Lightning Raiders (1946) Online

Clarence Linden Crabbe II made a boat load of B Westerns for PRC in the 1940's, all of them with Al 'Fuzzy' St. John as his sidekick. In the first thirteen of them his character was Billy The Kid. The name was changed to Billy Carson for another twenty three oaters, presumably to remove the outlaw stigma from the character. In 1936, Sam Newfield directed a film called "Lightnin' Bill Carson", but that one starred Tim McCoy in the lead role. Newfield also directed this one for Producers Releasiing Corporation.

The story is as formulaic as they come, but when it comes to these era flicks I just can't help myself. Almost every one comes up with at least one element that hadn't been done before. This time out, the evil town boss Hayden (Steve Darrell) calls in the loans on local ranchers, but here's the hook. He has his henchmen rob the mail coming in on the stage coach carrying various correspondence that might help the town folk. Like an approval on a note that would help extend the Wrights (Henry Hall and Mady Lawrence as daughter Jane). Or in the case of Jim Murray, a couple hundred dollars sent by his brother to tide him over. I was curious about that one - Carson replaced the money in the letter to Murray, then Fuzzy kicked in with a few bucks. What were the chances of that totaling exactly two hundred as the letter stated? Maybe I'm being too nit-picky.

Fuzzy has a couple of good moments in the story. The Mexican jumping bean episode comes to mind and later in the picture he pulls off one of the slickest moves I've seen in one of these flicks. Presumably knocked out by the town sheriff and lying on the floor outside the jail cell door, he kicks the sheriff while on his back from behind and locks him up tight to make the getaway. Pretty slick trick. If I had this on DVD, I'd have watched it a couple more times - the Fuzzy move, not the whole thing.

Lightning Raiders (1945)

This is such a poorly made, almost amateurish little Western you really can't watch it seriously. But in fact, it's also a bit of a comedy--certainly the one actor with real personality is a total goofball. I can picture watching an A-movie at the theater and being happy to sit for less than an hour and get a laugh out of this crazy thing. But on its own, with all the options at our fingertips, there is almost no reason to sit through it. The director (Sam Neufield, or Newfield, depending which and where you look) made almost 300 of these cheap movies, and he made them cheap enough and with enough crazy action to have a career of it, from the 1930s to the 50s.

Amazingly, this was part of a series (and so must have had a following), so in a way this is like a television series (and about that quality, say from the 1950s). The lead character is played by Buster Crabbe, who did a dozen Billy the Kid movies during the middle of the war and then a dozen Billy Carson movies near the end. That makes close to 30 movies (with Newfield/Neufield directing) in a three or four year stretch. And he's no actor, not anything to write home about.

But he's surrounded by lots of other types, mostly gunmen and sheriffs and the usual retinue from Westerns. But the gem is this bearded oddball who is a physical comedian, Al St. John. I don't think it's worth watching one of these just to see him in action, but maybe part of one, anyway. There is no sense of real drama because suddenly St. John (who is called Fuzzy) will show up and fall and be crazy. For example, he swallows some jumping beans and naturally has to turn upside down and act like his belly is on fire even as they are about to get nabbed by the crooks roving outside somewhere.

Ha. The writing is abysmal, the production values terrible, but who knows, give it five minutes and see how you stand it.

A mini-plot about an attempted land grab where the villain is trying to stop a ranch owner from repaying him the money he owes him so he can do it "legally". Most of the movie doesn't surround "story", only "circumstance" of trying to keep the truth from coming out and the loan re-paid. What I'll remember this for is the head-shakingly bad sequence where grizzled sidekick Al St. John is told he's just eaten some Mexican Jumping Beans and starts popping around the shack he's in as if he's a sack of popping corn. Buster Crabbe was far past his prime here as a leading man and is totally upstaged by St. John who chews up the scenery faster than a "chaw o' tobaccy".