Year: 1940
Runtime: 65 min
Director: Howard Bretherton
Starring: William Boyd, Russell Hayden, Britt Wood, Morris Ankrum, Jan Clayton, Wright Kramer.
The B-western was such a staple of Hollywood that it’s kind of weird how it’s now completely forgotten, a relic of an era long since past. Imagine, for example, if slasher movies completely disappeared after their heyday in the 1980s. True, the production of slasher films diminished, but they’ve never disappeared. On the other hand, the B-western is completely gone, faded into the mists of obscurity.
And really, at usually just an hour long, these films were cheaply produced and intended to be forgotten, so it’s kind of nice to know they are being preserved in some form.
The Showdown is a B-western from the peak of the genre’s popularity. It is one of sixty-six films made in the Hopalong Cassidy series that starred William Boyd, based very loosely on the novels by Clarence E. Mulford, and like the movies that came before and the movies that would come after, it exists in its own space, a vacuum where continuity is nonexistent.
The entire series starred Boyd as the titular Hopalong with a rotating selection of sidekicks, usually a comedic older character and a naive younger character. They were light-hearted good fun with nothing objectionable, aside from the casual sexism of the time and occasional glimpses of the, unfortunately, typical racism that permeates most old westerns, though as a whole the series had less of that ugliness than some of its contemporaries.
The movies were mostly aimed at a younger audience, so the plots were simple and devoid of anything controversial. Heck, they had stories so shallow you couldn’t drown in them even if you lay facedown with your mouth open. But that predictability meant they were like comfort food—you always knew what you were getting when you watched one of these movies and surprises weren’t on the menu.
This movie clocks in at a typically lean sixty-five minutes and has everything you could expect from a B-western. Chaste romance, a horse chase, a couple bouts of fisticuffs, one or two stunt sequences, and a fairly bloodless shootout. The formula was tried and true by this point in the genre’s existence and there was little need to mix things up.
This particular Hopalong adventure sees our hero in battle with a “Baron” who seeks to finagle a bunch of prime race horses from a colonel who is absolutely not Colonel Sanders but could be his brother, a slightly more gout-y version of the man who loved fried chicken.
The Baron (who maybe gets a name at some point in the movie?) is played to goatee-twirling perfection by Morris Ankrum, who appeared in roughly every single genre film released from the mid-30s through the early 60s. From the minute we lay eyes upon Ankrum, we know he is the villain. He has a monocle. A cane. Speaks in an accent that was surely described in the casting call as “European”. Heck, he looks like he spends his summers tying damsels to train tracks while cackling maniacally.
But his blend of French, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, and who-knows-what-else accent convinces the local rubes that he is Serious Business. Only Hopalong sees through this cad, but he isn’t sure what the plan is until it’s nearly too late.
The plan, such as it is, has the Baron posing as an interested party to purchase some horses from not-Colonel Sanders. But he has no intent to pay for said horses! He’d much rather steal them on the way to auction.
It’s a simple plot with no real twists or turns to the core story. The B-plot, on the other hand has a little more life.
You see, the Colonel has an unexpected visitor. His niece, played with “Oh Golly Gee” innocence by Jan Clayton. Seems her mom’s up and died and she decides to visit her uncle, whom she had never met as an adult. This sparks a bit of a romance from Hopalong’s young sidekick, Lucky, played for the 19th time (!) by Russel Hayden. And it provides a bit of an unexpected heel turn for the Colonel when it turns out he has a secret or two to keep from the girl.
The romance angle is as eye-rollingly awful as they come. Russell Hayden may or may not have been a perfectly competent actor, but here he plays so daft it’s hard to tell if he’s in love or suffering a serious concussion. He fawns over this woman he’s just met as though he’d never laid eyes on a member of the fairer sex before. I would have expected better acting from the two since they were actually married at the time of filming!
It actually gets pretty funny because it only takes Hopalong being polite to Clayton’s young lass for Hayden’s character to decide the two must be canoodling behind his back. He spends most of the film fluctuating between normal human behavior and frenzied jealousy. With just an off-hand comment, the villain sends him racing away from the horses he was to be guarding to confront Hopalong about this imaginary affair. Trying to follow his mood swings could bring about terminal whiplash!
But this crazy bit of storytelling is actually pretty welcome after the generally average main plot. At least it gives us something to laugh about.
There aren’t many great scenes in the film for Boyd, who mostly just ambles around being friendly and punching a couple dudes that need punching.
There is a particularly fun poker scene wherein Hopalong reads the play at the table so well that he manages to ruin the Baron’s attempts to cheat with a bit of sly play. His interactions with the comically evil Baron are a fun highlight in the otherwise staid film.
We don’t get much in the way of action either. One of the setpiece scenes involves Hopalong being trapped in a burning barn, but there’s no tension and the danger is resolved without any cleverness. Aside from some right hooks delivered by Boyd, the only other action sequence is a horse chase along a narrow ridge as Hopalong tries to catch up to the wagon containing our villain. We get a bit of a shootout with that, but nothing to write home about.
But even without any impressive stunts or fun shootouts, The Showdown isn’t a bad little movie. In fact, some of the unintentional comedy is a lot of fun. Aside from Hayden’s absurdly irrational behavior, another highlight comes from Eddie Dean playing the world’s most unintentionally incompetent marshal.
The character is so bad at his job that the only person he successfully arrests in the movie is an unarmed woman who has committed the grievous crime of not paying for a train ticket. And he completely ignores that little infraction when Hopalong asks him to let her go!
I wouldn’t call The Showdown the movie to watch if it was your first B-western. It’s far from the best example of the genre. But if you like them, there’s some fun to be had with this one, especially if you are a fan of William Boyd’s portrayal of Hopalong Cassidy.
