THE STAR PACKER

US, 1934, 55 minutes, Black and white.
John Wayne, Verna Hillie, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Yakima Canutt.
Directed by Robert N. Bradbury.

From The Big Trail in 1931 to Stage Coach in 1939, John Wayne made sixty films, most of them brief westerns, with running times under one hour. It would seem that during the 30s this was to be his standard career. However, with John Ford’s Stage Coach in 1939, Wayne starred in a classic western and immediately began to get better parts as in Allegheny Uprising, Dark Command, Three Faces West and John Ford’s The Long Voyage home.

The brief westerns are fairly creaky to look at these days. They were made on meagre sets, often had the same casts (including George ‘Gabby’ Hayes who was to appear in the 40s with Randolph Scott, and the famed stunt director, Yakima Canutt, one of the most renowned of Hollywood stunt men and the man who staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur).

Wayne, in his twenties, usually appears as a law officer, often undercover. He turns up in a town, a crooked situation arises, robberies of safes, fixing of rodeo competitions. He befriends the local authorities, sometimes suspicious of him, is attracted to one of the girls of the town. However, using his wits and his charm, he usually solves the mystery.

The 1930s consolidated the genre of the western – and it was films like those of John Wayne at this period as well as his screen persona which made them the archetypes of later westerns.

Many of the films were directed by Robert N. Bradbury, a prolific director of this kind of brief film from 1918 to the late 1930s.