West of the Divide (1934)

West of the Divide finds the Duke as a man searching for his younger brother and at the same time the people who kidnapped him and murdered their father.

The film opens with a piece of good luck coming their way in the person of the dying gunman Gatt Ganns who's been hired by Lloyd Whitlock to kill rancher Lafe McKee. Of course Whitlock is once again a villain in the Snidely Whiplash tradition who not only wants the ranch, but also has evil designs on McKee's daughter Virginia Brown Faire.

In reviewing B westerns, sometimes I have a tendency to reach back to those 19th century morality plays so popular in that era. Whitlock in fact even laughs like a villain in one of those plays. For reference you should see the Irene Dunne-Allan Jones version of Showboat to see just the kind of drama they used to put on then. It survived in the B western, John Wayne's as well as other's.

Wayne of course by the end solves all the problems concerned and the villain gets his just desserts. We can't say how though.

The Duke pretends to be the recently deceased Mr. Ganns to get the goods on the bad guys along with sidekick Gabby Hayes. He discovers a young kid being raised by one of the outlaws. Interesting in this B western set firmly in the 19th century morality play tradition, we also have a topic so very gingerly touched on as child abuse. A rather adult theme for a western or any kind of picture at that time.

Wayne was just beginning his stay at Monogram Pictures Lone Star westerns, this was his third. Monogram had a stock company to rival the much better one of John Ford. Note how for the next three or four years, the casts are just about the same in every Wayne western at that studio. It gets hard to keep these in chronological order, I wouldn't be surprised if a few of these weren't shot simultaneously.

The best you can say about the Monogram films is that they kept John Wayne employed, not something easily said during the Depression. And they beat those serials he did for Mascot. West of the Divide will never be on any John Wayne fans top 10 list.