Texas Terror (1935)

. . . the ways. First off, "Dan" is Bess' dad and John's foster pops. That makes John's Canoodling with Bess some sort of incest (but probably just a mild case, by Red Nape Standards). Second, John and Bess fall in love with each other while John is firm in the sincere belief that he himself blew Dan's brains out awhile back. (But Bess later eagerly surrenders her Virtue to the thug who actually DID do in Dear Old Dad, as this sort of Patricide-by-Sexual-Proxy seems to be a major plot requirement for Early Westerns.) Third, the downfall of Joe Blow's Crime Empire comes when the Martin Brothers pass two stolen ONE dollar bills from a random heist months earlier to pay their cover charge for the Annual Halloween Dance & Milking Contest, which indicates that the Police State of Texas has always monitored the exchange of all cash down to the last buck far more carefully than it follows the swapping, selling, or gifting of military assault rifles capable of gunning down at least 102 civilians even when the lone shooter is surrounded by platoons of heavily-armed S.W.A.T. cops.

"Texas Terror" is better than a lot of the Wayne Lonestar Productions. In this one, Wayne gets a chance to expand on his usual innocent-tough guy persona. After an incident where his friend gets shot, a distraught Wayne quits his job as sheriff. He falls apart and grows a beard and looks like he's halfway towards turning into a Gabby Hayes, gruff-old- goat character. He then does another nice-turn-around to get back to being the hero. Wayne is less stiff and actually looks interested in the scenes he's in. Its really one of his best early performances.Besides Wayne getting to play a more multi-dimensional character, there's a great plot twist at the end. It is Wayne's Indian friends who come charging on horseback to the rescue. It is nice to see a 1935 movie where the Indians are truly the good guys and heroes in the tale.There's an hilarious milking contest in the middle. The losing milker looks exactly like the Pappy Yokum character from Li'l Abner. He was probably the prototype.Overall, this Wayne Lonestars becomes more interesting as it goes along. This is not something you can say about some others.

In this Lone Star production, John Wayne is a sheriff who is tricked into thinking he killed his best friend and that selfsame friend was part of a robbery of an express company.So distraught is Wayne over this that he quits the sheriff's job and becomes a desert prospector. In these scenes the Duke with that growth of beard on him looks a whole lot like his character Tom Doniphan in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.Wayne does a major reclamation job on himself after he rescues Lucile Browne from a stage holdup. Browne is the best friend's daughter.Of course in the end the Duke does find out who are the real culprits with the help of some grateful and friendly Indians. How the Indians get into it, you have to watch Texas Terror.Texas Terror is set in a more modern version of the west. The stage is actually a large sedan and the people out here use telephones. Kind of like the settings of most later Roy Rogers westerns.Gabby Hayes is on hand as well as the former sheriff who steps back into his job when Wayne quits and LeRoy Mason who was in so many of these Lone Star films for Monogram as well makes a convincing villain as always.

I've seen this a few times now, but this was the 1st time on DVD with new digital music added to pep it up. Unfortunately it doesn't pep it up, it simply makes you wonder what the producers of the video release were thinking of in messing about with the original soundtrack. They wouldn't have been allowed to ruin 'Frankenstein' with senseless and incongruous dramatic chords sprinkled throughout, so why cheapies like this? This was a budget release, why couldn't they have spent any spare cash on eliminating the frame wobble?Big John's in good form, with lots of noble deeds to do and the usual Lone Star chases on horseback back and forth across California (not Texas) in 1934. In a case of mistaken identity the heroine says to him that she "doesn't know words vile enough to express her contempt for him". Sadly todays heroines would have no such problem! Nice to see Gabby Hayes just after his last shave!A good film for fans of the genre, not even marred by the shortness (49 minutes on this DVD) - Wayne made so many of these you'll be lucky to live long enough to see 'em all!