When I was a kid I loved Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies; now I don't care for them because they had motorcars in them and I prefer Westerns --A or B -- that take place on the 19th C. frontier.
Stage to Chino is a nice B Western starring George O'Brien who, for whatever various reasons, was a star in silent films (John Ford's The Iron Horse in 1924, Murnau's Sunrise in 1927) and mostly relegated to B Westerns in the thirties and forties, ending his career back with Ford in Fort Apache in 1948. Stage to Chino was directed by Edward Killy, who directed mostly B films with intelligence and flair. Stage to Chino has something for everyone: comedy (salesman Hobart Cavanaugh saying "I'm in ladies underwear"), music (by The Pals of the Golden West), action and romance. I especially liked the key role played by Virginia Vale, as the woman who takes over her father's stagecoach line and fights for the mail business, helped by postal inspector O'Brien. The film is also something of a study of monopoly capitalism, as a rival stagecoach line resorts to robbery and murder to win the mail contract.
Riding Shotgun is more of a B+ Western, directed by veteran Andre de Toth and photographed by Bert Glennon, who worked often with John Ford; it stars Randolph Scott, an icon of Westerns, and has the themes of many post-WWII Westerns and many of de Toth's film: betrayal and revenge. Many people die in de Toth's film, none in Killy's. Killy's film is in black-and-white, de Toth's in gorgeous color. De Toth emphasizes the solitariness of the Western hero (as in High Noon in 1954 and Rio Bravo in 1959), as Scott is thought mistakenly by the townspeople to be a murderer, while Killy's film has the townspeople working together. Killy's film has important roles for women, while in de Toth's film the women are mostly on the sidelines.
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