Jim Thorpe Movies

The air-mail pilots who fly from a small airport in the Rocky Mountains are determined but not paid well, and there are occasional fatal crashes. It's a tradition of long standing that when this happens, chief pilot Mike Miller (Ralph Bellamy) makes the next flight himself. Daredevil Duke Talbot (Pat O'Brien) is hired; he starts an affair with Irene Wilkins (Lilian Bond), wife of pilot Dizzy (Russell Hopton). A fierce snowstorm rages when Dizzy next takes off. He crashes and is killed, so Mike makes the next flight. He crashes in an inaccessible valley, but survives. Although Duke has now run off with Irene, when he hears about Mike's crash, he decides to fly to the rescue. ~ Bill Warren, All Movie Guide

"Suggested" by the book The West That Was by legendary showman William F. Cody, this 12 chapter Universal serial was merely another slam-bang affair in which Cody (Tom Tyler) and his younger sidekick, Dave Archer (Rex Bell), battle a nasty claim jumper, Jim Rodney (Francis Ford), and his gang. Resenting the interference in his plans, Rodney not only incites the local Indian tribe to attack the town but also blackmails the local community to elect him sheriff. Not one of the era's better serials, Battling with Buffalo Bill still manages to engage no less than 10 former silent cowboy stars in the cast, somewhat of a record. Of course, most of the gentlemen in question were finding the new audible Hollywood an inhospitable place and were just happy to be working, even for the lousy wages offered by Universal producer Henry MacRae. Leading man Tom Tyler, who had replaced Tim McCoy, would become a regular serial hero in the sound era, bringing such comic book heroes as "Captain Marvel" (1940) and The Phantom (1943) to life. A former Fox star, second-billed Rex Bell was the husband of Clara Bow and a future lieutenant governor of Nevada. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Shortly before Universal Pictures disbanded its "B" unit, the studio inaugurated an energetic western series starring Rod Cameron. In Beyond the Pecos, Cameron plays a rancher at odds with longtime rival Eddie Dew (himself a "B" sagebrush star at other studios). The two brawny men in Stetsons battle over rights of oil land that borders both their properties. When they tire of squabbling over money, Cameron and Dew fight over the attentions of pretty Jennifer Holt (daughter of Jack Holt). Director Lambert Hillyer handles Beyond the Pecos with his customary speed and efficiency. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Paramount borrowed John Wayne from Republic Pictures for the studio's second screen version of Zane Grey's Born to the West, which was also the Western's original release title. A couple of drifters, Dare Rudd (Wayne) and Dinkie Hooley (Sid Saylor), arrive in a Wyoming town hoping for a handout from Dare's rancher cousin, Tom Fillmore (Johnny Mack Brown). Dare takes but one look at Tom's girlfriend, Judy Worstall (Marsha Hunt), and decides to stay in town. He obtains the job of chuck wagon cook, but Judy, who is falling for the charming newcomer, convinces Tom to give Dare a job with more responsibilities. To get rid of a potential rival and to prove Dare's irresponsibility once and for all, Tom assigns his cousin the job of selling the herd. Unbeknownst to either Tom or Dare, however, saloon owner Bart Hammond (Monte Blue) also has his greedy eye on the herd and sets a trap for Dare. Hell Town used quite a bit of stock footage from the original silent version, Born to the West, which had starred Jack Holt. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Burt Lancaster stars as Jim Thorpe, the Native American sports whiz whom many consider the greatest athlete of the 20th century. We first see Thorpe as a child on the reservation, highly resistant to the notion of going to school. He proves to be an excellent student, eventually attending the all-Indian college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Still, Thorpe doesn't feel like mixing much with the other students until coach Charles Bickford encourages the lad to go out for the track team. Thorpe finds that he can be more "articulate" as an athlete than as a scholar, and soon excels at all school sports. He also marries his college sweetheart, non-Indian Phyllis Thaxter. After graduation, Thorpe tries to get a coaching job, but is frozen out by the white establishment. Determined to make a name for himself, he enters the 1912 Olympics at Stockholm, where he earns more gold medals than anyone else and is praised as the world's greatest athlete by the King of Sweden. Unfortunately, the fact that Thorpe briefly played semi-professional baseball while attending Carlisle costs him his amateur status--and every one of his medals. Things go from bad to worse for Thorpe after this; his son dies, his marriage disintegrates, and he crawls into a bottle. Thorpe has hit rock bottom when he is reunited with his old coach Bickford, who offers Jim a ticket to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. It is the first small step on the road to regeneration for Jim Thorpe (alas, real life was not so kind; Thorpe died in near-poverty, and it was not until years after his death that his Olympic medals were restored). Jim Thorpe, All American was directed by Michael Curtiz, who previously had secured small acting roles for the real Thorpe in such films as Knute Rockne: All American (1940). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

My Pal the King may not be the best of Tom Mix's talkie westerns, but it is the one that comes closest to the spirit of his silent films -- and it's the one that everyone seems to remember the most. The scene is a mythical European kingdom, where 10-year-old King Charles (Mickey Rooney) yawns his way through cabinet meetings dominated by the scheming, covetous Count DeMar (James Kirkwood). Escaping his royal environs, Charles scurries to the town square (actually the village set from Frankenstein!) where visiting Wild-West showman Tom Reed (Mix) is leading a parade. Quickly befriending Tom, Charles and his entourage are invited to a special presentation of Reed's travelling circus. Reciprocating, Charles welcomes Tom into the palace, where the down-to-earth Westerner introduces the young monarch to the concept of democracy. Sensing that Charles is being swayed by Tom's egalitarian point of view, the evil DeMar kidnaps the boy and traps him in the catacombs of the Count's country estate. As Charles's underground prison slowly fills with water, Tom and his buddies race to the rescue. In the best tradition of Universal Pictures, My Pal the King offers a million dollars' worth of entertainment on a very modest budget; in addition, the film offers the modern viewer a tantalizing glimpse of what Tom Mix's real-life Wild West Show must have been like (among the performers is former Olympic champion Jim Thorpe). The film falters only when star Mix comes "out" of the picture, exhorting the kids in the audience to imagine what it must be like for King Charles to experience his first western show; impressive though he is on a physical level, Mix was never much of a verbal actor. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

An average Columbia B-Western, Prairie Schooners once again features William Elliott as a highly fictitious Wild Bill Hickock. When local farmers are ready to string up nasty banker Dalton Stull (Kenneth Harlan), who had taken advantage of a drought to foreclose on their loans, Wild Bill agrees instead to negotiate on their behalf. When that fails, the hero suggests that the farmers sell their property and move to the hopefully more congenial Colorado. En route, the wagon train guided by Bill is attacked by Sioux Indians, who have been armed by Stull and his chief henchman Wolf Tanner (Ray Teal). Lovely Virginia Benton (Evelyn Young) is taken hostage by Stull, but Wild Bill and sidekick Cannonball (Dub Taylor) finally convince Chief Sanche (Jim Thorpe) to join the forces of good and the villains are rounded up. Prairie Schooners, which premiered in October of 1940, was based on a 1930 magazine story by George Cory Franklin. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Randolph Scott, whom Cooper borrowed from Paramount, plays Leo Vincey, an explorer searching for the "flame of life," a radioactive element hidden in the Arctic parts of Manchuria which, according to Vincey family lore, can bestow eternal life. Setting out on the fearful journey along with British scientist Horace Holly (Nigel Bruce), Vincey is soon joined by Dugmore (Lumsden Hare), a brutish trader, and his daughter Tanya (Helen Mack). In the mountains north of the legendary civilization of Kor, where the "flame of life" is said to be located, Dugmore stumbles over a frozen corpse laden with gold. Greedily hacking away at the corpse, the trader causes an avalanche that kills him and seals off Vincey, Holly, and Tanya from the expedition. The avalanche, however, also exposes a volcanic cave where the trio is taken into custody by Billali (Gustav Von Seyffertitz), Prime Minister of Kor, who brings them before the almighty ruler She, Hash-A-Mo-Tep (She, Who Must be Obeyed). The mysterious female potentate mistakes Vincey for his ancestor John Vincey, for whose return she has been waiting for 500 years. Completely under the spell of this beautiful but ancient monarch, Vincey demands that Holly and Tanya leave without him. But when She discovers Tanya's true feelings for Vincey, the merciless ruler orders the girl to be used as human sacrifice. Tanya is about to be dropped into the Holy Well when Vincey finally comes to his senses. With Holly and a rescued Tanya in tow, he escapes across a dangerous precipice -- right into She's sacred temple -- where a final, climactic confrontation between explorer and ruler takes place. Created by the makers of King Kong (1933) -- producer Merian C. Cooper and screenwriter Ruth Rose -- She, from H. Rider Haggard's 1886 novel, proved a disaster at the box office, losing a total of $180,000 according to some reports. Much of the blame was placed, unfairly perhaps, at the feet of Broadway actress Helen Gahagan, who made her screen debut in the film's all-important title role. Filmed at least four times in the silent era (including a 1925 British production starring American femme fatale Betty Blythe), She was remade twice by low-budget Hammer Films, in 1965 starring Ursula Andress and as The Vengeance of She in 1967. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

It's the wild and woolly waterfront world of San Francisco in the late 1800s in this rambling tale of an outrageous nightclub owner (Edward G. Robinson) and his efforts at wooing lovely Mary Rutledge (Miriam Hopkins), a lovely Eastern lass left to her own devices in the rowdy port city. The innocent babe loses that innocence when she becomes a kept lady, running the roulette wheel in Robinson's nightclub. The plot matures when Mary falls in love with an honest and upright gold miner. When the lovers are discovered during a fateful tryst, they flee the evil Robinson, hoping to escape as stowaways aboard a departing ship. Robinson is magnificent in this ruffian role. This action-filled adventure is suitable for the whole family. ~ All Movie Guide

Henry Fonda made his screen debut in this filmization of his Broadway success The Farmer Takes a Wife. The story is set along the Erie Canal in the 1850s. Fonda plays a farmer who takes a river job to make ends meet. He falls in love with Janet Gaynor, daughter of a canal-boat cook, who thinks very little of farmers. Nonetheless, Fonda and Gaynor marry, much to the displeasure of canal skipper Charles Bickford, who'd assumed that Janet was his girl. When Fonda avoids a fight with Bickford, Janet believes that he's yellow, but he eventually proves otherwise. It is said that during his first day on the set, movie novice Henry Fonda, noting the camera direction "dolly with Dan and Molly" in the script, asked director Victor Fleming who Dolly was. Adapted from the play by Frank B. Elser and Marc Connelly, The Farmer Takes a Wife was remade with Betty Grable and Dale Robertson in 1955. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

After having terrorized singing cowboy Tex Ritter in 19 consecutive Westerns, veteran Bad Guy Charles King found himself relegated to that of a minor henchman in The Man from Texas. The chief villain this time was the now forgotten Vic Demourelle, Jr., who played Jeff Hall, a nasty rancher plotting to take over his neighbor's spread. Said neighbor, Speed Dennison (Kenne Duncan), hires Ritter to help protect the property from Hall's hired gunslingers. One of them, the Shooting Kid (Charles B. Wood), is a friend of Ritter's and is being blackmailed by Hall. Unless he can get his cattle to the railroad station in time, Speed will forfeit his ranch, but Hall refuses him passage through his land. Aided by Sheriff Happy Martin (Hal Price), Tex and Speed nevertheless manage to get the cattle through Hall's illegal barbed wire fencing but in the ensuing shootout, the Kid is mortally wounded after taking a bullet meant for Tex. After the villainous Hall has been apprehended, Ritter reveals himself to be an agent for the railroad and that Hall was trying to steal the Dennison spread hoping to sell it to the company for a profit. Filmed on the Monogram ranch in Newhall, California, The Man from texas was even cheaper than Ritter's previous efforts and the former radio crooner only got to sing two songs: Prairie Lights and Men Who Wear the Stars, both composed by Frank Harford. On a more positive note, this was the first Ritter Western sans the so-called comedy relief by Snub Pollard and/or Horace Murphy ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

This Dick Foran "singing western" makes extensive use of stock footage from First National's Ken Maynard series of the silent era. Foran is cast as Northern officer Rod Colton, who goes undercover during the Civil War to flush out a gang of Confederate spies. It develops that the mercenary villains are planning to play one side against the other by fomenting an Indian uprising. Colton finds an unlikely but very attractive ally in the form of dance-hall hostess Lucy Blake (Paula Stone). Evidently Frank McGlynn Sr. was busy during shooting of Trailin' West, else why would the role of Abraham Lincoln be played by brawny Robert H. Barrat? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Wagon Master, splendidly directed by John Ford, is a superlative western. The film is the outwardly simple tale of a Mormon wagon train headed for Utah. Along the way, the group, led by Elder Wiggs (Ward Bond) hook up with two horse traders Travis Blue (Ben Johnson) and Sandy Owens (Harry Carey Jr), the members of a traveling medicine show and a tribe of Navajo Indians. The group is threatened by a gang, known as the Clegg family, who have robbed an express office and murdered the clerk. This wonderful film emphasizes the virtues of solidarity, sacrifice and tolerance, and shows John Ford at his most masterful, in total control of the production from the casting to the bit players to the grandeur and scope of the visual compositions. The film, with its breathtaking scenery, brilliant performances by a cast of character actors, and an engaging sense of humor, is a superlative example of the American western. Wagonmaster inspired the television series Wagon Train and was also shown in a computer-colorized version ~ Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide