Tom London Movies

Gene Autry sings "Home on the Range," "Cowboy Blues," and "Mexicali Rose," and the Cass County Boys take care of the humorous "Great Grandad" in this television Western, the second entry in Autry's 1950-1955 series. Coming across the murdered body of Gold Dust Charlie, Autry hurries to the assay office to stake a claim for the dead man's heirs. But he is too late and is instead jailed for murder. Sidekick Pat Buttram, however, does a bit of fancy talking that allows Autry to escape and hunt down the real culprit. Alan Hale Jr. and Pat Buttram's future wife, Sheila Ryan, co-star. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Someone is trying to ruin the Rocky Mountain Stage Line in Dentonville and mine superintendent Gene Autry suspects that Collins (Gregg Barton), the stage driver, has something to do with it. Meanwhile, the local stage agent, Mrs. Wilhelmina Wilkins (Minerva Urecal), takes a dim view of Dentonville's new schoolmarm, Lucy Lawrence (Sheila Ryan), whom the clerk, Henry Mason (Steve Darrell), accuses of being a former saloon girl. But the Widow Wilkins changes her mind when Pat's divining rod, aka the doodle bug, reveals Mason to be behind the recent stage holdups. Gene Autry sings his own and Smiley Burnette's "Ridin' Down the Canyon." Leading lady Sheila Ryan and comedic sidekick Pat Buttram were married two years later. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Breaking from the Republic tradition, cowboy star Monte Hale does not play a character named Monte Hale in The Old Frontier. Instead, Hale is cast as town marshal Barney Regan. It is Barney's formidable task to round up a gang of bank robbers and expose the "Mr. Big" behind all the robberies. Some novelty value is provided by comical sidekick Paul Hurst, here cast as a seafaring man named Skipper Horton, who insists upon imposing his nautical vernacular on every frontiersman he meets. The villainy is in the capable (if unwashed) hands of Tristam Coffin and William Haade. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Novelist Will James, a specialist in horse stories, wrote the yarn upon which 20th Century-Fox's Sand was based. Mark Stevens plays horse breeder Jeff Keane, who loses his prize stallion in a train accident. While the stallion roams wild and free, Keane enlists the aid of rancher Joan Hartley (Coleen Gray) in searching for the animal. Once the horse is located, it is clear that it has developed a mean streak, the result of various cruelties inflicted upon it by humans. Jeff and Joan combine their efforts to regain the horse's friendship. Veteran Native American actors Iron Eyes Cody and Jay Silverheels make significant supporting appearances. Sand was attractively filmed in Technicolor on location in Colorado. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A late entry in Monogram's Jimmy Wakely musical Western series, Brand of Fear features a nice performance by Gail Davis, television's Annie Oakley. Davis plays Anne Lamont, whose guardian, Marshal Black Jack Flint (Tom London), hires her as the new schoolteacher of Oreville, AZ. Black Jack, however, is really a reformed outlaw and is being blackmailed by crooked blacksmith Cal Derringer (Marshall Reed). Derringer is in league with outlaw Tom Slade (William H. Ruhl), who plans to rob a shipment of ore. On the side of law and order are trouble-shooter Jimmy Wakely and his sidekick Cannonball (Dub Taylor). They run down the villains, and with his dying breath, Derringer confesses that Black Jack was innocent of the charges leveled against him 20 years earlier and that he is actually Anne's natural father. In between battling the bad guys, Wakely finds time to sing "There's a Rainbow Over the Range" by Tim Spencer and "Cool Water" by the prolific Bob Nolan. Monogram could have done much worse than this tightly packaged piece of Western hokum, and often did. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Gene Autry enjoyed considerable success with his recording of Stan Jones' haunting "Riders in the Sky". He then parlayed this success into a film, which proved to be one of Autry's best postwar efforts. The basic plot concerns Autry's efforts to clear rancher Ralph Lawson (Steve Darrell) of a trumped-up murder charge. The trumper-upper, Rock McCleary, is played by Robert Livingston, a former cowboy star who turned to character roles late in his career. The heroine is played by Gloria Henry, ten years removed from her TV fame as Alice Mitchell in Dennis the Menace. The title song is imaginatively staged by director John English, with a ghostly Tom London riding hard and fast as a montage of moody images play across the screen. So effective was this vignette that Columbia included it in the coming-attractions trailer for Riders in the Sky. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In a season that also saw him as The Denver Kid (1948) and The Sheriff of Wichita, Republic's Allan Lane, still carrying the nickname of "Rocky," became marshal of the title's rough-and-tumble Texas location. Marshal Lane comes to the aid of a group of stagecoach passengers stranded at the spooky Halfway House after driver Ben Dolan (Roy Barcroft crashed the stage in an attempt to outrun a masked gunman. Prospector Nugget Clark (Eddy Waller) realizes that the Halfway House may not be your average hostelry when the night clerk (Denver Pyle) keeps up a lengthy conversation with a non-existent porter named George. After discovering the body of fellow passenger Hiram Short (Charles Williams), Marshal Lane and Nugget become even more mystified when the manager of the place, Welsh (Trevor Bardette), announces that he employs no night clerk and that the only guest in residence is cranky Mrs. Pettigrew (Minerva Urecal). Yet another stranded passenger, Underwood (Tom Chatterton), has vanished into thin air, his room now used for storage. Dolan, the stage driver, also meets with sudden death and the missing Underwood's pretty daughter Marjorie (Mildred Coles) informs Lane that her father was carrying $50,000 on his person, money earmarked for buying a ranch. Arriving to the inn late at night, Marjorie is also served by the spooky night clerk, who offers to take her to see her father. The plot thickens and Marshal Lane realizes that Underwood has been kidnapped for his money. After all the mysterious goings-on have been unmakes as fake, the murder/kidnapper is caught in a dramatic chase between stagecoaches, a chase that ends in a raging river. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Ralph Byrd returns to the character he had originated ten years earlier in the serial Dick Tracy. This time, Chester Gould's immortal comic strip hero is called in to handle a fur theft. The owner of Flawless Furs, Humphreys (Charles Marsh), has just signed on with the Honesty Insurance Company whose investigator, Cudd (Al Bridge), made him change the combination to the vault. The insurance policy --as the head of Honesty, Peter Premium (William B. Davidson), explains -- holds the company liable if the stolen furs haven't been recovered within 24 hours of the theft. The trail leads to Longshot Lily (Bernadene Hayes), a would-be fence who is promptly arrested. But when Tracy's snitch, Sightless (Jimmy Conlin), is found brutally murdered, the detective realizes that he has more than a simple fur theft on his hands. With the help of master thespian Vitamin Flintheart (Ian Keith) and ever-present sidekick Pat Patton (Lyle Latell), Tracy follows a series of clues that leads him to a deserted junkyard and a fateful confrontation with fiendish killer "the Claw" (Jack Lambert). Dick Tracy's Dilemma was followed by Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), after which RKO retired the series. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Saddle Pals hits a new low for Gene Autry's postwar Republic westerns, containing literally no action at all. Autry is drawn into the plot when he's given power of attorney in a property settlement involving his old pal (Sterling Holloway) and a gang of land swindlers. The pal then goes on an extended vacation, leaving Autry to sort things out. Though he doesn't display the business acumen that would eventually transform him into a real-life billionaire, Autry does manage to figure out that the swindlers are up to something dishonest. One of the more curious aspects of the film is the casting of traditional comedy-relief actor Sterling Holloway as the plot catalyst; he looks almost as uncomfortable as Autry. Fortunately, Autry's movie career would take an upswing the following year when he switched his base of operations from Republic to Columbia. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Marshal of Cripple Creek was the last of seven Republic "Red Ryder" westerns starring Allan "Rocky" Lane. This time, Red Ryder (Lane) rides into a gold-mining town, where an outlaw gang is operating unmolested. It's not that the local sheriff is corrupt; it's simply that the villains are too clever and well-hidden. Since the crooks seem to favor robbing the regular gold-ore shipments, Ryder rides along on one of these excursions, and the results are explosive indeed. Helping our hero achieve his goal is former outlaw Tom Lambert (Trevor Bardette), anxious to prove he's gone straight. In addition to Allan Lane, Marshal of Cripple Creek features Bobby Blake and Martha Wentworth as Red Ryder's comic-strip cohorts Little Beaver and The Duchess. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Clayton Moore stars as Jesse James in this Western serial, in which the notorious outlaw attempts to leave behind the criminal life. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Filmed in "glorious" Trucolor, a low-budget substitute for Technicolor, Under Colorado Skies remains a standard B-Western, neither better nor worse than the majority of late-1940s sagebrush fare from genre specialist Republic Pictures. Monte Hale stars as a medical student moonlighting as a bank teller. Arriving on the scene in the middle of a robbery, Hale discovers that one of the bandits (John Alvin) is the brother of his girlfriend (Adrian Booth). To shield the wayward youth from prosecution, our hero accepts blame for both the robbery and the death of the bank's owner (Raymond Bond), but manages to escape on the way to jail. Hooking up with entertainers Foy Willing & the Riders of the Purple Sage, he then goes undercover as a performer in a saloon owned by Paul Hurst. Learning the whereabouts of the bandits, Monte fakes his own death and is later able to flush out their leader, the nefarious William Haade. As always, Hale does well in both the fistfights and as a balladeer, accompanied here by Foy Willing and the Riders in such selections as "San Antonio Rose", by Bob Wills, "Holiday for the Blues", by Willing and Sid Robin, and "Wait for the Wagon", by George P. Knauff and Sid Robin. In one of her eight westerns with Hale, Adrian Booth is, as always, a fetching sight and the veteran Paul Hurst makes a welcome addition to the Hale oeuvre. Hurst would go on to appear in all but one of Hale's subsequent vehicles, providing his own brand of homey comic relief. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Cowboy star Allan "Rocky" Lane teams with a sagebrush favorite of yore, Jack Holt, in Republic's The Wild Frontier. In an unusual move, Holt is cast as the villain, the man responsible for the murder of Lane's sheriff father. Taking over from his day, Lane vows to locate the killer-who, unbeknownst to him of course, is above-suspicion solid citizen Holt. Having recently completed his duties in Republic's Red Ryder series, Allan Lane used Wild Frontier as a springboard for a series in which he appeared under his own name. Though popular with the public, the egotistical star did nothing to ingratiate himself to his coworkers, thus the "Rocky Lane" series was relatively short-lived. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide