Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

FightingWesterner When Wayne is shot and his father murdered by armed robbers, he's nursed back to health by his friend's intended fiancé, leading to the inevitable love-triangle. Complicating things further is the fact that the killer is the girl's brother.A decent entry in the series of Saturday matinée B-westerns that The Duke made as a contract star for Lone Star/ Monogram Pictures in the thirties, The Dawn Rider has several good action sequences and some okay melodrama.The climactic showdown includes a well staged fistfight between John Wayne and chief heavy Yakima Canutt.

John W Chance As one of the last 'Lone Star' productions this is one of the best in many ways. It has more character interaction and development, and even a love triangle. As others have noted, all the scenes work toward building up to the climax. It also features three early versions of some of the great clichés of the Western.William K. Everson quotes from Variety reviews of 1908-1909 westerns that mention that those films were competently made but "It all has been done so often before, and usually better." Well, here 27 years later we get these new wonderful clichés all excellently done: 1) the hero and a stranger meet and fight, then go to the bar for a drink as pals and become 'pards' (John Wayne as John Mason vs. Reed Howes as Ben McClure in the opening scene); 2) the 'get out of town by four o'clock or I'll come gunning for ya' saloon threat by the villain (the handsome, evil voiced, quintessential bad guy Denny Moore as Rudd Gordon) to John Wayne; and then 3) the final gunfight down the middle of Main Street, during which the tension builds with good cross cutting and the fact that Mason doesn't know his own gun is loaded with blanks! To back track on the plot, Mason's father is killed by Rudd in a robbery Mason witnesses. Chasing Rudd, Mason is shot and nursed back to health, at Ben McClure's place, by Rudd's sister Alice, who falls for Mason (shown in a telling scene where he talks about boots, but she thinks he's talking about a wedding ring). Ben is in love with Alice, and thinking Mason has designs on her, puts the slugs in his gun. Ben later realizes his mistake in a moving silent sequence, and then rides off to stop, warn or help Mason in his showdown with Rudd.Yakima Canutt gets to play a villainous barkeep, and do some good stunt work as well. No George Hayes in this one, but everything works fine without him. Plus of course, we have John Wayne! You can the sense the development of his patented swagger as he walks down the street during the showdown. So, we get one of the better 'Lone Stars' here. I give it a 5.

bkoganbing If John Wayne didn't say that in The Dawn Rider he should have because the film is a tale of mixing bringing a killer to justice and getting a little payback vengeance in the process.Wayne arrives home just in time to witness his father being killed in an express company holdup. He only knows that the killer wore a polka dot neckerchief and with that clue in mind, he begins the hunt.It leads him to places he doesn't like going especially when it turns out the killer Dennis Moore is the brother of Marion Burns who is nursing the Duke back to health when he gets wounded. Added to that is a nice little romantic triangle going on between Wayne, Burns and Reed Howes who has become Wayne's best friend.Yakima Canutt plays the saloon owner and head of the gang that did the robbery and Yakima worked overtime doing the stuntwork as well. There's pretty good sequence involving a foiled robbery when Wayne takes out a gold shipment. Lots of hard riding and shooting and fighting all in a day's work for Yakima Canutt and his fellow stuntmen.I have a version that is only 54 minutes long and I suspect a lot has been cut from it as I believe originally it ran 68 minutes. I suspect the film would have been better with the director's cut.

Spondonman Not being an expert on this genre I can't give The Dawn Rider an unqualified whoop or a hesitant snort either. I cut my eye-teeth on this type of B Western when a kid in the 60's - I've only seen a few hundred films like it since and it seems pretty much average.Wayne looked a very smooth and supple 28 year old, swinging into saddles for countless horse races, sorry, chases, but he was a much better character to watch as the craggy icon he later became. He, and all the characters (and the story) in TDR are necessarily flat and undeveloped - the kids in the cinema at the time weren't interested in multi-layered portrayals of Tolstoy magnitude, and Lone Star weren't going to give 'em it either!The DVD had new musical additions - I prayed for silence! But all in all a pleasant hour was spent by the TV at my ole homestead.