Last night, another good one from Lippert Pictures, though more notable for its cast than its plot, which I found confusing. The film was called "Hostile Country"(1950), and check out this lineup: Russell Hayden (who starred at the renegade Indian "Black Wolf" in Lippert's "Apache Chief", seen last week), Fuzzy Knight, Raymond Hatton (from The Rough Riders), Julie Adams (billed here as Betty Adams, of "Creature From the Black Lagoon" fame), and in a supporting role, Tom Tyler, playing a bad guy this time around. He looks quite different than we remember him from his films in the 1930s, even from his performance as Captain Marvel in the 1941 serial of the same name. By the time this picture was made, Tyler was 47 and suffering from scleroderma and rheumatoid arthritis, which would combine to kill him four years later, and you can see the ravaging effect it had on him; he looks thin and frail, and frankly, crippled, which is incredibly sad for fans like me. If you didn't know him, you'd think he was just another aging Western henchman, perhaps 60, and he's still able to ride a horse (and even fall off), but his lines of dialogue are extremely limited, even when you think he should be speaking, and because we know what he was like in his glory days (one of the greatest Western stars ever), it's both sad and inspiring to see him this way, because of the courage it must have taken to keep going. I looked up scleroderma after the movie, and while it's treatable now, it was not in the mid-40s when Tyler came down with it, and it's gotta be horrible to deal with, the word means "hardening of the skin", and you can see the effects on Tyler in this movie. To have that as well as rheumatoid arthritis must have been excruciating, but he kept acting right up until a year before his death in 1954, at age 50.
The stars of the film are Hayden and a guy named Jimmy "Shamrock" Ellison, both of whom were sidekicks to Hopalong Cassidy, according to IMDB. Both are very good, and as the movie opens, Raymond Hatton and his niece Julie Adams are blockading his ranch road so "Henry Oliver" (George Chesbro) can't get through with his cattle. A range war is in the offing, and into the middle of it ride Hayden and Shamrock, who are on their way to meet Hayden's Dad who has promised him half ownership of his own cattle ranch, but when they get there, his Dad has been shot dead in a card game.
Meanwhile, a bunch of hoodlums known as the Brady Gang is working the middle of this feud, trying to inflame both sides against each other to initiate a cattle rustling scheme. Incidentally, the name of Tom Tyler's character is "Tom Brady", haha. It's typical range war stuff, but there's too much riding back-and-forth and not enough 'splaining whats going on. The characters get lost in the non-specificity of the script. With a better director and Tim McCoy and Buck Jones helping Raymond Hatton, it would it have made a great Rough Riders film, but for me the main draw is the cast and especially Tom Tyler. For that reason, "Hostile Country" gets Two Big Thumbs Up and a must-see recommendation. You might even be able to follow the plot better than I did, and its possible that I was so shocked by seeing Tyler in this condition that I lost track of the story, but give it a shot. The picture is very good. ////
The previous night's movie was "Today I Hang"(1942), an involving crime story from those kings of Poverty Row, Producers Releasing Corporation or PRC for short. As it opens, the wealthy partners in an importing business are punching it out in the dining room of partner Henry Courtney's mansion as his butler "Hobbs" (Peter Scarden) looks on. They're fighting over who will profit from their latest find, a rare diamond necklace from Burma, when another man shows up: "Jim O'Brien" (Walter Woolf King), the former boyfriend of Courtney's wife "Martha" (Mona Barrie). Henry (Harry Woods) knows she still loves O'Brien. She tells him as much: "I only married you to spite him after we broke up". But O'Brien doesn't care about that - he's made his way back from Burma on his own, and wants his share of the profits from the necklace, which he helped track down. "You forgot about me over there" he tells the two partners. "Were you hoping I died?" Well, of course they were, because a two way split is better than three ways any day of the week.
Unfortunately for Henry Courtney, he's not gonna collect zilch on the necklace, because he turns up murdalized the next day, his body found by Martha. The Courtneys' maid just happens to be there, and she testifies that Jim O'Brien, the former boyfriend, was there earlier in the day, asking for a meeting with Henry Courtney. When the cops investigate, he claims he only wanted his money for the importation of the diamond necklace, but then they discover a gun in his suitcase at home, and it's the murder weapon. A jury doesn't believe him when he says he didn't do it, and he's sentenced to hang. The warden is a good man who feels badly about O'Brien's sentence (the theme of the Saintly Prison Warden was a common one in those days), and he allows Martha to visit him on death row with a lawyer, who turns out to be a crook. He offers to help O'Brien escape if O'Brien will help him steal the diamond necklace and fence it. O'Brien protests this scheme and says: "why should I have to escape when I'm innocent?" The answer is of course because he's scheduled (pron. Shedge-yooled) for execution in four days. All of this leads O'Brien to wonder if he can trust his old girlfriend Martha Courtney. "Don't you believe I'm innocent?" he asks her.
While O'Brien is waiting for the crooked lawyer to arrange his escape plan, a safecracker named "Slick Pheeney" (Sam Bernard) is paroled. The kindly warden wishes him well: "Now Slick, I don't want to see you back here." But really, his parole is just a front. In reality, he's been let out on purpose to help Martha Courtney prove O'Brien innocent. The script is all about Double Cross Chess, and Martha has to pretend she's in league with the crooked lawyer so she can get him to show his cards, which she believes will lead to the actual killer of her husband. It's very well done, and especially good is Mona Barrie, an English actress who looks a little bit like Kay Francis. We've seen Barrie before, last year in a Western called "Dawn on the Great Divide" where she played a casino owner. She was good in that one also. "Today I Hang" keeps you guessing as to who is trustworthy, and it will take a Quadruple Cross at the end to sort things out. I give it Two Big Thumbs Up. The picture is razor sharp. ////
That's all for tonight. This afternoon I got my first haircut since February 2020. The lady who cut my hair for ten years while I was with Pearl went out of business due to the pandemic, so I went to a Great Clips in my neighborhood. I didn't have it cut as short as it used to be, but the gal cut off a substantial amount. Because it hadn't been cut for such a long time, my hair was very damaged with a lot of split ends, and I like it better now. If I had what I call "girl hair", i.e. strong, shiny and thick like girls (and many rock stars) do, then I'd grow it ultra long. But nowdays, my hair quality isn't what it used to be. It's drier, and so when it gets long it becomes frizzy and, besides being hard to take care of, it doesn't look good. So, for now, I'll keep it medium length. My haircut looks like I could be in Talking Heads, or maybe a grunge-rock band circa 1992. My blogging music was Rainbow "Bent Out Of Shape", featuring the phenomenal voice of Joe Lynn Turner. Late night listening is "The Flying Dutchman" by Wagner, von Karajan conducting. I hope your weekend is off to a good start, and I send you Tons of Love as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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