dougdoepke An odd oater, with little hard riding and no fast shooting or flying fists. Instead combat takes place between two old airplanes, plus well-aimed lassoes. Hollywood cowboy Buck (O'Brien) shows his grit off-screen by helping ornery old rancher Violet Butler resist a shakedown by conniving city slicker Kramer (Middleton). Most of the storyline, however, is taken up with talk, maybe too much. But there is some good footage of the fabled Alabama Hills and scenic eastern Sierras. Also, some good bird's-eye footage of the maneuvering airplanes interspersed with process footage of the pilots against a backscreen. O'Brien's cowboy is more affable than tough, a rarity for matinée heroes, while Parker makes a comely blonde sweetie who'd make any guy stick around. Too bad the deliciously evil Middleton doesn't get more screen time, even though he's more subdued than usual. Anyway, it's definitely not a formula western, but has enough appealing novelties to satisfy an old matinée fan like me.A "6" on the Matinée Scale

JohnHowardReid This movie is now known as "Wings Over Wyoming", which in some ways is a better title because the film's most impressive scenes are those in which cattle are stampeded by a diving airplane – an original device if nothing else! Director Ewing Scott handles these action scenes with considerable flair, but both his screenplay, written in collaboration with Dan Jarrett, and his handling of it are less satisfactory. In fact, the many long dialogue exchanges without music or sound effects, remind us of independent westerns made at the very beginning of the sound recording era rather than major studio endeavors as late as this. Also the plot device in which the hero's rival is stupid enough to confuse a movie poster with the real thing doesn't ring true unless it's first established that the man is a moron or at the very least a bigot who hates movies with all the ignorance-is-bliss fervor of a revivalist preacher. Charles Middleton handles the role of the villain with his usual panache, Cecilia Parker makes a grand heroine, Maude Eburne is a wonderful foil, but Frank Milan is at best a rival of no account whatever.

classicsoncall I saw this picture under the title "Wings Over Wyoming", opening with a nod to the Franklin Roosevelt administration as newspaper headlines demand that 'Rackets Must Go'! With the heat on, mobster Doc Kramer (Charles Middleton) moves his enterprise out West, forming a racket called the Cattlemens Protective Association. If you're a Western fan, you've probably run across that name dozens of times in dozens of Westerns, although in 1937 it probably wasn't as generic as modern day fans know it today.So as common as the theme is, the picture gives it a bit of a twist with the identity of the principal player. George O'Brien portrays a 'picture actor' who's just wrapped up filming a movie, and is persuaded by film writer G. Gatsby Holmes (Joe Caits) to take some time off to go camping and fishing. Holmes' real motivation is to dodge a high profile divorce case brought by his wife, and it doesn't take much to talk Jeff Carson (O'Brien) into taking some time off.Once that's all established, it's a fairly routine good guys/bad guys story, with O'Brien's character falling for pretty Joyce Butler (Cecilia Parker), daughter of shrewd cattle rancher Violet Butler (Maude Eburn). Old Vi isn't falling for the protection racket business, even if Kramer's going rate is a penny a pound. I don't know, that sounded pretty reasonable to me, except for the fact that it was a shakedown with no value offered in return. It might have been worth it though just to have the guy get lost.The finale was a fairly inventive affair, as one of Kramer's henchmen who was about to stampede the Butler herd one more time using an old fashioned biplane became engaged in sort of a duel with a single wing aircraft enlisted by the cattlemen. It looked cool, but I didn't really see the point of it all, because there was no way they could have made contact with each other without both planes crashing. The way the film writers got around that was for the villain to run out of gas, thereby being forced to land. Meanwhile, the sheriff's posse on the ground ran down the rest of the baddies and hogtied them into submission. The best part about that was seeing the sixty two year old Butler lady lasso one of the villains, as Carson demonstrated the old 'ride off into the sunset' with the younger Miss Joyce.

Alonzo Church Hollywood COWBOY George O'Brien does battle with carpetbagging gangsters from the city who are trying to set up a protection racket in Wyoming. Can O'Brien beat the gangsters (led by "Ming the Merciless", Charles Middleton) with their airplanes and tommy-guns, with just a six-shooter and a sidekick named Shakespare trying to avoid a divorce subpoena? OK, the plot here, with the odd combination of the current day and old fashioned western action, is more than passing strange, but it does have the advantage of being something different. George O'Brien (the lead in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise and Michael Curtiz's Noah's Arc) also is several acting leagues above the average western star. As a result, the film is a bit better than average for a B, particularly as O'Brien does not take his role particularly seriously, and always seems about to burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all. What might be a problem for the B western fan is that there is no pleasant western music (sorry Autey, Rogers and Ritter fans), nor is there a lot of typical western action (sorry Tom Mix fans). Instead, the better parts of the movie are played for laughs, and the action scenes appear to have been lifted from more expensive dramas.The result is OK, with almost a Wild Wild West feel, but it is a dead end as far as a genre film is concerned. (How can you do a series of films, when the lead characters seem invested in the absurdity of the whole enterprise?) It's probably not surprising that later westerns done by O'Brien for RKO are more serious.