Rock River Renegades (1942)
In Old Wyoming, a gang is plundering stagecoaches of shipped currency and a crusading newspaper editor is trying to get the local marshal replaced, because of his apparent failure to catch the gang, which seems to disappear into thin air after every robbery. The situation escalates when one of the stage drivers is mortally wounded; so the marshal sends for his friends, the Range Busters, to help him catch the criminals. Meanwhile, even the marshal's fiancee, the editor's daughter, turns against him in favor of an aggressive agitator for law and order - who secretly is leading the robber gang.
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This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film
In one respect, "Rock River Renegades" resembles a Monogram Rough Riders flick in that the principles hooked up with each other after reaching their intended destination. That's when Max Terhune showed up as a 'printer's devil' at the Rock River Advocate, but I'm still not buying his story that he got there ahead of Crash Corrigan and Dusty King.This one's a fairly standard oater with a fairly standard story line. Territorial Marshal Luke Graham (Kermit Maynard) appears ineffective in smoking out a gang of villains causing trouble, so the locals are intent on replacing him with Jim Dawson (Weldon Heyburn), head of the Cattlemen's Association. The marshal wires for his buddies, The Range Busters, and once they arrive, they manage to smoke out the bad guys with the marshal's help. Graham discovers that Dawson is on the lam in Rock River using an alias, and just in time too, as Dawson was about to marry Grace Ross (Christine McIntyre), daughter of the Advocate's owner. Fortunately, the Range Busters tied up the judge, making him unavailable to perform the ceremony.I have to say though, the end of the story really left me scratching my head. The ruse the bad guys were using in their holdups to avoid capture was something I've never run across before - their horseshoes were rigged backwards to make it look like their horses were running in the opposite direction! That's fine if you buy the argument that they only rode in one direction to begin with. But Crash and Dusty always wondered why there was only a single set of hoof marks going in one direction to the villains' cabin, and never leaving from it. Even with the shoes reversed, wouldn't there be hoof prints going in both directions anyway? But that aside, you know what the biggest mystery of the story was? How did Max Terhune's dummy Elmer move and talk without Max providing the manpower?
Ray "Crash" Corrigan, John "Dusty" King, and Max "Alibi" Terhune head to the town of Rock River, where an old pal, the current marshal, is besieged by bandits and angry townspeople who not only blame him for not stopping them, but end up unknowingly electing the gang's leader as the head of the vigilance committee.There's a few okay action scenes and Dusty sings a good song, but this sluggish entry in the Range Busters series is mostly talk, with our heroes spending way too much time not battling the bad guys. All three have definitely done better work!Once again, there's a scene where Elmer, Terhune's ventriloquist dummy, moves independently of Max's arm. That's pretty creepy if you ask me!