miss Colbert's caliber. This movie is very typical of 1950's oaters. The one unusal aspect is that Prudence (Miss Colbert) is initially a strong, independent woman, kind of unusual for a western. But in the end Gene Barry Sullivan Fitzgerald becomes her "protector". This is a very cornball movie and Gregory Walcott who plays Jess Foley has got to be one of the most wooden actors ever to grace the silver screen. One can almost see the pain on Miss Colbert's face as she delivers some of the corniest lines in movie history. It is such a can of corn it is worth watching for the unintentional humor it delivers.

>>Claudette Colbert looking far too old and matronly for the part of an ambitious small-town journalist and card sharp Colbert certainly doesn't look matronly in this film - she's just as slender and attractive as ever.

I've just attended the WIllimasburg Film Festival, which showed this film. It has great meaning for Gregory Walcott- it was his "breakthrough" role, and his wife was pregnant with his first child, which she gave birth to a week after the movie finished filming.

In Walcott's biography, Hollywood Adventures, he tells the story of how he first met Colbert, who was concerned that he was so much younger than she was. But if older leading men can be put in with actresses 20 years younger than them, than women should be able to get the same treatment.

It is a bit episodic, but fun nevertheless.