LeRoy Mason Movies

Poverty-row studio Film Booking Office (the later RKO) had a winning combination in the strapping Tom Tyler and freckle-faced boy actor Frankie Darro (later Darrow), whose pleasant westerns were favorites with the small fry. This time around, a movie company arrives at Tyler's ranch. Tyler's naive girlfriend (Doris Hill) is quickly under the spell of the movie company's lecherous leading man (favorite western villain James Mason), and the cowboy retaliates by flirting with movie femme fatale Helen Lynch. Only fair entertainment as westerns go, Tom and His Pals offered the audience a rare insight into the woolly world of low-budget filmmaking. The "pals" of the title were the aforementioned Darro plus two clever canines. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

When Sandow the dog failed to work out as Pathe's answer to Rin Tin Tin, the studio banked its hopes on another noble hound, Grey Boy. The human hero of The Avenging Shadow is Ray Hallor, playing a young bank clerk framed on a robbery charge. Grey Boy gallops to the Great White North in search of the genuine miscreants. Hallor is cleared, winning the hand of warden's daughter Margaret Morris in the process. The Avenging Shadow is utterly free of surprises, but it cleaned up at the box offices in the hinterlands. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A prospector's unhappy wife (Alice Calhoun) takes in, cares for and later comes to love a man (LeRoy Mason) who is unjustly accused of a killing. The true killer, however, turns out to be her husband (Ethan Laidlaw), a fact the audience spotted long before the characters caught on. This basically silent western came augmented with a few sound effects and offered an early sympathetic portrayal by LeRoy Mason, a dapper-looking actor more at home playing smooth-talking villains. In fact, had the film been made only a few years later, Mason, whose darkly good looks were almost too sinister for heroics, would undoubtedly have played the murderous husband. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

The Climax is based on the 1909 play of the same name by Edward Locke. Kathryn Crawford plays Adela Donitelli, an aspiring singer who is coached to stardom by Italian voice teacher Golfanti (Jean Hersholt), who'd performed the same miracle for Adela's opera-diva mother. Along the way, our heroine falls in love with Golfanti's son Pietro (John Reinhardt), only to toss the boy aside in favor of handsome Dr. Gardoni (LeRoy Mason). When her voice begins failing her, Adela submits to an operation, to be performed by the brilliant Gardoni. Unfortunately, Gardoni's less-talented assistant bungles the operation, rendering the girl voiceless. Feeling responsible for this tragedy, Gardoni marries Adela, but gallantly steps aside when she regains her voice and renews her romance with Pietro. One suspects that this wasn't believable even in 1930 -- or 1909, for that matter. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Cowboy star Bill Cody trades his Stetson and chaps for the red uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Mason of the Mounted. Our hero heads below the border to the U.S. to bring in an elusive murderer. His quarry turns out to be the mastermind behind a busy gang of horse rustlers, all of whom are well armed. Be that as it may, the Mountie manages to decimate the other members of the gang and haul the head villain back to Canada. Andy Shuford, a young "Our Gang" alumnus who'd been successfully teamed with Bill Cody on several previous occasion, is back on hand in Mason of the Mounted. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A serial remake of a 1926 Western feature starring William Boyd, The Last Frontier became an early opportunity for young Lon Chaney, Jr. -- still billed Creighton Chaney -- to prove himself worthy of the Chaney name. But young Creighton, handicapped as he was by stilted dialogue and sub-par action sequences -- did not quite live up to the task and would be reduced to supporting roles until his true breakthrough as Lennie in Of Mice and Men (1939). In The Last Frontier, Chaney played Tom Kirby, a crusading newspaper editor opposed to "Tiger" Morris (Richard Neill, an outlaw whose reign of terror is meant to drive the settlers off their valuable land. Kirby dons the disguise of a masked avenger and together with such noted historical personages as General Custer (William Desmond) and Wild Bill Hickock (Yakima Canutt), the crusading reporter manages to curtail Morris' evil schemes. Dorothy Gulliver, of the silent screen, and Judith Barrie were added to the cast to lend a bit of feminine appeal under Spencer Gordon Bennet and Thomas Storey's direction. The Last Frontier was an independent serial produced by Van Buren for RKO release. The 1948 Sam Katzman serial Tex Granger was a very unofficial remake. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

The strapping Tom Tyler, in his fourth and last serial for Universal, played a daredevil pilot coming to the aid of a beleaguered scientist (William Desmond). In between romancing the professor's lovely daughter (Gloria Shea), Tyler battles a series of villains out to steal the "Contragrav," an anti-gravity device. The always suspicious-looking Leroy Mason is the head of a gang of smugglers that include such well-known blackhearts as Edmund Cobb, Bud Osborne, and Wheeler Oakman. A youngish Walter Brennan offers mild comedy relief, while Hugh Enfield played one of Tyler's pilot friends. Enfield later briefly changed his billing to "Robert Allen" before settling permanently on the moniker Craig Reynolds. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

The 1933 Fox production Smoky was the first of three film adaptations of the classic Will James novel. James himself served as off-screen narrator for this story of bronco buster Clint's (Victor Jory) undying devotion to his horse, and vice versa. Separated early on from Clint, Smoky is sold to a notions dealer, undergoing the humiliation of hauling a junk wagon until he grows too old for this sort of work. Slated for the glue factory, Smoky is rescued in the nick of time by Clint, who has never given up hope of someday reclaiming his beloved steed. Though not as effectively cast as Fred MacMurray in the first of the remakes, Victor Jory is quite convincing in his offbeat (for him) role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Silent-film director Edwin Carewe hoped to stage a talkie comeback with his self-produced Are We Civilized? Set in a fictional European country, the story concerns the rise to power of a Hitler-like despot. A courageous newspaper publisher (William Farnum) challenges the new dictator's oppressive reign of terror, and the resultant brouhaha nearly leads to a Second World War. Overladen with symbolism, Are We Civilized? invokes the ghosts of such past movers and shakers as Abraham Lincoln, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Julias Caesar, Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte and even Jesus Christ to hammer home its pacifistic message (the film wants to be both anti-war and anti-dictators, which history has proven to be an oxymoronic set of circumstances). Director Carewe fleshes out his film with generous stock footage from silent Cecil B. DeMille, D. W. Griffith and Thomas Ince historical epics. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In his first in a series of well-mounted Westerns and action melodramas for independent producer Sol Lesser, George O'Brien plays Ernest Selby, a young Easterner who cannot get rid of his inheritance -- an Arizona ranch -- soon enough. But when Sam Hepburn (Henry Hall), the wheelchair-bound operator of his ranch, mistakenly assumes that the youngster is seeking a job to get better acquainted with his haughty daughter Ann (Irene Hervey), Selby decides to stick around and look into the mysterious disappearance of 10,000 heads of cattle. With the help of cowhand Nebrasky Kemp (Syd Saylor), our hero quickly learns that nothing at the Red Rock Ranch is quite as it first appears: Old man Hepburn is only faking an injury, and the foreman, Hyslip (LeRoy Mason), knows more about the missing cattle than he cares to admit. Released by the Fox company, The Dude Ranger was filmed on location at Utah's Zion National Park. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Kermit Maynard, the talented brother of western favorite Ken Maynard, launched his own starring series for Ambassador Films with The Fighting Trooper. Maynard is cast as fledgling Royal Canadian Mountie Burke, who hopes to avenge the murder of his best friend. Disguising himself as a trapper, Burke infiltrates the hideout of the supposed murderer. Upon falling in love with the "killer's" sister (Barbara Worth), our hero endeavors to prove the fugitive's innocence. More carefully produced than most independent westerns, The Fighting Trooper kept Maynard on horseback for the most part, allowing this strapping six-footer to do what he did best. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

With a 45-minute running time, or thereabouts, Texas Terror was John Wayne's shortest Lone Star/Monogram Western and far from his best. Believing has accidentally killed his best friend (Frank Ball), the sheriff (Wayne) hands over his badge to George "Gabby" Hayes and retreats to the high country. En route to take over her murdered father's ranch, Beth Matthews (Lucille Browne) is witness to a stage robbery (a typical modern Western, the "stage" in Texas Terror is a Ford T touring car). An unshaven, dirty-looking Wayne comes to her rescue, but she thinks he is part of the gang. Vaguely recognizing his voice but nothing else, Beth later hires the now cleaned-up former sheriff as her new foreman and they quickly fall in love. But during a dance, Joe Dickson (LeRoy Mason), the incognito leader of the stage robbers, informs the girl that Wayne is the man thought to have killed her father. Wayne soon learns of Dickson's own culpability in the killing and summons an entire tribe of Indians to help capture him. The typical Hollywood Indians in this film all speak in broken English, Chief Black Eagle actually saying "Ugh!" on one occasion, an incongruous moment in a Western where the heroine arrives in an automobile. Intentional comedy relief is provided by Fern Emmett, a sort of poor man's Margaret Hamilton, and veteran slapstick comedian Jack Duffy, both of whom engage in a supposedly hilarious milking contest. The climactic chase sequence is rather heavily padded with stock footage from the silent era and Yakima Canutt is spotted quite clearly doubling for Wayne. As always, veteran director Robert North Bradbury has a great eye for composition (the film seems to have been shot on locations in the Sierras), but his handling of actors leaves much to be desired. Tight-lipped LeRoy Mason delivers Texas Terror's only solid performance as the villain. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide