Showing posts with label King Vidor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label King Vidor. Show all posts

8.05.2007

The Texas Rangers




Fred MacMurray and Jean Parker in The Texas Rangers (King Vidor, 1936).

Starts out as a comic outlaw buddy movie and morphs into an adventure-melodrama about friends turned enemies. The buddies are MacMurray, Jack Oakie (the proto-Jack Black), and Lloyd Nolan (as Sam McGee, the "Polka Dot Bandit"). Exciting, well-filmed action sequences, and some surprisingly elegant frame compositions. The character actors are wonderful throughout (I guess almost everyone in it is a character actor), especially in the Kimball County sequence, which gathers Fred Kohler, Jr., Jed Prouty, George "Gabby" Hayes, Richard Carle, and Charles Middleton for an antic courtroom scene.