Sagebrush Trail (1933)

Posted on August 16, 2011
Filed Under films

An excellent example of the early sound-era Western is Sagebrush Trail (1933), starring 26-year-old John Wayne, the second in a series of low-budget Wayne pictures produced by Lone Star Films for Monogram Pictures. Wayne plays a man wrongly accused of murder who escapes custody and joins an outlaw gang to find the real killer. Yakima Canutt plays the head of the outlaw band—he has an evil scar on his face, perhaps a brand—and Nancy Shubert, in her only credited film role, plays the upstanding storekeeper’s daughter Wayne wins at the end of the picture. Despite its tinny-talkie stiffness, Sagebrush Trail is a worthwhile slice of cowboy action fodder distinguished by a couple of commendable flourishes. 

Between 1933 and 1935 Wayne made more than a dozen Lone Star Westerns, many of which are available on home video. I’ve seen about 10 of them. They’re all just less than an hour long. Most were directed by Robert N. Bradbury and are prescriptively generic oaters. Sagebrush Trail was directed by Armand Shaefer, and is a little more ambitious than Bradbury’s films. Wayne’s opening escape from the law includes a short underwater sequence, cinematographer Archie Stout throws some oversize shadows into a nighttime robbery attempt, and the gunfight finale in and around the Bronson Caverns is executed with real flair. This is quality low-budget work.

In all of these pictures Wayne is billed above the title and scrupulously conforms to genre stereotype. He’s always costumed in a tight cowboy shirt, heavy jeans turned up at the cuff, a high-crowned Stetson and a long silk bandanna, with a .45 Colt on his right hip. He’s always the good guy (though in several he’s a wrongly accused “good badman”). The plots always involve murder and an outlaw band, and in the end Wayne always defeats the outlaws and gets the girl, who never gets much screen time. Among the supporting players are genre familiars like Canutt, George “Gabby” Hayes, Earl Dwire and Lafe McKee.

Most of the Lone Stars were shot on a simple movie ranch, so the same sets and set-ups turn up in picture after picture. One action sequence in Sagebrush Trail kicks off as Wayne swings out of the saddle at a gallop by grabbing an overhanging branch as he passes beneath it. Lone Star liked the effect so much that they used it (same star, same road, same tree) in at least four of the films. It’s probably Canutt swinging out of the saddle. The most notable feature of the Lone Stars are their frenetic action sequences, which are punctuated by Canutt’s remarkable stunts. (He’s usually doubling for Wayne.) In Sagebrush Trail he permits a stagecoach to drive over him—he’s positioned between the wheels and relies on the team not to step on him—and then performs a dangerous chariot-style ride on a prop fashioned to look like a stagecoach axle-and-wheels pulled by four galloping horses. Lone Star wasn’t shy about re-using footage, either. In most of the films Wayne wears a light-colored shirt, which means that action sequences from one film are easily used in later films. A sequence of riding stunts that sets up the finale of Sagebrush Trail was reused frame-for-frame a year later in The Man from Utah.

My admiration for Canutt’s work is matched by my revulsion at the brutal treatment accorded the horses in these films. Most of the Lone Stars feature at least a half-dozen violent Running W falls, and after watching 10 of them I’m pretty sure I witnessed a couple of horses killed.

The Lone Star pictures were important steps in Wayne’s career, for it was in the making of these films that he forged his friendship with Canutt. Wayne idolized Canutt and was quick to acknowledge that his on-screen persona was modeled on the cowboy stuntman. You can see it happening in their scenes together in the Lone Stars, especially in the later ones, most obviously in Wayne’s distinctive hip-shot walk, which is clearly taken from Canutt. The two collaborated in the creation of a number of stunts and in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s developed the techniques for the first realistic cinematic fistfights. They haven’t worked it out yet in the Lone Stars, and the fights in Sagebrush Trail, although energetic, look a little slap-happy.

For the original audience, Sagebrush Trail was set in the indeterminate recent past. The first image of the picture is a stock shot of a high-volume roller press printing newspapers, and then we see a street that’s dressed with a gasoline-powered truck—so we know right away this isn’t 1880. Sixty seconds later Wayne is on a horse fleeing the sheriff, and from that point on the picture might as well be set in the Old West. That was a common technique in ‘30s Westerns that permitted filming on easily accessible locations that happened to have telephone poles running along the roadsides. Of course the date didn’t really matter, because the Lone Stars are set in Hollywood’s mythical West, where everyone always dresses as if they’re in Wichita in 1880, and all the men wear Colts in belt holsters, and there’s nothing unusual about a gunfight that drops six men—I think that’s how many go down at the end of Sagebrush Trail, just before Wayne kisses Nancy Shubert. The film is available at the Internet Archive here.

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Archie Stout shot nearly all the Lone Stars. Of the films in the series that I’ve seen, Sagebrush Trail is probably his best work, and frankly there’s nothing here to suggest we’re in the presence of a major talent—but we are. Stout’s career began in the silent era. Although he shot The Ten Commandments for Cecil B. DeMille in 1923, in the 1930s he was relegated to photographing Bs and genre pictures. He was almost 50 when he shot Sagebrush Trail. His grand second act began in 1939, when he shot Beau Geste for William Wellman at Paramount. In 1947 he photographed Angel and the Badman for James Edward Grant at Republic, continuing a career-long association with Wayne that in 1948 produced Stout’s masterpiece, John Ford’s Fort Apache. Stout’s resume as a second-unit DP is even more impressive. He was second-unit shooter on Rebecca (1940) for Alfred Hitchcock, and on The Thing (195) for Christian Nyby (usually credited to Howard Hawks). He was second-unit DP for Ford on Hurricane (1937), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande (1950) and Wagon Master (1950). At the age of 68 he became the only second-unit cinematographer ever nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952)—and by golly he won.

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previous: Guns: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

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