Bar 20 Rides Again

I was surprised when I searched on YouTube for Hopalong Cassidy films. This is because in the 1950s, his films and those of many other famous B-western stars were hacked to pieces in order to get them to 54 minutes....the perfect length for a one-hour TV time slot. My surprise is that the films posted are the restored original versions in most cases...not the pared down TV ones. This is a blessing, as too many of Roy Rogers' pictures, for example, are only available now in the shortened versions.

As far as Hopalong Cassidy films go, "Bar 20 Rides Again" is a bit of a disappointment. Mostly this is because although Hoppy goes under cover to discover who the evil 'Nevada' is, this cattle rustling boss isn't really taken down by Cassidy at all. Instead, Hoppy mostly just hangs out undercover on this baddie's ranch until ultimately a posse of mad ranch hands arrive to stop Nevada once and for all. The only big plus is that in this film Cassidy meets Windy (George 'Gabby' Hayes) for the first time. Apart from this, a bit of a disappointment.

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.

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.

Rancher George Perdue is secretly running a band of rustlers under the moniker Nevada, incorporating his obsession with the life and military strategies of Napoleon Bonaparte, as well as chess, in his mad dream of becoming an emperor of the west. When he tries to rustle off the stock of his neighbor, Jim Arnold, the latter writes a letter to Hopalong Cassidy to come, along with Red Connors, to help stop the outlaws. Johnny Nelson also goes to the Arnold ranch, but only to see Arnold's daughter Margaret, but he doesn't realize that Margaret is sweet on Perdue and his civilized manner (brought on more by her school days in Boston). In order to join Nevada's gang and get a better chance to attack the outlaw, Hoppy takes on the disguise and manners of Tex Riley, a card shark. Nevada lets Hoppy/Tex join and gives him his first assignment of killing the man who is responsible for the rift in his relationship with Margaret, Johnny Nelson. Hoppy is forced to shoot Johnny, while he is trying to work with Red, Arnold, and Windy (Hayes in his first appearance as the character) to round up Nevada's gang, while not being discovered for whom he really is. Another great entry in the series, aided immensely by Worth's portrayal of the sinister, yet prim and proper Nevada. A great scene in the film is when he tells Hoppy (as Tex) he can use him, while fondling a chess pawn in his hand. Boyd also plays the Tex role to the hilt, with a foppishness soon to be seen many times in later films. A good climax ends another winning film in the series. Rating, based on B westerns, 8.

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.