The Mysterious Rider

Twenty years after being framed for murder and reluctantly abandoning his valuable White Slides ranch, Ben Wade rides the Arizona range as a masked bandit known as "Pecos Bill." Following a chance encounter with Jack Bellhounds, son of the ranch's current owner, Ben drifts over to White Slides andsecures a job there. Wade's daughter Collie, ward of the elder Bellhounds, is being forced into a marriage with the hot-tempered Jack. Ben tries to aid Collie without letting the girl know that he's the disgraced father who disappeared when she was a small child.

In 1938, nearing the end of its long association with prolific Western novelist Zane Grey, Paramount delegated contractually mandated film adaptation of the author's works to "Hopalong Cassidy" producer Harry Sherman. The Mysterious Rider, first of Sherman's four Grey-inspired programmers, bears little resemblance to Paramount's previous two cracks at the novel; Maurice Geraghty's script is densely plotted and richer in characterization than the earlier versions. The offbeat casting of perennial heavy Douglas Dumbrille as Ben Wade and director Lesley Selander's staging of sequences in Arizona's picturesque Saguaro Forest further distinguishes this edition of Rider from other film versions of this classic tale.

Silent filmmaker Benjamin B. Hampton often used the books of Western author Zane Grey as a source for his pictures; for this cliché-riddled picture he must have been scraping through the bottom of Grey's work. Hell Bent Wade (Robert McKim, for once not playing a villain) is the victim of an attack in which is wife is killed and daughter kidnapped. A couple of decades later, he is a sheriff known only as the "mysterious rider," because of his nighttime prowls in search of cattle rustlers. Wade encounters Wilson Moore (Carl Gantvoort), who has gone into the mountains because his sweetheart, Columbine (Claire Adams), has agreed to marry the son of her adopted father, Bellhounds (Walt Whitman), even though she does not love him. Wade sees a picture of Columbine and is convinced she is his daughter. It turns out that Bellhounds' son, Jack (James Mason) is in cahoots with cattle thief, Ed Smith (Frederick Starr). Wade gets incriminating evidence on the two and kills Smith, who was the varmint who headed the attack 20 years ago. Columbine winds up with two fathers and one true sweetheart.