Tonight I watched a Western called "The Fighting Frontiersman" (1946), starring Charles Starrett, whose bio claims him to be the most prolific cowboy actor of them all. He made a lot of movies portraying a character called The Durango Kid. You might remember my mention of him many months ago, when I watched another Starrett/Kid movie, my first, which prompted me to buy a ten-film "Durango Kid" dvd collection because I enjoyed it so much. These movies are pure entertainment of the Saturday Matinee variety. They clock in at about an hour apiece, which alone is a selling point for me as I love short movies.
I've had my "Durango Kid" dvd set sitting unopened on the shelf since about last Halloween or so. I hadn't yet peeled off the cellophane because I had a lot of other movies to watch (as I almost always do), but finally, after the Horror Marathon of October, the various dramas of November, the annual classics of the Christmas season and the several series we have watched since then, including all the Thin Mans, Falcons, Forbidden Hollywoods and Tarzans (among others), I finally ran out of movies.
Therefore it was time to break out The Durango Kid set, which is no knock on The Kid. It's just that these movies, while very much fun, are strictly low budget and can solidly be classified in the "B" section.
A bonus is that the two I have seen so far have been shot in Chatsworth, at the Iverson Ranch, so these are Santa Susana movies in every respect, and you can recognise many shots from Garden Of The Gods and a few of Stoney Point (aka "The Point Of All Things Stonelike").
The plots are simple, short and sweet. Tonight, a grizzled old prospector has discovered a treasure chest of gold coins in a cave off one of the trails. It turns out to be the cache of gold that General Santa Anna stashed during the Mexican-American war, worth an untold fortune. The prospector tells only one person of his find, a slinky local chanteuse who sings in a saloon in town. He trusts her because she has been the only person to have treated him kindly in the past. Soon, he will be disappointed, though, because she is beholden to the saloon owner and his henchmen. They hear about the discovery of the Santa Anna gold, long rumored to be hidden in the region, and they kidnap the old prospector and take him to a hideaway shack in the Chatsworth mountains. There, they tie him up & deny him food and water until he decides to talk, which he refuses to do.
The lady singer can't be all bad, however, because she sends a letter to Charles Starrett, the Marshall in town, to inform him that the prospector is being held hostage.
Suddenly, The Durango Kid shows up, all dressed in black, with a bandanna mask to match.
Could the Marshall and The Kid be one and the same?
No one in the cast will ever guess. In this way, you can think of this series as akin to "The Lone Ranger", or even "Batman" or "Superman". No one ever knows the Masked Man's true identity, no matter the character.
You don't need a lot of description to enjoy a "Durango Kid" movie. You just need to be a bit of a kid yourself. Fortunately, I fit the bill in that regard, haha. The films are well made, and you also get Smiley Burnette as Starrett's sidekick. He was a very talented comic actor who was also a singer who performed in these movies with a tight Western band called The Georgia Crackers. The two Durango Kid movies I've seen both feature a couple of songs by Smiley, in which he acts out the lyrics with a co-star, or goofs through the scene by himself. Smiley Burnette is a Hollywood legend from the early days. I learned about him by Googling after seeing him in the first "Kid" movie last September.
If I can find a Youtube of one of his song performances in tonight's movie, I will post it, because he is really an Original, I think. ////
Any "Durango Kid" movie is gonna be worth Two Lighthearted Thumbs Up, for the reasons described above. Watch for fun and to see old Chatsworth. ////
I am also reading my RFK book by Lisa Pease. She is very thorough and has done the most extensive analysis of the evidence so far, at least through the 300 pages I have read, out of 500 total for the entire book. It is very, very important not to forget the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, and of Martin Luther King, all of which happened in a five year period, and all of which have decimated the cumulative hope of millions of Americans that we will ever have a political system we can trust.
Keep these things in mind, because this history is so very important.
Nothing is more important than the Truth, for without it, life becomes a lie.
And we can't just go through the motions, now, can we?
See you in the morning, with constant love in between. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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