Film

The Texas Rangers (1936)

Director: King Vidor

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Riding silently in column, past towering cliffs and beneath ornate cloudscapes, the Rangers proceed on their implacable way, to showdowns featuring such declarations as 'Ain't no more room for your kind of Texan' and would-be amusing dialogue equating dead Indians with rotten apples. Redskin beware! Outlaw beware! (Though the latter merits the post-mortem valediction, 'Hope you'll let him in up there. He just got on the wrong trail, that's all.') The dilemma arising from this movie is whether to emphasise the correspondences between it and contemporary Nazi cinema or whether to focus on the distinctions. Vidor was himself a Texan and unembarrassed, it seems, by the concept of Texas as (after the elimination of undesirable elements) a paradise situated in the south of Utopia. It's mildly amusing, therefore, that the archetypal scenery framing all those stereotypical characters should actually be situated near Gallup, New Mexico. Nothing else is amusing though.

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