Texas Trail

In the first 8 minutes or so in this movie, you are introduced to a guy named 'Black Jack Carson'. Knowing the Hopalong Cassidy films, the odds are roughly 47502013249 to 1 that he would be a villain...such is the subtly you get in many of his films. Now understand...I really like the Hoppy films...but the writers didn't exactly try to hide who the baddies and good guys were! In fact in many the SAME actors played bad guys again and again and again....so keeping the audience in suspense about this just wasn't anything the films tried to do.

This installment of the Hopalong Cassidy franchise is one of the few where you can identify when the film was set. Most of the time, it's more vague when all this happens, but this one is set at the beginning of the Spanish-American War (1898). While Hoppy and his pals are all good, loyal Americans, they cannot fight in the war yet because the military needs them to use their cowboy skills to round up mustangs for the US Cavalry. But Black Jack Carson, inexplicably, is trying to prevent this...and he is planning on taking all the horses for himself and kill Hoppy and the men of the Bar 20. The gang's only hope, it turns out, rests on a kid...and, fortunately, for once he's NOT an annoying one!

The plot is mostly familiar stuff, though including the war and Cavalry is unique...and gives this film a bit more to enjoy. My only real complaint I talk about above....the baddie is just too obvious to make this a great B-western. Worth seeing.