John Wayne made a number of crummy movies at Lone Star. Trying to decide which was worst is not easy, but "The Man From Utah" is hard to beat.
John Weston (Wayne) rides into a new town looking for work, and immediately jumps in to stop a robbery in progress. U. S. Marshal George Higgins (George Hayes, later known as Gabby Hayes) then asks Weston to help solve a series of mysterious rodeo deaths he believes are caused by insiders running the rodeo, whose hired hands always win when these rodeos end in sudden death.
"It's mighty peculiar that these outsiders fall off those tough broncs sufferin' from snake bite," Higgins says. "I tell you it just ain't natural." That's some mighty fine po-lease work, I tells yuh.
Everything about "The Man From Utah" suggests a cut-rate, hurry-up production, more so than the usual Lone Star offerings Wayne made with director Robert N. Bradbury. The movie is slathered with minutes of footage of real rodeo action which seems a decade older than the rest of the film. Parading American Indians, steer roping, stagecoach races, people in stands waving and cheering, it just goes on and on.
Wayne is terrible in this one, stiff and wooden. He talks in a monotone and barely seems engaged in what he's doing. A weak script supplies his character with zero motivation to do more. Asked by this guy he never met to go undercover and risk his neck to solve the rodeo mystery, Weston simply smiles and says "Sounds great to me!" without even asking about pay.
"I'm kind of green at this racket," he says at one point. Green don't cut it here.
For some reason, the film introduces Weston on a horse and singing. I think it was him singing, and not the horse, though each seems to lip-sync as well as the other. When Weston reaches town, he puts the guitar behind a tree and the singing never comes up again. Why bring it out in the first place?
Padding. It's the reason for the stock footage, too, and a lot of other things in this movie. Take a sequence where Higgins takes Weston to meet a man chopping wood, who then takes Weston to a canoe on a river, whereupon they paddle to a small corral where the guy gives Weston a horse and tells him there's a trail to the town where the rodeo is being held. Why did we need to see all this, if not to fill time? Fifty-two minutes never seemed so hard to fill.
Everything is off in this film, from the opening gunfight (everyone including Wayne wave their pistols up and down when firing them, like finger jabs) to the closing battle, where Wayne rides up on two men who shoot and shoot at him, not breaking stride until he jumps off and tackles them to the ground simultaneously.
Hayes is fun to watch at times, and so was Polly Ann Young as the pretty love interest, though like everyone else she's saddled with bad dialogue trying to shoehorn a love story in the off minutes. Everyone else plays their parts like rejected extras from a social- disease short.
It's hard to rustle much love for this one. Even one of the more positive reviews of this movie notes: "Looking too deep into the story shows its flaws." I second that sentiment, provided "looking too deep" means watching it for more than 90 seconds. "The Man From Utah" is something you don't want to watch unless you are a John Wayne fan, in which case you REALLY don't want to watch it.
John Weston (Wayne) rides into a new town looking for work, and immediately jumps in to stop a robbery in progress. U. S. Marshal George Higgins (George Hayes, later known as Gabby Hayes) then asks Weston to help solve a series of mysterious rodeo deaths he believes are caused by insiders running the rodeo, whose hired hands always win when these rodeos end in sudden death.
"It's mighty peculiar that these outsiders fall off those tough broncs sufferin' from snake bite," Higgins says. "I tell you it just ain't natural." That's some mighty fine po-lease work, I tells yuh.
Everything about "The Man From Utah" suggests a cut-rate, hurry-up production, more so than the usual Lone Star offerings Wayne made with director Robert N. Bradbury. The movie is slathered with minutes of footage of real rodeo action which seems a decade older than the rest of the film. Parading American Indians, steer roping, stagecoach races, people in stands waving and cheering, it just goes on and on.
Wayne is terrible in this one, stiff and wooden. He talks in a monotone and barely seems engaged in what he's doing. A weak script supplies his character with zero motivation to do more. Asked by this guy he never met to go undercover and risk his neck to solve the rodeo mystery, Weston simply smiles and says "Sounds great to me!" without even asking about pay.
"I'm kind of green at this racket," he says at one point. Green don't cut it here.
For some reason, the film introduces Weston on a horse and singing. I think it was him singing, and not the horse, though each seems to lip-sync as well as the other. When Weston reaches town, he puts the guitar behind a tree and the singing never comes up again. Why bring it out in the first place?
Padding. It's the reason for the stock footage, too, and a lot of other things in this movie. Take a sequence where Higgins takes Weston to meet a man chopping wood, who then takes Weston to a canoe on a river, whereupon they paddle to a small corral where the guy gives Weston a horse and tells him there's a trail to the town where the rodeo is being held. Why did we need to see all this, if not to fill time? Fifty-two minutes never seemed so hard to fill.
Everything is off in this film, from the opening gunfight (everyone including Wayne wave their pistols up and down when firing them, like finger jabs) to the closing battle, where Wayne rides up on two men who shoot and shoot at him, not breaking stride until he jumps off and tackles them to the ground simultaneously.
Hayes is fun to watch at times, and so was Polly Ann Young as the pretty love interest, though like everyone else she's saddled with bad dialogue trying to shoehorn a love story in the off minutes. Everyone else plays their parts like rejected extras from a social- disease short.
It's hard to rustle much love for this one. Even one of the more positive reviews of this movie notes: "Looking too deep into the story shows its flaws." I second that sentiment, provided "looking too deep" means watching it for more than 90 seconds. "The Man From Utah" is something you don't want to watch unless you are a John Wayne fan, in which case you REALLY don't want to watch it.