John Wayne was thrown into this remake from the beginning of the West for an unusual reason
In our monoculture of nostalgia, Mad, remakes and restarts are everywhere. But Hollywood has always been in the game of existing media regurgitants, even at the beginning of the 20th century, when a young John Wayne slipped him into B-Film territory. The Duke did not become a screen icon overnight: he had to pay his subscription for 10 years, making dozens of what was known as Westerners of “WOW poverty” – low -production avoiners produced by small studios such as Republic Pictures and Monogram Pictures. Throughout the 1930s, it was the films that gave Wayne his departure in Hollywood, before director John Ford saved him from the relative darkness by throwing him into his seminal of Western “diligence” of 1939 (to the young actor’s surprise).
Before breaking through “Stagecoach”, Wayne played in some of her worst films, including “The Telegraph Trail” of 1933, with his unlit of the Amerindians, and “” Neath the Arizona Skies” of 1934, which was one of the 13 different projects, Wayne faced that year. But “Ride Him, Cowboy” of 1932 is notable to be one of the many remakes of previous silent films with Ken Maynard.
Directed by Fred Allen, “Ride Him, Cowboy” was at least produced for Warner Brothers rather than in poverty studios. He represents one of Maynard’s six remakes which were praised by the Duke between 1932 and 1933, this particular example being a reshuffle of a first national characteristic of 1926 called “The Unknown Cavalier”.
The Talkie version of the unknown rider was a success
At the end of the 1920s, Sound in Film spread, leading to an explosion of “Talkies”. But that also led to an influx of remakes when the studios decided to review the silent projects of past years and bring them to the new age. “Ride Hui, Cowboy” was an example. After Warner Bros. bought First National Pictures, the company had access to the studio catalog and decided to update some of its silent oats. But they were not going to be full remakes. In the case of “Ride Him, Cowboy”, the chief of Warner Bros. Jack Warner was convinced of Greenlight the project based in large part on the prospect of reusing images of “The Unknown Cavalier”, itself based on the novel by Kenneth Perkins in 1923 of the same name.
It was this approach that led to a 25 -year -old John Wayne in the lead. Obviously, studio leaders thought that the young actor looked sufficiently like Ken Maynard so that the public was unable to say when they surrounded their new images with old scenes from the Maynard waterfall. Even the main horse of the film was a double of Tarzan, the Camper of Maynard of “The Unknown Cavalier”.
In the remake, John Wayne plays the cowboy John Drury, who arrives in a new city where he saves a horse to be executed. Drury is hailed as a hero by city dwellers, who encourage him to examine a series of criminal acts by a mysterious figure known as Hawk. Soon, Drury discovers that the apparently decent Henry Simms (Frank Hagney) is actually the hawk, which links Drury to a job before caressing it for having made a descent into a ranch and killing a man. After the Wayne cowboy escapes, he must erase his name and eliminate the real hawk before it is too late. Although John Drury is not one of Wayne’s best roles, the film itself had a commercial and critical success, the criticisms congratulating the remake for its history and Cast and Warner rapping a solid profit. But the question that we are so often asked today applied in 1932: was this remake necessary?
Go up, Cowboy was a useless remake that still made sense
If a studio has redone a film today using action scenes from the new original sequence and simply intercreed in the story, it would rightly be rejected as a cynical cash outlet. In addition, Ken Maynard still appeared in films at Time Warner Bros. Remade “The Unknown Cavalier”, which was surely a bit of an insult to the Vétéran West star. (That said, Maynard was under contract with Universal at the time, which made it impossible for Warners to bring him back for their remake.) In addition, the advent of sound in the films was such a revolutionary development that he probably had a lot of sense to redo relatively recent features if it meant that they would finally get a soundtrack.
It certainly seemed to work for Warner Bros. Because “Ride Him, Cowboy” proved to be the success of almost all metrics. Variety (via Turner Classic Films) reviewed the film favorably, by doubling it “Excellent Western Entertainment” and by praising the cast to be “much higher than the usual galaxy in photos of this type”. The point of sale also praised the film to have “more history than hard circulation”, which was a rarity among these types of Western productions at the time. The genre in general had fallen into disgrace with the public, and it was only with “Stagecoach” and several other influential westerns in 1939 that it regained its popularity. As such, “Ride Him, Cowboy” was never going to be a Mega -Hit that invigorated the West, although it is a fascinating element of Hollywood history – and not only for its questionable remake status of a silent film. In fact, given what extent it was received at the time, one could say that it is an underestimated John Wayne film which is worth watching.
