{"id":5352,"date":"2019-03-02T14:59:59","date_gmt":"2019-03-02T14:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/?p=5352"},"modified":"2022-06-04T13:24:49","modified_gmt":"2022-06-04T12:24:49","slug":"john-wayne-1930s-movie-review-the-lawless-frontier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/john-wayne-1930s-movie-review-the-lawless-frontier\/","title":{"rendered":"John Wayne 1930s Movie Review – The Lawless Frontier"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Lawless Frontier (1934)<\/strong> Lone Star, Dir: Robert N. Bradbury, b\/w, 50m
Cast: <\/strong>John Wayne, Sheila Terry, Jack Rockwell, George Hayes, Buffalo Bill Jr., Yakima Canutt<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This entry in the Lone Star series is a bit more dramatic than others, the opening sequence in which John Wayne, as John Tobin, finds his murdered parents highly reminiscent of a similar scene in The Searchers<\/a> when Ethan Edwards discovers the bodies of his brother\u2019s family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"John<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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On top of that the main villain of the piece, Pablo Zanti, a half white half Apache played by Earl Dwire, is a nasty piece of work who not only shoots JWs parents in the back but also moonlights as a serial rapist on the side. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, not exactly a top choice for the usual Saturday morning matinee crowd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I therefore literally broke out into a loud cheer accompanied by an overwhelming need to shout out \u2018Tally ho, with a ying<\/g> and a yang and a zing zang<\/g> spillip<\/g>\u2019 at the glorious return of George Hayes<\/a> in full \u201cGabby\u201d mode, after what seemed to be a long run of him playing incompetent idiotic villains. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s even taken his teeth out, which is the mark of a truly dedicated thespian. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The film goes out of its way to stress that Pablo, or Zanti the Misfit as I call him for all you sci-fi Outer Limits Season One<\/a> fans who may be reading this, only poses as a Mexican. He\u2019s not a real Mexican because if he was then that would be offensive to Mexicans, the people responsible for making the film intent only on offending Apaches and white people instead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The message is simple; Mexicans onscreen can only be played by real Mexicans, unless you\u2019re Duncan Renaldo, who played The Cisco Kid some years later, but then he was Romanian, so I guess that doesn\u2019t count. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Tony<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Maybe that\u2019s why Tony Franciosa could get away with playing Mexican Juan Luis Rodriguez in Rio Conchos, even though his parents were Italian. This whole \u201cwho can play what\u201d ethnicity thing gets kind of complicated when you examine it. Now back to The Lawless Frontier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sheriff, played by Jack Rockwell, is a fully paid up member of the \u201cWhole Other Kind of Stupid\u201d club, erroneously suspecting JW of being in cahoots with Zanti. As JW exclaims sarcastically to \u201cGabby\u201d;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAn agreeable and appreciative sheriff you got here\u201d, <\/em>to which \u201cGabby\u201d replies \u201cHe started off all right but he\u2019s sure gone to seed.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because the sheriff is short on grey matter, he decides for himself that JW is a villain and follows him at every opportunity, waiting for our boy to make a mistake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, I\u2019m thinking there must be a supernatural element to John Wayne’s character. He seems to be able to foretell events before they happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no rhyme or reason for him to know that Zanti and his cronies are going to be riding along a particular trail but he does. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He ties a piece of string to his gun trigger, places the gun further down the bluff and operates it from a distance. The shots spook the gang and, this is the bit that amazes me, everyone but Zanti goes off to investigate where the shooter is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This then gives JW the opportunity to chase a now solitary Zanti. It\u2019s all a bit weird if you think about it too hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After capturing Zanti and resisting the understandably natural inclination to throttle the living daylights out of the back-shooting vermin who killed his parents, JW turns him over to the sheriff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a scene that could have come from the yet-to-be-made movie, \u201cMy Friend Irma Goes West<\/a>\u201d, the moron sheriff chains Zanti to a bed by his boot. Zanti then commits a crime so reprehensible I\u2019m having difficulty describing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He kills \u201cGabby\u201d Hayes by knifing him in the back and shooting him. Oh yes. Then the sheriff arrests JW for the murder of the old-timer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGabby\u201d dead. Please, say it ain\u2019t so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then it turns out it ain\u2019t so. \u201cGabby\u201d\/Dusty lives to splutter and gurn again. It seems the knife in the back and the gun blast to the head caused only minor superficial injuries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is lucky because he gets to save JW from being shot by Zanti, who rather unfairly has been slipping off the chain from around his bed, hopping off and trying to kill every living thing in the immediate vicinity before putting the chain back on again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The version I watched jumped about a bit towards the end but basically Zanti meets his maker by drinking water from a poisoned well \u2013 Holy West of the Divide<\/a> \u2013 with JW egging him on with \u201cDrink yer fill, Zanti. It\u2019s poisoned<\/em>\u201d which, although not quite as memorable as \u201cget off your horse and drink your milk<\/em>\u201d, still has a ring to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Wayne and Gabby capture Zanti\u2019s gang then turns<\/g> them over to the sheriff after which JW nicks the sheriff\u2019s job and everyone lives happily ever after. Apart from the sheriff of course. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be fair, \u201cThe Lawless Frontier\u201d is quite an entertaining watch compared to some of the other Lone Star efforts. I\u2019d say this bodes well for the next entry in the series. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lawless Frontier (1934) Lone Star, Dir: Robert N. Bradbury, b\/w, 50mCast: John Wayne, Sheila Terry, Jack Rockwell, George Hayes, Buffalo Bill Jr., Yakima Canutt This entry in the Lone Star series is a bit more dramatic than others, the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[307],"tags":[107],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5352"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5352"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5362,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5352\/revisions\/5362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}