Thunderbolt's Tracks

Jack Perrin and Harry Tenbrook, WWI Marine Corps vets, head out west to visit the father of their deceased buddy and get involved in a fight over water rights.

There used to be a large genre of 'modern' western, some examples of which survived through the collapse of the B Western in the 1960s. But while the modern western by the 1960s had become nostalgic to the point of depression for the Good Old Days of Open Spaces -- think of THE MISFITS -- the modern western of 1927 did not even recognize that the good old days were gone -- think of one of the characters in SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL Sheriff, on being told that James Garner was heading to the frontier of Australia: "I thought we were the frontier." It would take another forty or fifty years before the Western became a closed, nostalgic art form, its vision of freedom, growth and frontier shifting to science fiction.

In the meantime, you got these mixed genre works. This is a pretty good B picture, done with occasional gusts of comedy -- Tenbrook digging a trench in eight seconds, or Perrin trying to thread a needle. It's a movie for people to have fun with and it succeeds.