Well, my choice of summary line quoted above was a toss-up, it could just as well have been the line uttered by Big Nick Harden in the Mountain View Saloon - "Why you weak kneed yellow bunch of little puddle frogs"! I think Big Nick's was a bit more colorful.
"Death Rides The Range" was an unusual story for a Thirties Western programmer, in that it borrowed a plot line from mystery flicks of the era. An underground vein of helium gas becomes the target of a couple of opposing foreign government agents, while the main villain Joe Larkin (Charles King) attempts to gain the rights to the property from the Morgan's at the Lazy Y. They even used a standard lights out gimmick in the early going during which an archeology professor is murdered for what he knows. By the end of the picture, it's revealed that Ken Baxter (Ken Maynard) is an agent of the FBI!!!, bringing the bad guys to justice just in time to get the girl (Fay McKenzie as Letty Morgan).
You know, I never saw this before in over three hundred Westerns or so, but here, villain Larkin lassos Baxter off his horse and hogties him until the hero's horse Tarzan makes the save by chewing through his ropes. That was actually Tarzan's second slick move, earlier he picked up Baxter's hat after another scuffle with a baddie.
As for Ken Maynard's character, he performs a real Tarzan-like move by doing that rope swing through the cabin window, but I had to wonder why he didn't just walk in instead. The move was much more dramatic than it needed to be considering the outcome. Nearing the end of his career as a movie cowboy, I found Maynard's description of himself in the story as somewhat insightful, stating that he came from nowhere and was heading in the same direction.
"Death Rides The Range" was an unusual story for a Thirties Western programmer, in that it borrowed a plot line from mystery flicks of the era. An underground vein of helium gas becomes the target of a couple of opposing foreign government agents, while the main villain Joe Larkin (Charles King) attempts to gain the rights to the property from the Morgan's at the Lazy Y. They even used a standard lights out gimmick in the early going during which an archeology professor is murdered for what he knows. By the end of the picture, it's revealed that Ken Baxter (Ken Maynard) is an agent of the FBI!!!, bringing the bad guys to justice just in time to get the girl (Fay McKenzie as Letty Morgan).
You know, I never saw this before in over three hundred Westerns or so, but here, villain Larkin lassos Baxter off his horse and hogties him until the hero's horse Tarzan makes the save by chewing through his ropes. That was actually Tarzan's second slick move, earlier he picked up Baxter's hat after another scuffle with a baddie.
As for Ken Maynard's character, he performs a real Tarzan-like move by doing that rope swing through the cabin window, but I had to wonder why he didn't just walk in instead. The move was much more dramatic than it needed to be considering the outcome. Nearing the end of his career as a movie cowboy, I found Maynard's description of himself in the story as somewhat insightful, stating that he came from nowhere and was heading in the same direction.