CALIFORNIA MAIL

US, 1936, 55 minutes, Black and white.
Dick Foran, Linda Perry, Ed Cobb, Tom Brower.
Directed by Noel Smith.

California Mail is one of the first of Dick Foran singing westerns. In fact, he sings only at the beginning and at the romantic end.

The setting is the 1860s, the end of the Pony Express era and the introduction of sending mail by Stagecoach. Foran plays a rancher, supported by his father, who puts in a bid for the new Stagecoach company after serving as a Pony Express rider. The Sheriff of Gold Creek decides that there should be a race on 4 July, through the most difficult part of the route for the Stagecoach. Foran and his father apply as does another old-timer. However, it is the Barton brothers who put in a bid, tamper with Foran’s stagecoach wheel which means that he crashes over a cliff. The buttons that the contract but also plan to rob the stagecoaches.

A rider is commissioned to hold up a coach and kills the heroine’s father. He has stolen Foran’s horse, the famous Smoke who appeared in most of the films, and disguised himself. Foran is blamed, goes to prison to await trial, escapes and persuades his father to talk with the bank manager to put a fake consignment of gold on a coach and observe the robbers. In the meantime, Smoke has trampled the initial killer who is then discovered, proving Foran innocent.

The finale is the coach going through the territory, attacked by Barton and his gang, discovering that the gold consignment was only rocks, and Foran and his father and the sheriff riding to the rescue.

And, of course, there is a conventional romance.