West of the Divide

Before calling it a night on Saturday night, I decided to light up an El Cobre and pop in another film from my John Wayne Collection. This time around I watched the third movie in the series, West of the Divide. This movie was featured in 1934 and runs 52 minutes in length.

This movie starts off with Ted Hayden (John Wayne) and friend Dusty (George “Gabby” Hayes) sitting in a field talking about a gunfight twelve years ago. During this time, Ted was just a boy and was being shielded from gunfire by his father. During the fight his father is killed and Ted is wounded and instructed to play dead.

The following morning Dusty came along and cared for Ted. As the two men talk, a third man stumbles up to them and collapses, telling them he unknowingly drank from a poisoned water hole nearby. After the man dies, Ted inspects the body and discovers that there was a note for a gang leader in the area. Along with the letter was a wanted poster for a murdered named Gat Ganns.

The poster had a photo which had a striking resemblance to Ted Hayden. From that point on Ted decided to play the role of Murderer Gat Ganns and get to the bottom of the situation. Along the way the Duke finds the man that killed his father twelve years prior as well as meets up with his long lost kid brother who was just a baby at the time of the murder.

Even though this movie was filmed a year earlier that Paradise Canyon and Rainbow Valley, the footage was much cleaner. The actors were in far fewer dark spots on the set which did not hide them in the black and white film. There was alot of hissing in the audio but aside from that, this film was very easy to watch.

So far, this is easily my favorite of the collection. I have another three films to get through before wrapping up the DVD bundle and I hope the remainder are just as good as this one was.