User Reviews

Was this clichéd when it was made? It is now, of course. Every line of script is hombre, garsh ma'am and reach for the ceiling! But, now, almost everything from the old movies is clichéd. In 1932, was this material fresh? I doubt it. Everything about this movie screams one-shot direction and fast production.

But, that's okay! It does what it was meant to do in providing a fast and furious western saga. John Drury (Wayne) is new in town but wastes no time taming an angry horse (Duke), making sweet time with Ruth (Hall), and going after the film's villain (Hagney).

Folks seem a little harsh in judging the acting and plot. This movie rushes along as it was meant to. There's little time (55 minutes) to waste on characterization or thoughtful pauses. What we do get is wall-to-wall action which, I believe, is what the movie was shooting for. For drama there are some double-crosses (Drury is framed for being the murderer) and tough talking.

John Wayne is nowhere near as polished as we see him in later (and more successful) movies. But his charm is right there in all it's rough glory.

I recommend this movie for couch-and-snacks enjoyment. 5 of 10!

Director Fred Allen's "Ride Him, Cowboy," a remake of the 1926 Warner Brothers' Ken Maynard western "The Unknown," toplined John Wayne in his first oater for the Burbank company as a harmonica playing hero out to break up a ring of range thieves terrorizing ranches. Essentially, "Ride Him, Cowboy" was a B-movie sagebrusher where the star's horse shows more sense than most of the characters and behaves like a resourceful canine rather than a skittish mount. Aside from a cowboy orchestra strumming a tune, "Ride Him, Cowboy" contains no orchestral soundtrack, but this western boasts better than average production values and looks more expensive than Wayne's later Lone Star westerns that he made after Jack Warner turned him loose some five westerns later. Indeed, this is John Wayne at age 25 looking skinny and rawboned as an upstanding, romantic lead. Predictable from fade-in to fade-out, "Ride Him, Cowboy" is nothing distinguished, but director-turned-editor Fred Allen makes interesting use of dolly shots and there is an interesting point-of-view shot of the sun boiling down on our hero when he is tied to a tree in the desert.

"Ride Him, Cowboy" opens during one dark, rainy evening as the notorious outlaw 'the Hawk' (Frank Nagney of "The General") a.k.a. Henry Sims and his henchmen attack the Gaunt ranch to steal money. A fierce horse storms up and drives the henchmen away. Jim Gaunt (Henry B. Walthall of "Judge Priest") and his granddaughter Ruth (Ruth Hall of "Monkey Business") check into the disturbance and find one of their ranch hands, Bob Webb, unconscious and in pretty bad shape. Gaunt is surprised to see Sims on his property. Sims explains he just happened to be riding along when he heard the fracas. Sims argues that the horse tried to kill Webb and ought to be destroyed. Meanwhile, the doctor thinks that Webb will pull through without harm, but the ranch hand remains in a coma for three days.

The next day in the frontier town of Cattlelow in Maricopa County around the year 1900, Judge Bartlett (Charles Sellon of "Baby Face") convenes court to decide whether to destroy Duke or let the horse live. Sims offers compelling testimony against the horse and Duke rears up at Sims. Ruth rushes to Duke's defense and pleads with the judge not to destroy a horse as gentle as he is. About that time, wandering cowpoke John Drury, late of the Tumblin' Ace Ranch in Texas, rides into Cattlelow on his horse 'Buddy' playing a harmonica without a care in the world. When Drury leans about the impending demise of Duke, he intervenes and persuades Judge Bartlett to let Duke live if he can ride the ornery horse. Sims makes a one-hundred dollar wager with Gaunt that Drury cannot stay aboard Duke and loses. Ruth and Gaunt are overjoyed that Drury saves Duke and a bystander observes that Drury would be a great addition to the vigilantes in their fight against the Hawk. Gaunt invites Drury to their meeting after our hero says that he loves excitement and gives Ruth a loving eye.

At the vigilante meeting, Drury suggests that the best way to handle the Hawk is for one man to tackle the villain. Drury learns that nobody knows what the Hawk looks like, except the man has ridden roughshod over the county for years now. John Gaunt persuades Sims to escort Drury into the Hawk's bailiwick. One of the best dolly shots in "Ride Him, Cowboy" occurs during this scene when Allen dollies out from a close-up of Sims to show the entire with several western characters seated around a table. The deputy, Clout (Henry Gribbon of "Yankee Doodle in Berlin"), provides top-notch comic relief as a clowning blow-hard coward. Later that evening at the Gaunt ranch, John and Ruth get to know each other and Ruth insists that John take Duke when he leaves to track down the Hawk. At the same time, Duke trots up and strips the saddle off Drury's horse Buddy. Drury rides off on Duke and meets Sims the following day at Eagle Pass. They ride into the desert and take a breather where Drury explains that his revolver is a 38 caliber gun in a .45 caliber frame dampen the recoil. They compare their ability to make difficult shots look easy and Sims tries out Drury's six-gun and gets the drop on our hero. He ties Drury to a tree while Duke restlessly pulls at his own reins after Drury has knotted them to nearby tree.

The Hawk gathers his men, attacks a ranch, and kills the son of the owner and wife. Burning down the buildings, he frames Drury for the crime by leaving Drury's harmonica at the scene. Sims informs Ruth that Drury left him without a word in the night and hasn't been seen since he rode off. The vigilantes and the sheriff catch up to Drury. The only reason that Drury didn't die from exposure of the sun is that Duke pulled himself loose from the tree and untied Drury's bonds with his teeth. The authorities take Drury to a nearby abandoned town where Judge E. Clarence 'Necktie' Jones (Otis Harlan of "Dr. Socrates") convenes a hearing and pretty much railroads Drury into a noose based on Sims' testimony. Meanwhile, Webb recovers from his coma and informs Ruth that it was Sims as the Hawk who attacked their ranch. Ruth mounts up and rides like the devil to save Drury's life. Along the way, she runs into the Hawk's henchmen and fools them into following her to 'Necktie' Jones' courtroom. Ruth arrives in the nick of time to save Drury from an inevitable hanging.

Clocking in at a lean, mean 55 minutes, "Ride Him, Cowboy" moves at a brisk pace and never bogs down. Producer Leon Schlesinger is the same individual who supervised the Warner Brothers' cartoons with Bugs Bunny and company.

Copyright 23 August 1932 by Vitagraph, Inc. U.S. release through Warner Bros: 27 August 1932. No New York opening. U.K. release by Warner Bros: January 1933. 6 reels. 56 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: John Drury (Wayne) is a wandering cowboy who saves a spirited wild horse ("Duke") from being put down after a killer, whose identity the horse knows, tries to cover up his crime by laying the blame for the rancher's death on the animal. But what the townsfolk didn't know was that their fellow citizen is actually a mysterious but ruthless bandit known as "The Hawk".

NOTES: A re-make of The Unknown Cavalier (1926), starring Ken Maynard as Drury, Kathleen Collins as Ruth Gaunt, David Torrence as Gaunt, and James Mason as the marauder. Albert Rogell directed for producer Charles R. Rogers.

Wayne did not make the list of top ten money-makers until 1949, when he suddenly jumped into 4th place. However, he did rank 7th in the first annual survey of western stars in 1936.

The first of six "B" westerns Wayne was to make for Warner Bros, all of them co-starring "Duke" (variously billed as "The Devil Horse" and "The Miracle Horse").

COMMENT: A fascinating little western with great production values (augmented by a few stock shots from the 1926 Ken Maynard version), a suspenseful story, a few offbeat characters and some great acting, particularly from "Duke" the horse, "Duke" the star, Otis Harlan the judge (repeating his role from the 1926 film), and Frank Hagney the villain.

Director Fred Allen shows occasional flashes of genius. A less imaginative director could well have made this movie into just another routine little oater. But aided by Ted McCord's superlative camerawork and the availability of some inspiring locations, Allen has created a minor gem.

In short, a very pleasing effort from all concerned. Wayne is already an engaging personality.

During the 1931/1932 movie release season, Columbia Pictures had Buck Jones under contract to do a series of Westerns. During the same period, they also signed up a young John Wayne, perhaps to groom for future leading roles. However with the signing of yet another Western hero, Tim McCoy, Wayne became expendable after appearing in three films that featured Jones and McCoy.

So Wayne was picked up by Leon Schlesinger over at Warners, resulting in a series of six films; "Ride Him, Cowboy" was the first. Long after seeing all sixteen of Wayne's Lone Star Westerns (1933 to 1935) he made right after the Warners gig, I've been diligently seeking them out, and lo and behold, all six appeared on the Turner Classic Movie Channel this past week, aired in the order of their original release. Sometimes the movie gods smile down favorably.

The film opens with Wayne galloping into view atop his horse 'Duke', perhaps not as dramatic an entrance as he made in the opener for "Stagecoach", but impressive nonetheless. What's interesting is that the picture serves as the origin story for Wayne's horse, who appeared in all six of the Warners sagebrush yarns and released as 'Four Star Westerns'. In the story, Duke is put on trial! for being a menace to the community of Cattlelow in Healer Valley, Maricopa County. The film's captioning stated the town's name as 'Catalog', but I use another reviewer's description since it seems to make more sense.

Duke, who's owned by the Gaunt's (Henry B. Walthall and Ruth Hall), is saved by harmonica playing John Drury (Wayne) after successfully staying on board the bucking Duke to prove that the horse is manageable. That scene of Drury taming down Duke was handled using stock footage from an earlier Ken Maynard film atop his horse Tarzan. Duke himself, a white horse, was selected because of his resemblance to Tarzan for just such an eventuality. One more note of interest - Duke appeared to have some sort of brand or mark on his left hindquarter, and depending on the camera angle, the mark looked like 'A1' or '/H', a little difficult to tell, although in the follow up picture, "The Big Stampede", it definitely looks more like 'A1'.

Duke proved invaluable in the later going when it became necessary to save his new master from dying in the desert after the villain Hawk (Frank Hagney) tricked Drury into giving up his gun. Duke managed to uproot the tree he was tied to and undid the rope securing Drury so he could bring the Hawk and the rest of his rustling gang to justice. Before that though, Drury had to stand trial for a raid on the Gordon Ranch, having been implicated by his harmonica placed at the scene by Henry Sims, the Hawk. A newspaper headline touting 'Dewey Captures Manila' in the office of Judge 'Necktie' Jones (Otis Harlan), places the date of this story some time after May 1st, 1898.

Riding hard to make the save, because Duke couldn't actually speak, one of the few things he wasn't capable of, Ruth Gaunt arrived just in time after outwitting a trio of Hawk's henchmen. In a story made credible only by the standards of these early B Westerns, Drury and his gal Ruth close things out with a kiss, establishing a tradition that would carry through the remaining Four Star Westerns as well as the Lone Star films to follow.

Addendum**** 6-7-2016 - Doing a little research on 'Duke', you can see a pretty good screen capture of the brand noted in my review here at: http://www.b-westerns.com/hoss-jwayne.htm. Apparently it's a combination of the letters AH as one can see from the picture.

It is said that in mediaeval Europe animals could be tried in court for crimes against humans; the 1993 British film "The Hour of the Pig" centres upon such a trial. It would appear from this film that this practice survived in the USA, at least in the Western states, into the late nineteenth century, because as the film opens a horse named Duke is on trial for his life, accused of killing a man. A young cowboy named John Drury, who happens to be passing through town, is convinced that the animal is not dangerous, and the local people agree to spare Duke if Drury can ride him. He does, of course, and Duke is duly acquitted. The rest of the film tells of how Drury, ably and nobly assisted by Duke, manages to rid the area of a notorious bandit named "The Hawk".

John Wayne's first starring role was in Raoul Walsh's "The Big Trail" from 1930, but when this film flopped at the box-office he spend most of the rest of the decade making third-rate horse-operas for the smaller "Poverty Row" studios. "Ride Him, Cowboy", however, is a cut above that sort of thing. It was, for a start, made by a major studio, Warner Brothers, albeit as a B-movie. (It is less than an hour long).

The film's main weakness is its major plot-hole. The Hawk turns out to be one Henry Simms, a man posing as an upright, respectable citizen, and in order to divert suspicion from himself he attempts to frame Drury for his crimes by dropping a mouth organ belonging to the young man at the scene of one of his robberies. At this point, however, Simms wrongly believes Drury to be dead. (Simms has tied him to a tree in the desert and left him to die of thirst, a complicated way of killing someone probably chosen by the scriptwriters in order to allow Duke to repay his debt of gratitude by loosening Drury's bonds). It seems quite illogical for Simms try and frame a man he believes to be dead, especially as dropping the mouth-organ would only serve to incriminate Simms himself, as the man in the best position to have stolen it.

Despite this, the film is a lot more watchable than many of Wayne's offerings for the period. It is not marked by the sort of bad acting, cheap special effects and incompetently choreographed fight scenes that marred films like "Paradise Canyon" or "The Desert Trail". There is a relatively decent story and Wayne, although by no means at his best, is certainly than he was to be in those two films and many others like them. There is an entertaining comic turn from Otis Harlan as a corrupt-but-funny hanging judge. The best acting, however, probably comes from the horse Duke. 5/10.

Ride Him, Cowboy was John Wayne's debut film for Warner Brothers from 1932. Wayne stars as a drifter who happens upon a small town besieged by the "Hawk", a vandal terrorizing the townsfolk for a reason that's never fully revealed. A horse named Duke (of all names) joins up with Wayne in thwarting the "Hawk". The film is a remake of an even older Ken Maynard film, and the plot and characters are creaky. The film moves at a brisk pace, but Wayne never gets to show his stuff much and is upstaged by Duke the horse, as is everyone else in the film. Frank Hagney plays Henry Sims, in one of the few credited roles he played; most of his later roles in his long career were uncredited bit parts. Cornball comic moments are provided by the deputy played by Henry Gribbon and Judge "Necktie" Jones played by Otis Harlan. Film is not up to later Wayne standards, even for a programmer. *1/2 of 4 stars.

In the 1930s, John Wayne made a very long string of low-budget westerns. Despite their limitations, most of these films are pretty enjoyable for what they are--films to compete with series by the likes of Gene Autry and the like. And, compared to these other films, the Wayne films are generally a bit better. However, none of the films of this genre are high art--with often silly and tissue-thin plots but plenty of action.

This film irritated me a bit, as you must accept the notion that everyone in the film has an IQ lower than a tomato's! Heck, Duke the Horse is MUCH smarter than everyone else in this silly film! You see this is one of the earliest scenes where Duke is on trial(!). He's accused of being vicious as he reacts horribly--at least around certain people. No one seems to notice that he is a gentle horse and only acts up around people who turn out to be evil! No one in town seems to know who the local villain, 'the Hawk', is, but Duke sure knows--and might pay for his life because of this! A bit later, it turns out that Wayne's character is also amazingly stupid. In a badly written scene, it's obvious to every single person in the audience (including the babies) that the guy in the desert with Wayne is the Hawk. Their conversation clearly lets you know that the guy is the Hawk and people in the audience were no-doubt yelling "it's the Hawk--don't trust him!". Yet, oddly, Wayne hands this evil man his guy to 'try it out' and low and behold, he takes Wayne prisoner!! And, for that matter, the Hawk isn't all that bright either, as he ties up Wayne and leaves him instead of just shooting him in the head! I guess the Hawk knew Wayne was the hero and, as such, was invulnerable! Later still, it's obvious that Wayne is a good guy. So what do the townsfolk do? Yep, they decide to hang him despite having almost no evidence!! And, when Wayne offers to give them proof that he's innocent, they ignore him! They also won't allow him to testify in court! What a bunch of poop-brains!! Is there lead in the water or something that might account for everyone being so incredibly stupid?! Perhaps there is a stupid gene and everyone here is related to each other! To make it even worse, a nice young lady learns who the Hawk really is and tells everyone in court who the Hawk is...and they STILL want to hang Wayne!!

Overall, this is a pretty terrible film--even for a B-western. Wayne went on to make some very good Bs, but his early ones for Leon Schlesinger Studios were amazingly bad. This and "Haunted Gold" are two of these dreadful films he made with them and fortunately his films made just a few years later were much, much better--such as his Three Mesquiteers series. Any film that requires characters to be this dumb to make the plot work just isn't worth seeing--except for its value as comedy!!

John Wayne had been around for a while prior to making this B Western at Warner Brothers, first as an extra and bit player, and later the star of a big western epic, "The Big Trail". That wasn't enough to make him a big star early on. But after some low budget westerns through the Lone Star production company, he went to Warners and starred in a series of low budget films that definitely look like A films compared to most of his others made in the 1930's.

This one doesn't even reach an hour in length yet it's pretty good dealing with Wayne coming to the rescue of a horse on trial and saving it from being turned into glue. The horse's name happens to be Duke and he isn't afraid of stealing from Wayne's other horse's feed bag. The town where Wayne arrives in is being harassed by a masked villain known as the Hawk, and it's up to Wayne to unmask him.

While riding out in the desert with Frank Hagney, the two engage in a very macho conversation about their guns and it's unintentionally funny. Hagney ends up with Wayne's gun and reveals himself to be the bad guy, tying Wayne to a tree, and returns, claiming that John is the Hawk. It's pretty obvious how things are gonna turn out. One thing is unclear why Duke gets billing and the other horse doesn't, even among the uncredited. Still a very entertaining film and signs of what was to come for the real Duke.

. . . during her Troubles of the 1900s into our 21st Century for hanging BOTH Quasimodo's crush Esmerelda AND this gypsy gal's dancing goat! Just thinking about that poor, innocent goat flailing around at the end of a rope is enough to make anyone toss their French fries. Warner Bros. uses RIDE HIM, COWBOY to warn America that the "Red State" West is every bit as uncouth and gauche as backwards France. It's bad enough that a 25-year-old John Wayne is almost strung up for possession of a harmonica, before he's done anything in Real Life to earn his nickname of "The American Anti-Christ." But the heartless bozos who populate the U.S. West go too far in putting Wayne's Wonder Horse "Duke" on trial, with an eye toward dropping the white stallion on the Gallows. Both "Dukes"--man and horse--are nearly doomed on the say-so of the local crime-lord, a top honcho on the town's Vigilante Council. Red Stater's inability to differentiate between Angels and Demons explains why they're now going down at the Final Trump, Warner Bros. explains with RIDE HIM, COWBOY.