Movies I've Missed (Until Now): The Outriders (1950)

I usually check to see what old Western movie the digital TV channel GRIT is running on Saturday nights. GRIT shows old Western movies all the time, of course, but for some reason when they run one on Saturday night that I haven’t seen before, I try to watch it. Most recently, it was THE OUTRIDERS, a Joel McCrea film from 1950 that not only had I never seen, I don’t remember ever even hearing of it before. So I had to check it out, of course.

The movie opens late in the Civil War. McCrea, Barry Sullivan, and James Whitmore are three Confederate soldiers who escape from a Union prison camp in Missouri. They throw in with a gang of irregulars led by Jeff Corey and are sent all the way to Santa Fe, where they’re supposed to infiltrate a wagon train taking several loads of hides back to St. Louis. Hidden under those hides, however, is a million dollars in gold headed for the Union treasury. Corey plans to steal it and take it to Richmond to prop up the Confederacy, but in order to do that, McCrea, Sullivan, and Whitmore have to lead the wagon train into an ambush.

Tensions develop among the three men, of course, and are made worse when a beautiful young woman played by Arlene Dahl joins the wagon train. There are Indian attacks, a flooded river, a tragic death, some fisticuffs, and finally an epic showdown. Western movie fans will have a pretty good idea what’s coming, all the way through.

Along the way, however, there’s some spectacular scenery (besides Arlene Dahl), excellent photography, and a lot of action. McCrea is his usual stalwart self and Corey hams it up effectively as the epitome of wide-eyed evil. There are a couple of lapses of logic in the plot that could have been explained away easily with a line or two, but mostly things hang together all right. THE OUTRIDERS is worth watching for Western fans, as long as your expectations aren’t set too high.

While watching this, I was struck by the fact that when it comes to Westerns, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are practically interchangeable. I think McCrea had considerably more range and could play effectively in different kinds of films. For example, I can’t imagine Scott in DEAD END or SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. But the characters they played in Westerns were almost identical. THE OUTRIDERS would have been the same movie with Scott in McCrea’s part. So it’s kind of fitting that they’re both in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, with Scott playing a little against type for a change. And that’s a movie that I ought to watch again, one of these days.