There’s-a-long-long-trail / robert-mandell-with-the-romantic-strings-voices
I’m guessing you noticed that those rascals used a couple of the same posters from King of the Pecos – an annoying, but not uncommon practice in those days. Not bad posters though.
This movie is hard to come by – I could find no clips, previews – hardly anything – just a few pics – though it appears to be shown on TCM occasionally.
Reviews
One average Review, one friendly Review, and one trashing Review …
DVD Talk
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/60347/lonely-trail/
The Lonely Trail /April 30, 2013 /
Review by Stuart Galbraith IV | posted May 26, 2013
“A Reconstruction-era Western with John Wayne battling a scurrilous carpetbagger, the meaninglessly titled The Lonely Trail (1936), is fairly good, early Republic production. Though cheap ($20,000, of which Wayne received $1,750), it lacks the sausage factory mechanicalness of many of that studio’s later Westerns. The company style hadn’t quite set yet, and the picture is fresher and a bit more adult, if creaky and less fine-tuned.
Yakima Canutt, the great actor-stuntman-second unit director who helped shape Wayne’s screen persona, plays Holden’s main henchman. In an early scene, Canutt gets to demonstrate his dexterity with a pair of six-shooters that still impresses today. And it might very well have been him doubling for Wayne in a terrific stunt where Wayne’s character leaps from a galloping horse onto a runaway buckboard.
Parting Thoughts: It looks great and, for fans of B-Western, loads of fun, The Lonely Trail is heartily Recommended.”
“Ozus’ World Movie Reviews”
LONELY TRAIL, THE (director: Joseph Kane)
“Standard Western.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz 10/4/2005 GRADE: C
Standard Western directed by Joseph Kane from a story by Bernard McConville, who also handles the screenplay with Jack Natteford. Republic boss Herbert Yates was a NYC stockbroker who went to Hollywood and began Monogram Studios. His cinema philosophy was all about the money–not giving two cents about a film’s artistic worth. Yate’s philosophy was that a film should make back at least three times of what it costs to make. In John Wayne, Yates found a dependable and bankable star. For Wayne, these cheapie films became his school where he learned how to act. This is one of those middling film where if Wayne wasn’t in it, it would be of little interest.
Screencaps
I really had to wonder if my difficulty in finding this movie had something to do with it’s depiction of Black Americans in that era. It is clearly an outdated Social/Political depiction – even though it may be of some historical accuracy. I also wonder then, if future social climates will permit this film to return to our Libraries and Archives ?? I have to wonder.
From Rotten Tomatoes:
Actress Etta McDaniel made her stage debut along with her seven siblings as a member of H. M. Johnson’s Mighty Modern Minstrels, a Denver-based musical troupe. In the late 1920s, McDaniel and her older brother Sam headed to Hollywood, where both found steady work in bit parts. In keeping with Hollywood’s racial attitudes of the 1930s and 1940s, she was confined to the stereotypical roles usually assigned black actresses of the era: housekeepers, maids, mammies and African natives. Unlike her younger sister Hattie McDaniel, who eventually attained co-star billing and an Academy Award (for Gone with the Wind), Etta McDaniel spent her entire Hollywood career in minor roles.
