Tumbling Tumbleweeds
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
Gene Autry (Gene Autry) returns to his home after a five-year absence as a singing cowboy with a group of strolling players that includes Smiley (Smiley Burnette) and Eightball (Eugene Jackson), who sell Dr. Parker's Painless Panacea. Gene's father, a cattle barron and one of the original "nesters" in the West, was recently murdered during a conflict with his landlord.
While at an abandoned nester's cabin, the group is held up by Harry Brooks (Cornelius Keefe), whom Gene recognizes as his old friend. Wounded and semi-delirious, Harry induces Gene to hide him from the posse headed by Sheriff Manley (George Burton). The deputy later returns and tries to shoot Harry, but Gene chases him away.
In town, the deputy reports to Barney Craven (Edward Hearn), leader of a gang which is trying to silence Harry. Meanwhile, Gene and his friends set up a performance in town, but it is interrupted by Craven's men, who report that Harry is wanted for the murder of Gene's father. Hastening to Harry's home, Gene confronts his former sweetheart Janet, now Harry's wife, and meets Janet's younger sister Jerry (Lucile Browne), whom he had only known as a girl. They assure Gene of Harry's innocence and reveal that Harry and Gene's father were about to sign a settlement over disputed water rights.
Now suspicious of Craven, Gene captures Craven, the deputy, and their cohorts by a series of clever ruses that land them in jail, and thereby vindicates Harry. Gene and Jerry marry and join Smiley and Eightball on the departing Parker wagon.

Review: Anyone can dance if they are properly persuaded.
Surprisingly enjoyable Western where Gene solves the murder of his father, rights the wrongs attributed to his old friend, and gets both the horse and the girl  all in just over one hour!
The writing is clever and Gene's acting is both more fluid and his lines more subtle than in many follow-on films.
The substance of the dispute  water rights: a very real part of the history of the American West.George "Gabby" Hayes (it appears with all his teeth) does yeoman service as Doctor Parker.
Smiley Burnette is good as the sidekick that cannot quite find the mate to a missing spur.Good songs and the use of a modern record player allow Gene to trap three of the bad guys.
Good chase scene.
Best line in move is when the good guys line up the three bad men and Smiley (angry that they just shot a hole in his guitar) tells them to dance.
The bad guys say that they can't dance and the response is "anyone can dance if they are properly persuaded." Sure this is a low budget Saturday matinée special, but it appears that someone was trying very hard to show that this team of actors and director Joseph Kane would be able to produce a winner that could be replicated.
Highly recommended..
Gene Autry's First Starring Feature.
Gene Autry, an early country and western singer, appeared as a guest in two Ken Maynard western movies.
Then he starred in the surreal serial, "The Phantom Empire." His fourth movie and first starring role in a feature was "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," obviously with Republic Pictures (which had just begun operations as a merger of six smaller studios).After the credits the opening crawl reads, "In the Old West there was no law." Those among the newcomers who became the strong divided their empires.
Later arrivals, who wanted just a small piece of land and water, were the Nesters.
Before long, bitter warfare ensued between the landlords and the Nesters.
Thus we have the movie's setting.
There are good actions scenes early on (possibly stock footage?).
Gene's dad – a landlord but handicapped – incorrectly assuming that his son did not contribute to his cause, banishes him from his homestead.
Five years later, as part of Dr. Parker's Medicine Show, Gene returns to the town of Gunstock.
Dr. Parker is Gabby Hayes, toothed and beardless, but mustachioed.
In Gene's absence, his unrelenting father was murdered and his friend, Harry Brooks, charged with the crime.
Gene recognizes Harry to be innocent, so he and his sidekick, Smiley Burnette, set out to solve the crime.
They soon discover that Barney Craven and his gang are also after Brooks.
It seems that there is a conflict over water rights, even though the main problem with the landlords and the Nesters has ended.
If Smiley can only find the mate to the spur that he found at a crime scene!
And who smokes Red Top cigarettes?
Gene will surely get to the truth.Sometimes it is difficult to place the time-frame for Gene Autry westerns, which, as his movie aficionados know, range from 1829 to about 1950.
Gene's movie settings of the late 19th and early 20th century are not his "mythical" westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, when the old West was long gone.
These mythical westerns showed modern cars, radios, and even early televisions!
And yet there were "sections" of towns that catered to men who still rode horses and carried six guns."Tumbling Tumbleweeds" shows a "modern-looking" portable phonograph (circa 1930, without the cylinder) and disc record, and women are seen in 1920s or 1930s hairstyles and clothing.
The Indian tribes have been subdued; there are telephones, but still no automobiles.
Despite the anachronisms of the hairstyles, clothing, and phonograph, we may surmise that we are in the historic West of the nineteenth century, but very late (1890s).
The movie has nice action and some good close-up shots.
See the fist-fight scene about 39 minutes into the film, which runs slightly under an hour in time.
The western town of Gunstock obviously has black residents, a nice touch for the time.
Eightball (Eugene Jackson), part of Dr. Parker's show, dances some cool moves with a split that obviously wowed 1935 audiences.
The title tune is a treat.
And the ending  not only does Gene get the girl, but also he gets hitched!.
'8' on the Matinée Scale.
Autry's first movie under the banner of Republic is a good one.
Catch those great panoramic shots of gangs hard-riding across the flats, taking aim at each other courtesy director Kane.
They're real eye-grabbers, unusual for a matinée western.
In fact, the 60-minutes is full of imaginative touches like the brawl inside the traveling show wagon, with the losers getting dumped unceremoniously onto the rocky roadway.
And I kept wondering where grizzled old Gabby from the credit crawl was.
But there he was, hiding behind a brown mustache, a nice suit, and even a set of false teeth.
Yes sir, it's Gabby like I'd never seen before.
Plus, Gene's all duded out in cowboy finery of his own, trying to get a bead on whoever murdered his dad, and you just know he will.
Even at this early stage he's got an easy way with a song, including the great title tune.
And who is that black kid with feet faster than the proverbial flying bullet.
Yes indeed, that's quite a medicine show old Gabby puts on.
And I love the way he fills his bottles of elixir with muddy water, just the thing to cure everything from a nosebleed to gout.Anyhow, I think there's a flaw in IMDb's rating system.
I'd hate to put this programmer-- good as it is-- up against quality A-pictures.
So instead, I give it an '8' on a scale strictly for those great old matinees that are still a lot of harmless fun..
"You see anything of a fella with a couple of bullet holes in him?".
Depending on how you count them, Gene Autry made about ninety plus films; this is my eightieth review of an Autry flick, all courtesy of Encore Westerns and their faithful screening of his movies on Sundays at noon (although I caught this one early on a Saturday morning).
As it turns out, this was Gene's very first picture for Republic, cobbled together from a handful of Poverty Row Western film productions.
Interesting that it took seventy nine other pictures for me before getting around to Number One.For his first starring role, Gene is put in the precarious position of opposing his father's (Joseph W.
Girard) stance as a leader of the ranching landowners in fierce opposition to nesters making their way into the valley.
Saving his unconscious father from going over a cliff in a runaway wagon, Dad repays Gene by banishing him from home for his siding with the opposition.
Granted, no one ever told Autry Sr. what happened, so you have to give him a pass on that one.Fast forward five years and Gene finds himself tagging along with Dr. Parker's Phamous Purveyors of Phun Phrolic and Painless Panacea.
To the uninitiated, that would be George 'Gabby' Hayes, looking almost youthful at fifty years old, what without a graying beard and only a dark mustache in the way of facial hair.
I was caught off guard when Doc Parker referred to his magic elixir as a 'batch of dope', but it didn't seem unusual to him that any old stagnant water laying around would do to make up the next concoction.Not only do you have Gabby on board, but future Autry regular Smiley Burnette also finds himself in the mix here, joining in on a couple of songs and interrupting his regular patter with the trademark frog voice.
Rounding out the entertainment group, young black actor Eugene Jackson has a tap dance routine all worked out for the locals, revved into high gear with a gulp of Parker's magic tonic.Long story short, Gene learns that his father was murdered and enlists help from the locals to find out who pulled the trigger.
Even though good friend Harvey Brooks (Cornelius Keefe) was implicated, Gene smells a rat and takes steps to lay out the cheese.
I was somewhat amused when Gene used the old dummy in a rocking chair trick to smoke out the bad guys.
That ruse was used again some dozen years later by Autry in 1949's "Riders of the Whistling Pines".Overall the film utilizes some good action sequences like the brawl in the runaway wagon, sandwiched around a fair passel of tunes by Gene and his pals.
One of the cool sit up and take notice scenes for fans of these old B Westerns is catching three of the era's most prolific character actors - Charles King, Tom London and George Chesebro - dance a jig under Gabby's watchful eye and handy six shot persuader..
The template for a first-rate B-Western.
This was the one, folks: Gene Autry's first starring, feature-length movie, and it is a very fine one.
In fact, if you were going to write down the directions for making the perfect B-Western, they might produce "Tumbling Tumbleweeds."The movie starts with stock footage of hard-charging, deadly shooting cowboys, battling each other, ranchers on one side, nesters on the other.
Excellent choice of action scenes.
Why do some reviewers always mention "stock footage" disdainfully as if somehow the studio "cheated" by not shooting all of the footage for the movie from scratch?Then we move to the present day.
Gene Autry is the son of a wealthy cattle baron whose ranch is being attacked by a mob of the nesters, determined to bring the ranchers down.
Autry Sr., who is confined to a wheelchair, sends one of the hands to round up all the ranchers in the area to defend their way of life.
Gene, who is dressed slick as a whistle and is shown seated in his dad's office, playing his guitar and singing, doesn't agree with all the feudin' and fightin' between the two groups, but he follows his father and the other ranchers to the point where the fighting begins -- and manages to save his wounded father from likely death by lifting him off the wagon he is riding in and carrying him to safety.Apparently no one tells the old man that Junior was the one who saved him, because he orders Gene to pack his things and "git." Gene does so.
The implication of his father's words to him is (and I've never heard anyone else take note of this) that he is something less than a real man because he didn't charge head-long at the nesters, gun blazing.Five years later, Gene returns as part of a medicine show,headed by George "Gabby" Hayes, cleverly disguised as Dr. Parker, sans any whiskers (except a mustache), and with a full set of teeth.
Smiley Burnette is also on board, although he and Gene aren't bonafide "partners" yet.The group encounters Gene's best friend Harry Brooks on their way into the town of Gunstock.
He is badly wounded, armed and belligerent, and fleeing from a murder charge which he insists is false.
The medicine show bunch patches him up as well as they can, and hides him in the wagon.Later, after the troupe has done several musical numbers for a good crowd of the town's citizens, Gene learns from one of the locals that the man Brooks is accused of killing was Gene's own father.
Gene, visibly stunned, goes up on the stage, gives a brief but moving speech about his father, and begins singing "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine," which was a big hit for him and Jimmy Long, who wrote it, in real life.Barney Craven, the head baddie who wants to gain control of the elder Autry's ranch, sends Tom London and George Chesebro, two of his henchmen who were popular "bad guys" in B-Westerns, into the crowd to disrupt the medicine show.
At one point Chesebro yells an insulting, "We don't need no lavender cowboys in this town!", another implication that Gene may be a little sissified.But Autry quickly shows that he can deal with troublemakers quite well, as the concert ends in a fist fight in which Gene whips Chesebro and London is laid out by the local who gave Gene the bad news a few moments before.From that point on the movie turns into a twists and turns detective story, Western style, with Gene and Smiley trying to figure out who really killed Autry Sr., and bring that man (or men, as it turns out) to justice.
The climactic scene features a wild dash of the medicine show wagon back to town with a full-fledged fight among the Craven bad guys and Gene's men going on all the way in the back of the wagon.In the end, Craven and all his men are marched into jail, where Harry Brooks and his wife, who had been Gene's girlfriend five years before, have been hidden for days to keep the crooks from trying to bump him off.Gene and the former girlfriend's younger sister have meanwhile fallen in love with each other, and in the final scene they are riding off in the medicine show wagon, Gene holding the reins and singing the title song, apparently just married.
Riding off into the sunset; what better ending for a sterling B-Western?Gene Autry shows surprisingly good acting talent in this, his first starring role, especially considering the claims of some reviewers that he "couldn't act at all." Smiley comes up with some funny lines, without descending into the silliness that sometimes marred some of Gene's later pre-World War II movies.
Hayes shows off his versatility as "Dr. Parker," whose personality is completely different from the one that "Gabby" always displayed when playing Second Banana, usually to Roy Rogers.If you've never seen this movie, then you should.
It's well paced and directed, with a good plot, plenty of action, and good characterizations.
It could be the "template" for the B-Westerns of yore.