Call The Mesquiteers (1938)

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Sometimes it doesn't pay to be a Good Samaritan. The Three Mesquiteers stop to help a driver of a wrecked truck as they were returning from a rodeo. They have the horse trailer as well tied to their cab. The people in the wreck however turn the tables on Robert Livingston, Ray Corrigan, and Max Terhune. They steal their rig and hold the Mesquiteers hostage. In a shootout with the authorities the robbers are killed and the Mesquiteers are held as part of the gang.The writers were sure getting a little lame on this one. Seems that it would have been a simple matter to ascertain the guys just came from competing in a rodeo. Still it's lynch talk that's brewing and the guys have to escape and capture the bandits.The loot in this case is silk, taken from a freight train. There isn't even much detective work involved as the Mesquiteers just happen to stumble on to the hideout. Good chase climax in the end.Not one of the best Mesquiteer stories.

There were probably other Three Mesquiteers films where the cowboy trio bucked up against the modern world but I can't think of one right now. This picture had truck and motorcycle chases and the boys seemed right at home whether on horseback or behind the wheel of a big rig. Another novelty for this story was the target of the bad guys, they were hijacking a shipment of raw silk off a cargo train and dispersing the bundles among a handful of trucks to meet at a predetermined location. I don't know how valuable silk would have been in the Old/getting new West, but somebody must have thought this was a good story idea.For Bob Livingston, Ray Corrigan and Max Terhune, this was one of fourteen films in which they portrayed the Mesquiteers together. There were a total of fifty one pictures in the series with a rotating cast including John Wayne at one point. It's the present trio that's best remembered as the Mesquiteers, and if you want to consider a fourth member, Max had a wooden dummy Elmer that only made a brief cameo appearance in this one with minimal lines.The one character to keep your eye on in this picture isn't even one of the good guys OR the bad guys. Hawkshaw is a German Shephered owned by a young boy named Timmy (Sammy McKim), and if you watch closely, you'll see him do a chameleon routine at various points. It's most evident when Hawkshaw jumps onto a truck he's been chasing, and his standard Shepherd coloration changes from a dark colored saddle back to an overall monotone tan color. You'll probably think you're seeing things, and it made me ask why they couldn't get a couple of dogs with basically the same color pattern to shoot different scenes. I wonder if audiences of the Thirties noticed stuff like that.Anyway, this is a fairly lively Mesquiteers flick that has the boys pegged as part of an outlaw gang before they have a chance to set the record straight. I had to chuckle when the trio ditched their truck to head on over to that great Western cosmopolitan metropolis of three thousand conveniently named - Cosmopolis!

Ray Corrigan, Bob Livingston, And Max Terhune stumble across an overturned truck on the highway and are forced by gangsters to load the stolen goods from the wreck onto their own truck. Kidnapped and in the company of gun-toting criminals, they're mistaken for accomplices and forced to take off rather than participate in a necktie party.With it's abundance of trucks, car chases, motorcycle cops, telephones, and radio, this isn't much of a western at all. Still, this entry in Republic Pictures' Three Mesquiteer series is a fairly entertaining adventure, with decent enough production values and performances.One thing that's pretty unique is when the Mesquiteers wander into a modern, art deco ghost town, with grass protruding from the paved streets and tumbleweeds all around!