FLOOD! DESOLATION! PESTILENCE! FAMINE! What is this, the evening news? Nope, it’s Gunsmoke Ranch, getting off to a quick start with a masterfully masterly masterpiece of stock footage reappropriation. The gist, in case you missed the subtle hints, is that some good people are in a bad way. And though it’s a flood (or FLOOD!), not a Dust Bowl, I choose to interpret this as a veiled attempt by the Mesquiteer masterminds to comment on the Okie problem in 1930s U.S. Thus, it is necessary to move this Old West franchise up chronologically…it is now a contemporary drama.
The Three Mesquiteers practice substantial discontinuity between entries. This movie proves it. We’ve already seen the time period switch with abandon from the 1880s to 1919. This forces the viewer to question just how the entries tie into each other. Is there any continuity? Did our Three Mesquiteers today partake in the same adventures as the former Mesquiteers (who are indeed the same actors playing the same characters)? It’s hard to accept the same men, at the same age even, took part in the Indian Range Wars, World War One, and The Great Depression…Well, Gunsmoke Ranch presents new wrinkles to these notions, so let’s plow ahead!
Where were we? Ah yes, those displaced by floods. They’re living in wigwam communes now, like common hippies, when a vile businessman arrives with a “solution.” Enter Phineas T. Flagg (Kenneth Harlan), which isn’t exactly the lead character’s name from “Around the World in 80 Days.” He’s a flimflam artist, promising this community free land in Gunsmoke Valley – they won’t pay a cent for 20 years, will be provided transportation, and will get 40 acres and a mule. Careful with those loaded historical notions, Mesquiteers!
Flagg ferries these fools to the frontier. It seems perhaps once or twice a year, The Three Mesquiteers allow themselves a proper budget, because this desert setting isn’t the usual stuff outside of Los Angeles. They went to an actual location. It’s the nicest thing about Gunsmoke Ranch, the location photography, combining the snowcapped mountains with the arid, water-formed sand valleys. I think it may be Death Valley, or maybe Utah. Other than a noted lack of Rita Hayworth, this may be the most beautiful entry in the series.
Out here, riding around awaiting a plot, are the Three Mesquiteers, Stony (Robert Livingston), Tucson (Ray Corrigan) and Lullaby (Max Terhune). Upon catching wind Flagg’s Paradise Land Co. is in town, they go into action. (Dialogue indicates the Mesquiteers previously tangeld with Flagg, in one of their adventures the filmmakers didn’t deign to film. Dialogue also indicates that the few comprehensible words Lullaby utters are profoundly offensive racial slurs, so there’s also that.) Thus the trio rides into the nearest generic Old West town (the 1937 setting sort of comes and goes), partly to flag down Flagg, but more importantly to eat up screen time with unrelated hijinks.
Lullaby goes into a general store to buy a new hat (his pals shot the old one off his head in a not at all potentially deadly bit of literal horseplay). Very well, it was national law in 1937 that all men were to wear hats at all times. Here, Lullaby discovers a hideous, Lovecraftian artifact which silently beckons – his famous ventriloquism dummy, Elmer. So…it’s 1937, easily the latest-set Mesquiteer, and now we’re getting the oh-so-essential origin story to Lullaby’s grotesque little doll?
Okay, you know what, maybe each film takes place in its own continuity. Events and characters are similar, as though these are separate exact Mesquiteer duplicates, acting out variations on a universal story for the amusement of some dread, immaterial heathen gods. This Elmer and Lullaby are not the Elmer and Lullaby from, say, Roarin’ Lead…Yeah, I’m goin’ with that.
One thing Gunsmoke Ranch is sorely lacking so far is some context-free western action, so let’s get some of that. Fistfight! Men wail on each other with little justification in the center of town. Lullaby even battles his brand new dummy! (It represents the doll’s assimilation of his soul.) And since this fight is outdoors, and hence with no chairs to break over men’s heads, instead we get public drownings in horse troughs. Family entertainment, this.
Aided by montage, the homesteaders construct their homes on the new ranch property. To celebrate this act of plot progression, they hold a grand ball in the community hall. Here we get a multi-minute speech from a scraggly, gap-toothed, whiskey-smellin’ rube, Elmer Twittlebaum (Lou Fulton), speakin’ entirely in incomprehensible frontier gibberish which smacks of a combination of Tweetie Bird, Porky Pig and Foghorn Leghorn cranked up to 11. Here, let me try:
“I s- I s- Ladies – I s- I s- I s- Ladies and – I s- I s- I s- Ladies and gentlemen – I s- I s- I s- Ladies and gentlemen of – I s- I s-”
You get the idea. He’s talking about the flood, by the way (I think). This scene serves no macro-movie purpose, beyond the time-wastin’. Also, between this cracker and the puppet, there’s altogether too many Elmers in this thing!
Checkin’ the runnin’ time, and realizin’ time needs further a-wastin’, the token love interest (she’s called Marion this time) proposes that Stony do some singin’ in that there baritone. That’s right, Robert Livingston had a record career to promote, and was willing to hijack a movie to do so, like so many pre-tragedy Lindsey Lohans. He opts to warble “When the Campfire is Low on the Prairie,” a song about prairies and campfires. And if Elmer (the ostensibly human Elmer) could waste time through incomprehensibility, Stony can waste time through slooooowness. Here, let me try:
“Whhhheeeeennnnn thhhheeeee caaaaammmmmpfiiiiirrreee iiiiiisssss llllloooo-”
You get the idea. Lullaby, apparently overcome by the dark demon Pazuzu, cuts this performance short (so that is lasts a mere 4 minutes) with random and feral shrieking of animal noises. I know Lullaby and his dummy are “comic relief,” but call an exorcist!
In comes Flagg to brag, revealing the precise villainy we were all expectantly awaiting. Now that his innocent suckers have improved the Gunsmoke land, he’s going to evict them under a fine print clause, and sell the property to FDR at a hefty profit. Apparently, the land having been made arable and useful, the U.S. government wants to dam it. Makes sense. There is a lengthy history of idiotic dams in the American west, though we hold nothing compared to China’s similar contempt for nature.
The Mesquiteers respond to Flagg’s dam plan by coercing the dame Marion to sign a deed for a legitimately owned bit of land. The notion is this shall null eviction. Ah, a B-western which dabbles in real estate law in lieu of shootouts and horse ridin’ – exciting! Of course, Flagg has no way to stop this effort, except through legal means…or he could just murder everybody. As a villain in a Three Mesquiteers movie, guess which option Flagg chooses. (Murder.)
But for now, it’s the calm before the storm. Stony romances Marion, as Lullaby likewise uses similar tactics (and Elmer) to romance her younger brother. It’s supposed to read as a mockery of Stony’s reprehensible ways (attraction towards a woman and all), but methinks the ventriloquist doth protest too much. Really, The Three Mesquiteers has an odd attitude towards human sexuality – it hates it. Further working in his lifelong quest to cock-block Stony, Lullaby recounts all his former romances – He simply lists out by name the previous films’ love interests, from Rita Hayworth on down to the four other girls whose names I forgot. How’s that, continuity? So this does occur in the same timeline as the other entries? Even though Lullaby only got his dummy in this one? And it’s four or five decades later? Okay, sure, whatever. Unless we’re to believe…I’m not wholly sure, perhaps some sort of time travel shenanigans which would confuse the makers of Primer. (Also, in Lullaby’s telling, all of Stony’s former loves are now dead! Rita was murdered in New York, Betty killed herself in a river…Sweet ever-lasting gobstopper, these movies are MORBID!)
Anyway, let’s ignore all that discontinuity and death, and also forget the finer details of land eviction precedent, it’s climax time! That means, no matter what’s happened so far, all can be resolved with a simple shootout between Mesquiteers and Flagg’s flunkies. This is the same horse-riding, gun-shooting stunt work we’ve seen throughout the series, enlivened by the authentic desert locations. There’s also a stagecoach involved, somewhat predicting, well, Stagecoach. And in the end, the Mesquiteers emerge victorious (spoilers), having actually lassoed and bound all the baddies. That’s right, they arrest them, for once having killed no one! The heroes are acting heroic? I’m not sure how to handle that.
There aren’t many conclusive things to say at the end of Gunsmoke Ranch. It isn’t wholly successful, as the lovely visuals are offset by a stalling and half-baked story. But at least I’ve learned how fast and loose The Three Mesquiteers can play with usual franchise rules. I’m used to series with little connection between entries (James Bond, anyone?), but for a movie to self-contradict within one entry to this degree is something new. Time period, setting, a selective memory of past events, all are accounted for. With the usual rules for narrative causality so effortlessly taken out back and executed, I guess I can expect anything from upcoming entries.
Related posts:
• No. 1 The Three Mesquiteers (1936)
• No. 3 Roarin’ Lead (1936)
• No. 4 Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937)
• No. 5 Hit the Saddle (1937)
• No. 7 Come On, Cowboys! (1937)
• No. 8 Range Defenders (1937)
• No. 9 Heart of the Rockies (1937)
• No. 10 The Trigger Trio (1937)
• No. 13 Call of the Mesquiteers (1938)
• No. 14 Outlaws of Sonora (1938)
• No. 19 Santa Fe Stampede (1938)
• Nos. 29 – 38 (1940 – 1941)
• No. 35 Prairie Pioneers (1941)
• Nos. 39 – 51 (1941 – 1943)
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