Somewhere in Sonora Reviews

The fifth of the six westerns in the series Wayne made for Warner Bros. which established him as a western star.(He had appeared in a few westerns previously, but his roles were a mixed bag until this time; the studio brought him out of poverty row, where he had landed after an altercation with Harry Cohn, boss of Columbia Pictures--said to be over a woman both were interested in--where he had been a contract player.) Wayne plays a rodeo performer who, accused of fixing a stagecoach race, is forced to travel to Mexico. Once there, he makes like an outlaw and joins the gang which has shanghaied the son (Fix, his first picture with Wayne, and the start of a long association) of his old rodeo boss, Walthall. Wayne foils the felons in their effort to rob Lewis' silver mine, thereby clearing his name and winning the love of the mine owner's daughter, Fay. Like some of the other pictures of the series, this was a remake of a Ken Maynard silent. The studio used many of the expensive outdoor silent sequences from the 1927 Maynard film in this later version, cleverly costuming Wayne and the heroine so that, in long shots, they would be indistinguishable from their earlier counterparts. As in all the other films in this series, the hero's front handle was John, a trick often used by the studios to establish continuity and identification with a specific actor.