The Big Stampede / Ride Him, Cowboy / Haunted Gold
John Wayne's road to stardom needed some giddyup in the early 1930s; after a leading-man turn inThe Big Trail, he quickly fell into B-movie obscurity. While waiting to vault to first-tier status in 1939'sStagecoach, he honed his talent with a set of six B-Westerns at Warner Brothers, shot in 1932-33. The series allowed Warners to recycle footage (and plots) from a string of silent Westerns made with Ken Maynard, with the young Mr. Wayne stepping into Maynard's saddle. These snappy little films (under an hour each) are contained on two Warners DVDs; this one has the first three pictures in the series.Ride Him, Cowboyis the best of the batch, a very entertaining number in which Wayne is introduced to a feisty horse named, of all things, Duke. Duke would feature in the later films, as would Wayne's harmonica playing. The movie has some wild stunt riding and some very amusing dialogue (someone urges a pokey storyteller, "Skip that part and get down to bedrock"). And for a cheap B-movie, there's some exceptionally inventive camerawork by Ted McCord, who would go on to shootThe Treasure of the Sierra MadreandEast of Eden.McCord also shotThe Big Stampede, which doesn't have much drama but lives up to its title with a cattle-frenzy finale. Noah Beery Sr., plays the baddie, and Wayne's futureStagecoachco-star Berton Churchill plays Lew Wallace (the governor of New Mexico and the man who wroteBen-Hur).Haunted Goldadds a dose of haunted-house shenanigans to an awkward tale about a hidden cache of gold. The comic relief comes from character actor Blue Washington, who unfortunately has the kind of wide-eyed, scaredy-cat role that too many black actors of the era got stuck with.Wayne, 25 years old, plays the same naively heroic hero in each. He's lean and handsome and not yet grown into his talent. But you can see how much the camera likes him--as his future director Howard Hawks might have put it--and how much that famous stride is already coming into step.--Robert Horton