Given the profusion of '30s Westerns, even if you're considering only Wayne's filmography, you'd be surprised to come upon one more or less at random - as in, Westward Ho (1935) - and not find an unimpressive, shortcut-riddled programmer, staged and shot for maximum efficiency. Westward Ho, released on DVD by Olive Films along with scores of other Wayne entries, is actually something of a shocker, sheerly in terms of visual scale and energy. No expense seems to have been spared. Directed by studio cowhand Robert N. Bradbury, and stunningly shot by cinematographer Archie Stout (who started with B westerns but worked for John Ford, Rene Clair, William Wellman and Andre de Toth before he was through), the film is a stirring feast for even jaded eyeballs, beginning with breathtaking Ansel Adams-like vistas of a wagon train dwarfed by the Rockies, and then a tightly-choreographed band of 18 outlaws on horseback charging to a hilltop and lining up as they observe their mark in the desert below. When the attack comes, the notions of using stock footage (as Ford's classic Stagecoach did a few years later) is never broached; Bradbury's camera shifts perspectives endlessly, cutting on the action, and the melee (seen mostly in fascinating wide shots, not constructed out of close-ups) is huge and thrilling. Later, a massive shootout in the desert between what looks like dozens of gunslingers and dozens of outlaws, all amid a real stampeding cattle drive, puts the lie to cheapskate "B westerns"; this was a spectacle any A-list film would be proud of, executed with speed and visual imagination.
The narrative is another matter. When the film is confined to dialogue and exposition, it simply slogs through it, as if everyone involved were wishing that the whole film could just be hard-riding cowpoke action out on the plains, without any of this tiresome talking. (In this, too, the film conforms to a 10-year-old's way of thinking, for better or worse.) In the second half, we're granted entrance to the criminal kingpin's saloon-second-floor office (!), strangely decorated with an old desk, a file cabinet, and a divan! Wayne's frontier hunk, whose parents were killed and brother was kidnapped years earlier, gets fed up with the outlaw gangs and begins enlisting civilians into a band of vigilantes - all wearing back shirts and white kerchiefs as a uniform, and riding snow-white horses. This is a preadolescent kid's Western world, where the laundry is always pristine, and good guys are good all the way through, and cowboys spent their downtime singing in harmony around the campfire. Wayne, sings, too, in a dubbed baritone courtesy of Bradbury's son, and Westward Ho could be classified as a "singing cowboy" movie, with the vigilantes comprised largely of The Singing Riders (a one-shot supergroup of Western crooners led by Glenn Strange, whose career sort of peaked playing the Frankenstein monster in the last three Universal films in that classic cycle). Thankfully, because it remains desperately difficult to take singing cowboy movies very seriously, Bradbury's film only dawdles momentarily by the fireside, and climaxes with a hairy frontier battle in which horses were, sorry to say, clearly crippled.
Naturally, Wayne's hero confronts his long-lost brother - now an undercover bandit, played by Frank MacGlynn Jr. - but the story was and still is nothing new. The main attraction at the time wasn't even Wayne, who was a callow and strangely stiff leading man in 1935. It was the Western semiotics themselves, the place and time captured in a mythic frieze of fairy-tale good and evil, and of righteousness triumphing in the open wilderness where the law has little purchase. (In the '30s, Hollywood product had little advertising beyond the neighborhood marquee; people would just go, knowing they were in for musicals or westerns or comedies or whatever.) In this way, Bradbury's film is a slice of heaven, visiting our grade-school selves into that dusty, violent, man's-man sphere somewhere west of St. Louis and north of Hell, but keeping us safe and secure in our seats all the while. Still, Westward Ho is far from being a typical token genre piece of the Depression years - certainly, no Gene Autry vehicle had this much respect for chaotic action and landscape, and few Westerns before John Ford hit his stride in the '40s invested these stock stories with this much breadth and business.
By Michael Atkinson
