User Reviews

Unfortunately, in stark contrast to the excellent work DVD companies have done for Gene Autry and Bill Boyd, Roy Rogers has been treated rather shabbily. Many of the titles on sale offer blurry, faded, out-of-focus pictures with garbled and/or muffled sound tracks. Even worse, the Trucolor entries are often presented in various shades of gray.

An exception is "Night Time in Nevada" (1948) which Mill Creek present in a well-graded black-and-white copy. I'd rather watch Trucolor, but even in black-and-white, the movie provides a feast for railroad buffs, plus fans of Grant Withers who turns in one of his most charismatic portrayals ever.

In fact, I think Sloan Nibley wrote his screenplay primarily with Withers in mind as the villain, and then added Roy, Andy Devine and the super-wonderful George Carleton who plays the crooked lawyer.

Not a bad LITTLE Western with Roy Rogers. This is one of the first of Roy's films that I've seen in at least 50 years, and it occurred to me that one of the attractions to Roy's movies was that a story was told in about an hour, so the stories would move right along with no lulls in the action.

Here, a murder years earlier rears it ugly head when the daughter of the murdered gold miner goes west to get her inheritance. The original murderer and his buddies intend keeping that inheritance, as well as the cattle belonging to Roy and the Sons Of The Pioneers. Helping to solve both issues is deputy Andy Devine...which isn't quite the buffoon that he often portrayed. The only downer here is the female sort-of-love-interest Adele Mara...hardly even a B actress.

Roy plays Roy, Trigger is along, of course. Grant Withers is a very limited talented bad guy. Marie Harmon is Adele Mara's best friend (another less than B actress). Joseph Crehan is the engineer Casey; Crehan had quite a long career. George Carleton plays the relatively crooked attorney. Bob Nolan and the Sons Of The Pioneers are along as Roy's pals and provide a nice background for the title song.

If you like them simple, sweet, and brief, you can watch the film on Amazon video service, but the video quality is limited. Great for Roy's fans...I guess there are a few of us left.

Very odd, it seems like every reviewer on this board so far saw a different version of the film. My copy stated the picture in color at sixty seven minutes, but it was somewhat shorter and in black and white. The only song, if you can call it that, was a brief one liner with engineer Casey (Joseph Crehan) joining Roy and The Pioneers 'for old times sake'.

Speaking of Casey, watch the scene closely where one of the bad guys shoots him while running the train. Did that bullet do a U-turn in mid air? Another example of the impossible logistics these old time Westerns often relied on. But I'm not complaining.

Once the story gets underway, State Police captain Cookie Bullfincher swears in Roy as a deputy to solve a couple of crimes involving Roy's stolen cattle and a missing trust fund due Joan Andrews (Adele Mara), who's father was murdered twenty years earlier.

You know what's spooky? I watched another flick just last night where a woman turning twenty one the very next day arrives on the scene to claim her inheritance. Her father also died in a mine cave-in twenty years ago. The picture was "Topper Returns" from 1941. What are the odds?

Anyway, back to Nevada. Except for the early scene where Joan and her friend Toni Borden (Marie Harmon) take the stowaway cowboys on a joyride through the desert, the picture is played fairly straight with Andy Devine's character. He often plays a comedic sidekick to Roy, but here he was a pretty no-nonsense lawman. Still, when Cookie and Roy emerge from their jostling camper ride, they both have to clean up their flour-do.

What's never in question with one of Roy's pictures, the bad guys lose in the end. But you know, I have to question Roy's common sense sometimes, like boarding Farrell's (Grant Withers) down hill, runaway cattle truck and duking it out with him with nothing but mountain on one side and air on the other. Not the kind of chance I'd bet the ranch on, even if I were King of the Cowboys.

Say, does anyone know what happened to Toni?