bkoganbing Sarah Padden a tough old frontierswoman and rancher calls on an old friend Buck Jones a US Marshal to investigate rustling in her area. When you call on one Rough Rider you get three as Marshals Tim McCoy and Raymond Hatton come to help also.The situation is a bad one as a lot of the ranchers are mortgaged to the hilt to the town banker Walter McGrail. So you know he has to be the one behind the rustling with a couple of other partners. Bankers were popular villains in those years. One thing about McGrail that kind of tickled me. When the jig is up and the Rough Riders are closing in, McGrail's instinct as a banker kind of tickled my funny bone.You'll have to watch Riders Of The West to find out.

MartinHafer "Riders Of The West" is a sad movie when you think of it. It's the last of the Rough Riders series from Monogram Pictures that featured Buck Jones, Tim McCoy and Raymond Hatton. While Jones and Hatton would return for one more film, the series would come to a halt when Jones died in a fire at age 50. As a final film for the trio, it's not at all bad--but you wonder how many more would have been made if it hadn't been for Jones' unlikely demise.The film begins with a very typical sort of plot. Some rich guys in town (the banker, sheriff and saloon owner) are out to force all the poor folks off their land. But they are clever and no one knows that they are the ones responsible for all the violence. The only one who does know is one rancher who also is in on this scheme. The but rancher, Holt, is having second thoughts--so they have the sheriff kill him--at which point Holt's son shoots the sheriff. The young man is now jailed on a murder charge.At the same time, the rest of the ranchers have hired an investigator to try to figure out who's behind all the recent problems. However, the Rough Riders' members, Buck and Tim, happen upon the investigator about to be kidnapped by the evil guys' henchmen. Tim decides to take the investigator's place (whether the investigator wants it or not) and infiltrate the mob. Can the three Rough Riders save the day? Well, of course, they always do--but how they do this is well worth seeing.Is this a brilliant film? Nah. It's just a B-series film. But a film doesn't need to be brilliant--just fun. And, compared to the average B western it's quite nice.By the way, the DVD is from Alpha Video. Like most of Alpha's DVDs, it's of dubious quality at best. On the other hand, if Alpha didn't produce these films, you couldn't get copies of most B-westerns. So, it's a good news/bad news situation. I have learned that although the sound is often terrible, there is never any captioning and the picture is badly faded or too dark, it's the only game in town.

FightingWesterner Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, and Raymond Hatton are called in to solve a series of sometimes deadly cattle rustling incidents, all involving ranchers indebted to the local bank.An okay entry in Monogram Pictures' Rough Riders series, this is a little more plot-heavy than the average poverty row western programmer. Once again, action and gun-play take a backseat to undercover sleuthing, with the Riders' well-used tactic of disguising themselves as separate strangers in order to work different angles of the case. McCoy manages to outshine his co-stars yet again.Always fun to watch is Charles King, playing a heavy for the umpteenth time in a B-western.

classicsoncall "Riders of the West" was the seventh of eight Rough Riders films to come out of Monogram Pictures. The stories brought together the aging cowboy trio of Buck Rogers, Tim McCoy and Ray Hatton who usually met up at some point in the movie to thwart assorted villains and desperadoes. In this one, the boys are summoned by rancher Ma Turner (Sarah Padden), who's cattle have been stolen. The set up is a familiar one as local ranchers lose their herds to rustlers, they can't make their mortgage payments, and the crooked banker forecloses on their property. The cast of villains will be a familiar one to fans of 'B' Westerns, with Harry Woods as crooked saloon owner Duke Mason, and Walter McGrail as larcenous banker Miller.Probably because they were getting older, the picture's heroes didn't engage in a lot of physical action, though Buck Jones can still put the hammer down when he's astride his horse Silver. Usually, Jones would take on an under cover assignment, but this time it's McCoy who impersonates a special investigator from the Cattlemen's Association after hijacking the real one away from a stagecoach holdup. The bad guys hoped to stop him from arriving at Red Bluff to complete his mission. Curiously, after learning that Investigator Dodge was hidden away in Ma Turner's hayloft, we never see him again. I wonder if he's still up there?Though Monogram planned to continue the Rough Riders series, World War II intervened and Tim McCoy returned to active duty. Jones and Hatton made one more film as their characters Buck Roberts and Sandy Hopkins in "Dawn on the Great Divide". Hatton continued portraying the character Hopkins for Monogram as the sidekick for their new star Johnny Mack Brown, using themes that were developed to be used by the Rough Riders.