Parallel Mesquiteer Universes

I wrote about a Three Mesquiteers film only a month or so ago, but we're going to visit another of them today. This is in part because a B-movie group I run on Facebook has generating a number of posts and comments, inspiring me to watch them. But also because I'd like to talk about the inherent weirdness of when the heck theses movies are set.

In the universe of B-movies and serials, the Wild West remained wild right up until what was then "modern day." There are still cowboys, cattle drives, Indians and six-shooters. But there's also automobiles, telephones and radios. Heck, Mesquiteer films made in the 1940s had them fighting Nazis. So a 1937 entry like The Riders of the Whistling Skull was obviously set in 1937, despite the Old West trappings.

I'm fine with this. It's a universe in which the West remained the way it should be, even while some elements of modern society slowly snuck in.

But other entries in the series, such 1938's The Night Riders (the movie I reviewed last month) are clearly set in the 19th Century. The Night Riders' plot revolved in part around the 1881 assassination of President Garfield.

The movie we are looking at today--1937's The Trigger Trio--is another one set in then-modern day. The plot involves an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease among the local cattle. The Mesquiteers are deputized to enforce a quarantine at the state border and are stopping 1930s model cars and trucks. The movie is still a Western--both heroes and villains more commonly ride horses and nobody pulls out a Tommy gun during the final shoot-out--but it's definitely set in the '30s.

The movie is an excellent entry in the series. It's the first one not to feature the usual three main characters. Robert Livingston, who was playing Stony Brooke at the time, went swimming with co-star Ray Corrigan and bumped his head on a rock. That laid him up for a month.

So Ralph "Dick Tracy" Byrd was brought in. The script mentions that Stony is down in Mexico and introduces Byrd as Larry Smith, the brother of Corrigan's character Tuscon.

It's fun to see Byrd, whom I'm most used to playing straight-laced authority figures like Tracy, take on the role of a hot-headed younger brother. And having a hothead in the cast is a strength for this particular story. The villain is a rancher whose cattle first contract the disease. He changes the brand of the sick cattle and sneaks them into someone else's herd. He also murders an agricultural inspector to keep his secret.

Larry, meanwhile, is annoyed that his older brother is so strict about upholding the law and enforcing the quarantine. He ends up unwittingly helping the murderer when he agrees to help with an illegal cattle drive to get the beef to market across the state line.

But when the villain's identity is revealed, Larry rejoins the other Mesquiteers and acquits himself well.

Like many of the early Mesquiteer films, this one is in the public domain. You can watch it here:





But it's time to get back to the main point. Why are some films set in the 1930s and others in the 19th Century. The Night Riders is clearly set in 1881, The Trigger Trio is clearly set in the 1930s, while later films in the series (involving Nazi spies) are clearly set in the 1940s.

Just to complicate matters further, 1941's Prairie Pioneers is set just after the Mexican War ended, nearly a full generation before 1881.

Were the Three Mesquiteers immortal, destined to fight evil through all eternity? Do the films set in then-modern day involve the identical sons of the original 19th Century Mesquiteers? Or (and this is my preferred interpretation) are there two (or possibly three) parallel universes involving multiple sets of Mesquiteers who were born in different generations?

Let's go with this last one, which means we have at least two universes. One is the traditional mythic Old West. The other is the B-movie universe's modern West, in which time stood partially still for the last generation or two. Either universe is a good setting for entertaining Westerns, so I'm happy that both have a version of the Three Mesquiteers riding around.

President Garfield, Robin Hood and John Wayne.

John Wayne did tons of B-Westerns and serials during the 1930s, before finally hitting the big time with Stagecoach in 1939. One of regular gigs was playing Stony Brooke--one of the 3 Mesquitteers. Wayne played Stony in 8 of the 51 films in this popular series.

One of these films 1939's The Night Riders and it is one of my favorites. The villains this time out are a forger and a crooked gambler (who is also a former actor). The two team-up to respectively forge a document and assume the identity of a Spanish noble. This allows them to claim ownership of millions of acres. They then begin to tax the pants off the homesteaders and ranchers already living on that land.

This leads to the Three Mesquitteers losing their ranch. This in turn leads them to assume masked identities, becoming "Los Capaqueroes," masked vigilantes who rob from the villains' tax collectors and return the money to the homesteaders.

I really enjoy the story, especially the Zorro and Robin Hood influences that are so effectively used. There's also a number of fun twists and turns in the plot, such as when the boys take a job with the bad guys and are tasked to catch themselves.

Another plot twist involves a cameo by President James Garfield--not a president you see portrayed very often in films. (Without researching it at all, I'm going to guess that Lincoln followed by FDR are the most commonly seen Chief Execs we see in the movies.) Garfield's assassination, by the way, proves to be an important plot point.

It's also just plain fun to see John Wayne in what it essentially a superhero costume. Tom Tyler (who himself would be playing superheroes such as Captain Marvel and the Phantom) is an evil henchman, while future Frankenstein's monster Glenn Strange has a small role at the beginning.

The Night Riders is in the public domain, so here it is in its entirety:

Sometimes, the title alone is enough.

As I’ve advised before—on more than one occasion—it’s always a good idea to rummage through the discount DVD bin at retail chain stores. You never know when you’ll find something worthwhile for a low price.

This time around, it was a set of movies and TV episodes titled Heroes of the Old West, containing a lot of the 1930s John Wayne movies that are often found in public domain Western sets. There were a half-dozen early Bonanza episodes that have slipped into the public domain—including a strong episode guest-starring Vic Morrow. Though it should be mentioned that the generic music played over the credits to replace the still-under-copyright Bonanza theme is downright awful. There’s a dozen or so Lone Ranger episodes—all of which I’m pretty sure I already have on various DVDs.

Two items on this set made me buy it, anyways. One is an episode of an early ‘60s Western titled Outlaws, which featured Barton Maclane. I actually hadn’t heard of the series, but always admired Maclane as a character actor. The episode turned out to be a very good story that featured another appearance by Vic Morrow, along with Dean Jones and Ray Walston (playing a manipulative and murderous con man—it was fun to see My Favorite Martian play an out-and-out villain).

The other “I gotta buy this” item was a 1937 film titled The Riders of the Whistling Skull, starring Ray “Crash” Corrigan.

The Riders of the Whistling Skull? How can you NOT want to watch a movie with that title? 

Well, it turned out to be a Three Mesquiteers film---in this particular instance: Stony Brooke (Robert Livingston), Tuscon Smith (Corrigan) and Lullaby Joslin (Max Terhune).

The Mesquiteers starred in a series of 51 B-Westerns between 1936 and 1943, sometimes with different actors and occasionally with different names for the main characters. John Wayne did eight Mesquiteer films as Stony Brooke. The films were obviously popular enough in their day, noted for including modern elements along with all the Old West stuff. But that wasn’t uncommon—in the B-movie and serial universe, the Old West remained the Old West pretty much into the 1940s, with horses, six-guns and Indian uprisings still common. The last few films in the series had our heroes fighting Nazis. In The Riders of the Whispering Skull, the modern elements are a little more subtle, reflected mostly in the dress of a few characters and Stony reading a modern pulp magazine (as opposed to a dime novel).

But in the end, the Three Mesquiteers didn’t quite achieve the same cultural longevity that the contemporaneous Hopalong Cassidy films would, or that Roy Rogers would achieve a decade later. And it’s actually easy to see why.

Whistling Skull is a fun enough movie. The three heroes get involved in helping a scientific expedition that’s looking for a lost city and a lost scientist. There’s a violent cult of Indians out to stop them and one of the expedition members also might be a murderer. A couple of people are, in fact, murdered and the expedition loses its supply wagon when the Indians attack.

They eventually find a landmark appropriately called the Whistling Skull—a large rock formation riddled with caves that cause the wind to whistle when it blows through. The good guys are trapped inside the Skull for a time. In the finale, Tuscon is unarmed and being chased through the desert by Indians; Stony has been captured and is about to be executed; and Lullaby is trying to start an avalanche in a last-ditch effort to save Stony.

As I said, it’s all perfectly good fun---though the arrival of a posse in the nick of time is a bit too much of a dues ex machina. But the level of fun simply doesn’t rise to the same level as it does in the best Hopalong or Roy Rogers films.

Why not? The problem is that there isn’t just one main hero with a couple of sidekicks. Instead, there are three heroes. That’s an important distinction. The movie only runs 53 minutes and in that time Stony, Tuscon and Lullaby each get a chance to play hero. In one sense, the movie manages to maintain this balance nicely, shifting between the characters without losing track of the story. But in a B-movie that’s barely enough long enough to qualify as a movie, there’s not enough time to do this AND give each of the heroes distinctive personalities. The individual quirks they do exhibit (Stony fancies himself a detective and Lullaby sometimes acts as the comic relief) come and go so quickly that there’s no time to really notice them.

Hopalong and Roy are as cool as they are because they had personalities we could latch on to. Hoppy’s boisterousness and Roy’s inherent kind-heartedness drew us to them and they became the moral heart of the movies they starred in. 

With the Three Mesquiteers, we have three perfectly likable guys, but not one of them fills the roll that Hoppy and Roy filled. So we have a good movie that really is worth 53 minutes of your time. But--- well, there’s no way to say this that isn’t incredibly corny, so I’ll just say it. The Three Mesquiteers simply don’t have the heart that Hoppy and Roy gave their films.

All the same, it’s called The Riders of the Whistling Skull. That’s just COOL.