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Reviews
The Marshal's Daughter (1953)
Different kind of western
Am trying to find clear words telling why I liked Ken Murray's 1950s version of an ultra low budget 1940s poverty row western.
First, I liked the cast. Bob Duncan, an enigmatic b-western actor in real life, plays the bad guy, plus he wrote the script. Hoot Gibson had enough left to phone it in. Lauri Anders, another enigmatic figure, is Murray's protégé here instead of Marie Wilson, Murray's primary "Blackout" revue star. Harry Lauter plays his gratuitous role well enough, pretty much like he played all his roles.
Second, Texas Ridder sings some of the soundtrack as background instead of too far out front like it was in that Cooper/Kelly western High Noon. Third, an improbable poker game is inserted only because Murray wanted it, featuring "name" b-western players and Preston Foster, all friends of Ken Murray.
Last but not least, the cast plays it straight. No actor hambones it up, there are zero pretensions, everyone seems to be hitting their marks, and the sometimes erratic editing is not much of a distraction.
This is the third time I've watched it since i found it on the internet years ago. It reminds me a little bit of a Judy Canova movie made around then that is similarly low regarded but that I like. I.
The Big Trail (1930)
A sort of missing or generally unacknowledged masterpiece...
What some mistake for stilted dialog and/or dismiss as archetypal characterizations accurately represents how people talked, lived and were before World War II, let alone in whatever years "The Big Trail" represent on film.
The movie took my breath away the first time I saw it years ago. Reading the boards here helped me understand why it missed at the box office and why movie goers got the benefit of Wayne in B Westerns for another ten years. Wayne was in my opinion better in "The Big Trail" and the years of Bs than most of his star turns after 1939 with Ford's incredible cavalry trilogy, "True Grit" and "The Shootist" being Big time exceptions.
What a shame theaters missed the boat on this in 1930. Had this movie hit we might have enjoyed more movies with more realism and less hokum. In my opinion this is not only one of the finest westerns ever filmed with accurate dialog and accurate character realization, but among the finest representations of a passage of any kind ever put on film.
It still takes my breath away. Especially the dialog and accurate characterizations of types that simply don't exist any more. Some celebrate the surface homogenization of our culture that in fact hides the largest cultural degradation (into 'people like us' and 'people like them') and political divide (corporatists vs Main Streetists) in US history, but for me "The Big Trail" represents a time when our surface differences were more obvious but underneath them most folks wanted to work out the nation's failures and most folks aspired to build a great culture and a great nation.
"The Big Trail" is an epic of the melting pot in motion toward the American Dream. Certainly the finest film on that path I ever saw. that subject ever filmed.