Bar 20 Rides Again (1935)

I wish I could have rated this movie higher. I like westerns in general, the half-hour Hoppy TV shows are OK, the first Hoppy movie (Hopalong Cassidy Enters) was fine.This one, though, seemed cheesy, almost juvenile. The scenery was good, and the bad guy, whatever his over the top faults, was certainly interesting and different.I'll give just some examples of the silly inferior quality of it: (1) Hoppy is going undercover as a card shark in order to join the bad guys' gang. When asked what he was doing at their hideout, he says he is after the James Ellison character (a friend of Hoppy), whom Hoppy lies that he wants to kill. The leader of the bad guys also wants Ellison killed, so they travel to a place where Hoppy is given a rifle to shoot Ellison, who is hundreds of yards away. So from that distance Hoppy makes a miraculous shot, just grazing Ellison's head, making him temporarily unconscious. (2) The scene with Buck's sister visiting was unfunny and completely unnecessary. (3) I always hate it when the good guy sets a fire to suit his purposes. Here Hoppy left a magnifying glass in the sun near some brush, that eventually ignites the fire, yet the bad guys can't reach it in time before it signals the good guys. Scenes like these make you cringe.

Of all the B-movie westerns of the 1930's-40's, the Hopalong Cassidy films remain some of the best. They have more action, for those who are looking for that in these flicks (and many of us are) and excitement than some other westerns of that time, and have comparatively high production value and less cheesy story lines.Bar 20 Rides Again is one of the earliest Hopalong Cassidy films, and it shares the strengths and weaknesses of the older films. It is less formulaic than the later movies with a more original story, and, although it is certainly family friendly, Hoppy is edgier and less like "a kiddie show". Although I love the later B-movies and the subsequent television series, I enjoy the slightly edgier stories as well. On the downside, the production value is much higher in some of the later movies and the story, although less formulaic, is pretty disjointed and doesn't seem to flow from scene to scene. As always, however, the locations are beautiful and scenic and capture a true "western" feel that many television shows 30 years later missed with obvious painted backgrounds on studio sets. James Ellison is also mostly terrible as Johnny Nelson, although William Boyd and Gabby Hayes as Windy help to save the day as far as acting goes. The best trio by my reckoning was still Boyd, Hayes, and Russell Hayden as Lucky Jenkins, and the movies with those three were often the better quality Hoppy films. In this movie there are also a couple of other recognizable faces, including Paul Fix who played Micah on The Rifleman.The thing that really made this film memorable to me was the unique villain and some clever dark humor. Hoppy movies often cast the same actors as the same basic villains with a small mustache. Although the villain in this film had a similar motive to those villains, he had a bit more character, a Napolean aficionado who sees himself as a chess master and doesn't even consider fighting when the going gets tough. My family and I also got a kick out of how the demise of certain evil characters was treated by Hoppy and the gang with some nonchalant, deadpan humor.So all in all, Bar 20 Rides Again doesn't have the best production quality or actors and has some pacing issues, but the fun factor and some more unique elements to the story makes up for that. This is a good one.

So often cast as a dour villain or stern-faced sheriff in his sound era westerns, J.P.McGowan here brings genial and knowing good humor to the role of foreman Buck Peters. He shows an easy authority among the ranch hands, then goes into ironic self-effacement when the dragon sister arrives. In his mid-fifties and getting heavy in build, with more than one hundred and eighty roles behind him (and that counts all his appearances in The Hazards of Helen as just one!), JP takes readily to the humorous business at the ranch which counters the serious purpose of Hoppy's mission as the film develops. Not a big role, but one that the Mulford fans would have insisted on being done to rights. As a much experienced producer of inexpensive but popular light dramas himself, JP may have enjoyed working for the veteran producer Harry Sherman. He would have enjoyed, too, the adroit and vigorous direction of the sole sequence in which he appears, set in front of the bunkhouse. All in all, the audience sees a different and happy side of J.P.McGowan, Hollywood's first Australian.

Cassidy's short films were shown at boy's birthday parties in Brazil in the early fifties. That was before TV . When he came out on TV a couple of years later in the U.S.A. there was a lot of expectation because all newspapers were writing about what a fortune he made by this deal. Unfortunately there was very little you could do in half an hour. More than fifty years have gone by since I was so deceived by that TV episode that I never saw any Cassidy film again. Seeing "Bar 20 rides Again" made me realize how his films were above average "B westerns. There was none of that "Roy and Gene" stuff. Cassidy was 40 years old and this was his third film as Hop- A-Long as he is shown in the final credits. The film has a comic start as an elderly woman arrives to the Bar 20 bossing the cowboys who try to avoid her orders without being indelicate. The bad guy is called Pardue and models himself after Napoleon, giving orders with a chess game on his desk. Hoppie acts like one of the rustlers and even shoots his pal Johnny Nelson to prove he is one of them . The great final scenes show all the cowboys of the Bar 20 riding together in a gigantic showdown with the rustlers. "Bar 20 Rides Again" is not a sequel. Hoppy made a film named "Bar 20" much later in 1943.