Always Make Sure Your New Home isn't a Ghost Town!

Prior to hitting the big time with Stagecoach in 1939, John Wayne appeared in over 100 B-movies and serials, almost all of them Westerns. Though Wayne did not quite have the on-screen presence he would have as an A-lister, he was still effective and personable in what were almost always enjoyable films.

Winds of the Wasteland (1936) is very enjoyable. It has a fun premise--John Blair (Wayne) and Larry Andrews (Lane Chandler) have just lost their jobs when the Pony Express closes up shop. But Blair has a new plan for making money. Their severance pay included a quartet of fast Pony Express horses. So why don't the two men use those horses and the pay they've saved to start a stagecoach line?

Sadly, they get swindled when they buy a stagecoach and the rights to a route from dishonest businessman Cal Drake (Douglas Cosgrove). The stagecoach is a wreck and the town of Crescent City (the hub of the route) is a ghost town with a grand total of two citizens.

But there's no sense in giving up. Soon they have the stagecoach up and running and, surprisingly, Crescent City begins to slowly gain citizens. When Blair manages to arrange a telegraph line to run through the town, things actually begin to look up.

Then an opportunity to win a government mail contract comes up. This involves winning a stagecoach race to Sacramento. But Drake is running one of his stages in the race as well and he's willing to do anything--including arson, having Blair arrested on trumped-up charges and having his henchmen set dynamite booby traps along the road.

I watched this movie specifically because I like the premise of two men starting up a stagecoach line with a broken-down coach. I ended up really liking the execution of that premise. Wayne and the rest of the cast all give enjoyable performances and the plot moves along quickly and economically.

In fact, I wish the run time of the film had been 10 or 12 minutes longer, as the one real fault is the abruptness with which the plot jumps from one plot point to another. But that's a pacing issue rather than a story issue--the plot itself makes perfect sense within the context of a B-movie universe.

The director was Mack V. Wright (who directed a number of Wayne's film during the '30s), who provides us with some nice location photography, making the climatic stagecoach race look particularly nifty.

It's impossible to watch this film without thinking about John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Though Winds in the Wasteland can be enjoyed for what it is, it's hard not to image what it would have like had a genius like Ford been behind the camera, or if Yakima Canutt (who has an uncredited role as a henchman in Winds) had been creating his magnificent under-the-stagecoach stunt that was the visual highlight of the later film. That's not fair to the Winds. I know. In fact, it would be fun to watch both films as a stagecoach-themed double feature. If I ever get around to writing a sequel to This Week's Double Feature, I'll have to keep that in mind. 

Here's Wind in the Wastelands on YouTube. If you have Amazon Prime, there's a slightly better print available there.