Overland Stage Raiders [Blu-ray] by Olive Films

Actors

• John Wayne
• Ray Corrigan
• Max Terhune
• Louise Brooks
• Anthony Marsh

Format

• Black & White
• NTSC

Editorial Review

It's incredible that, mere months before his breakout role in Stagecoach, John Wayne should have been working on Saturday-matinee fodder like Republic's Three Mesquiteers series. To be sure, by Poverty Row standards the Mesquiteers pictures were well above average, and their headlong pace ensured that no kid got bored. But being dragooned into costellar partnership with Ray “Crash” Corrigan and Max Terhune was a career low. (Wayne's character, Stony Brooke, stood in the same relation to Corrigan's Tucson Smith and Terhune's Lullaby Joslin as George Clooney's Ulysses to his partners in O Brother, Where Art Thou?: he seemed to be “the only one with the capacity for abstract thought.”)

And speaking of careers, Overland Stage Raiders is infamous for being the last credit the legendary Louise Brooks ever had. Less than a decade earlier she ruled the German Expressionist screen in G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl and, as Lulu, Pandora's Box. Hollywood didn't know what to make of Brooks pre-Pabst, and they didn't even try afterwards. Still, the lady is on record as having found her last leading man a dreamboat.

But really: a Western called Overland Stage Raiders that lacks a stagecoach? What they call a “land stage” is actually a bus, and within minutes it's been supplanted by a couple of airplanes. There's also a train, and a train robbery–that is, they steal the train. And that's not even counting a cattle drive, a midair holdup, and several gunfights. Did we mention the headlong pace? –Richard T. Jameson