Streets of Laredo

Streets of Laredo is a remake of Paramount's successful Texas Rangers with William Holden, William Bendix, and Macdonald Carey playing the parts that were done thirteen years earlier by Fred MacMurray, Jack Oakie, and Lloyd Nolan. Color is added and if anything this is a remake that proved better than the original.

Three amiable outlaws get separated running from a posse. Two of them Holden and Bendix join the Texas Rangers and Carey continues his outlaw ways. Carey also as the film progresses demonstrates that he's a good deal more vicious than when we first meet him.

Between them they have a lot of adventures on both sides of the law. But it is inevitable that they are destined for a showdown.

There's a nice performance here from Alfonso Bedoya, fresh from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as Calico another outlaw with a murderous protection racket.

Bill Bendix though he's never bad in anything, is really miscast in a western. He's just too urban a type to be a convincing western sidekick. Holden is a year away from his breakthrough part in Sunset Boulevard, in Streets of Laredo he's in one of his 'smiling Jim' parts as the amiable good guy. He fit those parts well, but he never would have had the career he did had he stuck to them.

Western fans will definitely like this one, enough action and gunplay for any fan of the genre.

Three outlaw friends find themselves on opposite sides of the law when two of them join the Texas Rangers to get themselves out of a tight corner.

Lively western basking in splendid technicolour and very good performances, especially by MacDonald Carey, who plays a smug outlaw with villainous ambitions. His character becomes more cold blooded towards the end. The film has enough drama, tension with the three friends splitting in different directions, and Mona Freeman - who had a crush on MacDonald's character at first - eventually changes her mind when seeing his true colours and prefers Holden, who does well in this well-directed western.

This stars MacDonald Carey and William Holden. I grew up always watching McDonald Carey as Dr. Horton on Days Of Our Lives but I had never seen what he looked like when he was so young before. He was very handsome. He played an outlaw who helped rescue the main woman in the movie when she was just a girl. Also in this movie is Alfonso Bedoya. I saw him in the very first film I saw at film class in college, The Treasure of The Sierra Madre -- also a very good Western. Anyway, what I liked about this one is how the two friends who rescued the main woman when she was a girl were enemies now on account of how McDonald Carey was now an outlaw but William Holden was now a Sheriff and William Bendix, who was very funny, played his deputy, Wahoo. So, there was lots of tension back and forth, and the ending really surprised me. I liked this Western a lot.

I first watched this 1949 Western unremarkably ditected by Leslie Fenton in the mid-1970s. I was then around 17, and I did not like it, finding among other things that Mona Freeman looked too young for the part, that mediocre color cinematography did not make the most of mountains and other landscapes, that the dialogue seemed trite and stale, among other minuses.

McDonald Carey delivers a suave, villainous, deceptive performance that steals the show. He abandons his stagecoach-robbing partners, William Bendix and Holden, to seek better pay with cattle rustler and criminal kingpin Alfonso Bedoya (whose role is surprisingly short, considering his unforgettable part in TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE one year earlier).

Watching STREETS OF LAREDO a second time nearly 50 years later, this time I enjoyed it more, though I still see it as a rehash of ideas in Westerns at the time, the dialogue stale in parts, Holden underused. But this time Freeman seems to grow up into an adult woman during the movie.

Good pace, some humor - especially by dimwitted Bendix - make it worth watching at least once 7/10.

Streets of Laredo is directed by Leslie Fenton and adapted to screenplay by Charles Marquis Warren from a Louis Stevens and Elizabeth Hill story. It stars William Holden, Macdonald Carey, William Bendix and Mona Freeman. Music is by Victor Young and cinematography by Ray Rennahan.

For fans of traditional Westerns this is as solid as a Brick Adobe Structure. A remake of The Texas Rangers (1936) of sorts, plot finds Holden, Bendix and Carey as three bad boys who get divided by circumstance, love and conscious. Two of them wind up in the Texas Rangers - the famed frontier law enforcement battalion - the other stays on the wrong side of the law. All roads lead to the day of reckoning...

The production is the usual mixed bag of superlative location photography (Simi Valley/Gallup) and crude back projection so often seen in the 40s and 50s Oater releases, with Rennahan's Technicolor photography a treat for the eyes. Performances are assured because the three principal guy actors are given characterisations that suits them - Holden tough emotional anti-hero - Bendix a lovable and dopey toughie - Carey sly bad boy. Freeman is lovely but it's a dressage character, while Alfonso Bedoya is on hand for some stereotypical bandido villainy.

At 90 minutes in length it feels a bit padded out until the two guys actually join the Rangers, so some patience is required during the first half. However, there is plenty of Western movie action within the story, some turns in plotting to grab the heart strings and a pleasing array of costumes and musical accompaniments to keep the senses perky. All told, it's just a thoroughly enjoyable Oater regardless of if you have happened to have seen the original version. 7/10