Sunset Trail

After selling out the cattle herd, Kenneth Harlan is murdered by Robert Fiske and his gang leaving wife Charlotte Wynters and daughter Jan Clayton with the ranch and little else. A friend suggests two things that she open a dude ranch as a coming business and that Hopalong Cassidy be sent for.

Gabby Hayes and Russell Hayden go to work as regular cowhand help and Hoppy arrives as one of the first batch of dudes yearning for the western experience. Bill Boyd is just great hamming it up to beat the band as an eastern tenderfoot. It's a guise that Boyd would use every so often in the Hoppy films and it's used very effectively here in Sunset Trail.

Fiske is a particularly nasty type villain not only robbing and killing Harlan, but he has designs on Wynters. His chief henchman is a nasty young punk played by Anthony Nace who has designs on Jan Clayton.

Jan Clayton gets to sing a nice western ballad here. At the time she was married to Russell Hayden. That singing voice would take to Broadway as the original Julie Jordan in Carousel and of course later she was Tommy Rettig's mom in Lassie.

Some nice cameos by Maurice Cass as a Ned Buntline type writer of penny dreadful novels and Kathryn Sheldon as a spinster woman with her eye on Gabby Hayes. In Gabby's films he would sometimes be paired with a woman in his own age bracket with marriage on her mind and his antics fleeing were always fun.

One of the better Hopalong Cassidy features put out by Paramount.

Disguising himself as a milquetoast Easterner who is quite a dandy, Hoppy enrolls in a dude ranch in order to unmask the murderer of the owner's husband.

This is one of the best examples of Hopalong Cassidy westerns that pulls all the stops to deliver sheer class entertainment and has a wide gamut of humour ( great lines and poor Gabby Haynes scarpering from an eastern lady visiting a dude ranch), intrigue, action, and William Boyd switching to a foppy character and doing great. The scenery is great as ever - the characters come alive and you get a real creepy villain in Robert Fiske. One of Hoppy's best entries.

In the 1950s, many B-westerns by a variety of cowboy favorites were trimmed and shown on TV. This was done with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy films, and probably a few others. But William Boyd (Cassidy) was smart...he retained original copies of these movies...and today you can watch the entire film instead of a truncated version. Fortunately, some time ago, these original movies were posted to YouTube...and they are the best copies you can find anywhere. The version of "Sunset Trail" I watched was one of these originals.

The film begins with John Marsh selling his ranch to Keller and moving out of town. However, the scum-bag who bought it has no intention of letting John keep the money...and soon his bandit buddies attack the stage and rob everyone aboard. And, in the process, John is murdered. Fortunately for the widow,, a kind man helps set her up in business AND contacts Hopalong Cassidy to look into the murder and robbery.

As you'd expect, Hoppy arrives soon after...with his two sidekicks in tow. In this case, it's Windy (Gabby Hayes) and Lucky (Russell Hayden). Hoppy always seemed to have two sidekicks--one a lover and occasional singer, the other a crusty old guy like Hayes or Andy Clyde. And in this case, he tells his friends to go to Silver City* and wait to hear from him, as Hopalong often liked to investigate on his own.

When Hoppy arrives in town on the stage, he's dressed like an eastern dude....and plays a very funny version of himself. It's actually pretty cute seeing Boyd playing a nervous hypochondriacal coward. But this enables him to look about without attracting too much attention from the baddies.

I love seeing cowboy heroes going undercover in their films. It provided a nice change of pace and it was fun seeing Boyd playing the dude...just like it's fun seeing Tim McCoy (another famous western star) playing Mexican bandits in a few of his films. This is especially true since B-westerns in general have a real sameness to most of their plots....and variety is nice. Overall, it's one of the best of the Hopalong Cassidy films...fun and clever and quite original.

*I checked. There are MANY Silver Cities in the west...in Nevada, California, Colorado and New Mexico...and a few others. I went through the famous one in Nevada...and there isn't much left of the town. Virginia City, down the road, is a great little town to visit.

**In the film, they used the term 'Yellowbacks'. These were paper bills used as currency and which were redeemable for gold. When the US left the gold standard in 1934, these bills were no longer redeemable for gold. In contrast, 'Greenbacks' were dollars NOT redeemable for gold nor silver....and were, as a result, less desirable.

When a stagecoach is robbed and a passenger murdered, the boss of the company asks his pal "Hoppalong" (William Boyd) and his friend "Windy" ('Gabby' Hayes) to travel, incognito, to get to the bottom of things. We know that "Keller" (Robert Fiske) is the man behind the crimes and that he has stolen $30,000 from the now dead husband of "Ann" (Charlotte Wynters) but he is not expecting this great milk-sop of a dandy to arrive replete with bow-tie, and so "Hoppy" is able to infiltrate the town and observe just how the stolen cash is being laundered through it's casino. Needless to say, neither "Ann" nor daughter "Dorrie" (Jan Clayton) are best pleased with this hapless man, but that is bound to change once he gets onto the scent of the perpetrators and brings them to book. Of course the result is that certain, yes, but this is still a solid adventure western with plenty of action, duplicity and Fiske makes for quite a decent baddie as things hot up to a well staged conclusion where luckily nobody's aim is much good. Boyd is competent here and Hayes serves well as his lively foil and for an hour it's an amiable story of greed versus good.

We all love seeing Hoppy in his iconic black outfit, but just for a change it's fun to see him go undercover as a foppish tenderfoot dressed up in a suit and trilby. William Boyd was a good actor, a big name in the silent era when a lot of acting depended on facial expressions, and Boyd is a master at this lending his western hero more credibility than most. This is a fun romp with some good comedy moments, and Russell Hayden with his soon to be wife Jan Clayton having some nice scenes together. Gabby Hayes of course is Gabby Hayes. Hard to believe in real life he was a well dressed, articulate man. Some may be better than others, but I've never seen a Hopalong Cassidy film I didn't like!