Sunset Trail

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!

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.

When Hoppy dresses in his all-black outfit, you know there's going to be action & old fashioned western excitement. When Hoppy dresses in his tan or "dude" outfits, you know that William Boyd will get a chance to do more "acting," which he loved to do to break the monotony of his 66 picture run as Hoppy, but you can also expect less action & more talk. So one of the first things I look at, to foretell the type of movie it will be, is the clothes he wears! In this one, he starts out in black & then dresses as a dude in a white hat & sports jacket to go undercover. And sure enough, it's a so-so entry in the Hoppy series, not bad, but not great either. Gabby Hayes has a good role in this one. Worst scene: Russell Hayden (as "Lucky") plays guitar with the guitar invisible to the camera, while his romantic interest sings a western song in the finest pop-operetta style! Best scene: close-up of Boyd riding Topper at high speed. Hoppy changes back to black just in time to ride off with his friends as the movie closes. I rate this one 6/10.

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.

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.