You are now listening to the Someone's Favorite Productions podcast network.

Welcome back to Tumbleweeds and TV Cowboys, a classic Western film and TV podcast.

My name is Hunter.

In this week's episode, I'm joined by author Scott McCrae, and we're talking about the Writer of Death Valley.

It's from nineteen thirty two and features silent film star Tom Mix.

Tom Mix has been referenced on the podcast a couple times in past episodes, but this is actually my first time seeing one of his films.

I'm guessing that Tom mixed movies are a blind spot for quite a few listeners, and I think Scott is the perfect guest to introduce you to Tom Mix and his movies.

Here's our conversation on the Writer of Death Valley.

Scott, Thanks for coming on the show.

How's it going.

It is a great pleasure to be here.

Hunt's Hunter really your real name?

Oh?

Yes?

Absolutely?

I've never met a Hunter.

This is so cool, Okay, I've I.

Have only met three other Hunters.

One was actually last week, and then the other two were in the Saint was on the same night.

I was at a bar in LA and somehow I met one person named Hunter and he and he said, I'm actually here with another friend of mine named Hunter, and so the three of us hung out together, and I think I was I think I was twenty five, but it took twenty five years until I finally met somebody named Hunter.

Wow, Hunter, Hunter, Hunter and Robinson.

You signed a law firm.

Yes, all right?

Well yeah, well, Scott, I'm very excited to have you on and I'm looking forward to talking about Tom Mix and the writers of Death Valley.

But before we get into that, can you tell us about yourself and your history with Westerns.

Well, I was born at a very early age and rapidly got older.

No, so I grew up.

When I was a little little kid, I hated westerns, absolutely hated Westerns.

And I was lucky enough to grow up in the seventies during the Great nostalgia craze and PBS was playing movie cereals along with Fleischer cartoons, and the first sereal they played was Tom Mix and the Miracle Writer, which also happened to be his last movie.

He made it for Mascot, which later became Monogram, and it was a super duper cereal.

I mean, the very first episode was forty minutes long, and they had spent more money on that cereal than they had on any other serial.

Of course, they spent more later on on Flash Gordon, but it was it was, you know, a deluxe serial, and I instantly and irrevoicably fell in love.

And after that, of course I became you know, you could have grown up in the seventies and all of your pop culture could have come from the thirties and forties, because it was this huge revival of everything.

And every night you could listen to all time radio on WRVR, and you had movie cereals, and then they were reprinting all of the great comic strips and you know, so my favorite Christmas present ever when I was a little kid, is that they got me the collected works of Buck Rogers in the twenty fifth century, with a introduction by Rape Bradbury.

And this thing was enormous.

It was like the size of a porper's tombstone, you know.

And Bradbury was talking about, you know, newspaper strips when he was a kid in the twenties.

And in some weird way, and I realized that this makes me sound hopelessly psychotic, but in some weird way, I really grew up more in the thirties than I did in the seventies because I was reading Duc's Average and looking at movie serials, and a lot of the movies and things that were going on when I was growing up just completely passed me by because I wasn't interested.

I was.

The very first concert I went to was Bing Crosby at the Euris Theater.

So I mean, like disco is a whole, you know, empty and empty chasm to me.

I was listening to Bing Crosby.

So and that's how I first got interested in comics and it's been a love affair ever since.

Oh that's awesome, like like and the Miracle Writers.

I should say, that's actually the first thing you suggested that we talk about, and I do want to talk about it eventually because I would love to cover a cirial on here.

But since you've since you're really familiar with Tom Mix, can you kind of give us give listeners an idea of what they can expect from a Tom Mix movie, because I think a lot of listeners will be unfamiliar with his filmography, so I thought it might be good to provide like some context before we discuss the writer of Death Valley.

Well, can I give you two pieces of context?

Or is that too much?

Oh?

No, that's that's fine.

So when Tom Mix was a little kid, when he was eleven in Pennsylvania, so he's not a Westerner.

He's an East Coaster essentially.

When he's eleven, Buffalo Bill's Wild West comes through town and he goes to see it and is and he Tom is absolutely besotted by Buffalo Bill in the and the Wild West.

He went many times, and when the show was over, he went to his mother and so this is eighteen ninety one and says, Mom, I want you to make me a Wild West costume.

So she's dutifully does, you know, like any mother would.

And when he was old enough, he went west and became a real Westerner and ended up in the Miller one oh one Show, which was one of the successors to Buffalo Bill and one of the very first rodeos.

And then, of course in the nineteen twenties, he becomes, along with William S.

Hart, one of the most important movie stars ever in the nineteen twenties.

In fact, Tom was for a long time the highest paid not only performer, but the highest paid American.

For several years running and a good way.

Well, so the first piece of context is a good way to think of Tom Mix in the nineteen twenties and thirties is Tom mixes John Wayne.

So a lot of his movies tend to be lighter, and he is an accessible and good guy.

And Williams Heart is Clint Eastwood.

His movies traditionally are darker and grittier and a little harder edged.

And like John Wayne, Tom Mix is often the west of our fantasies and and our longings, and Eastwood and Heart are probably the grittier and meaner, closer to the truth.

That's that's the first hunk of context and and the other.

And this is not a plug, but I always, I always think that this is fascinating.

I write westerns now uh and Buffalo Bill Cody sort of invented all of the things that we think of when we think of Westerns.

It all comes from the Wild West Show, the Stagecoach, hold Up, the Indian Rescue, uh, you know, the Pony Express, the Deadwood stage and and all of his imitators, and that influenced Tom Mix, and Tom Mix helped John Wayne get into the movies.

And Tom Mix was the great influence of Roy Rogers and Gene Ortry, and to a lesser degree, guys like Clash LaRue, who then you know, were an influence on people like Clint Eastwood, who was an influence on Kevin Coster.

And the great thing about being involved in westerns, if you if you either write westerns or you make westerns, is that you're part of this lineage that really has a sense of continuity that other genres of entertainment do not have.

So that's remarkable.

And then you know, the other thing is that you know Westerns, you know, so I write them.

But ideally Westerns are performance because even Buffalo Bill's Wild West was a Wild West show, although there were hundreds of dime novels written about Bill, just like there were dime novels written about Tom Mix.

And and it was that sense of performance because he really was a performer more than he was an actor, and that sense of international stardom.

I mean, he was actually beloved only in the United States but in Europe.

That that that solidified what a Western is and what we still expect from a Western.

It all goes back to I always said, it always goes back to Tom Mix, and it goes to Buffalo Bill.

I mean they were the two that that created the Western as we know it.

Yeah, now I know.

Now you have written books where uh where Tom Mix is a like a character in the in the books.

Is that correct?

Yeah, I've written I've written nine Tom Mixed novels, which are essentially pulp novels.

And you know, the initial idea was I was going to have Tom in various part of his life, you know, involved in a Western adventure when he's making a movie in the thirties, or when he's on the Universal lot and he meets Boris call Off.

But he was also very briefly a marshal, and all of them ended up except for one of them mostly being about him being a marshal.

And I always wanted to keep the series fresh.

So one is a detective story, and one is an adventure story, and one's a sort of ribbeled comedy, and one is a historical fiction.

So they have a lot of variety.

I like doing them a lot.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah, And I will say I'm going to end the show notes for this episode.

I am going to have a links to your social media and to a page where they can check out your books as well.

Oh go, so yeah, so definitely give Scott a follow and go check out his books for sure.

All right, well, I think at this point we can get into the Writer of Death Valley.

Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about the cast and crew here for a moment, and then we'll kind of and then we'll get into our general thoughts on the movie.

Perfect all right.

So this is a Universal Pictures production and it's produced by Carl Lanley Junior, and he produced the Universal Monsters movies and was head of production at Universal at the time.

And it's directed by Albert s.

I think it's rogl Rogel, Rogel, Yeah.

And he worked with another Silent film star, Ken Maynard quite a bit, and he later directed John Wayne in a western called War of the Wildcats, which apparently has another name.

It's in Old Oklahoma.

Yep.

Yeah, I had only ever heard of it as War of the Wildcats before.

But anyway, The Writer of Death Valley was written by Jack Cunningham and he wrote a lot of Tom Mixed movies, and he was the writer of what's probably one of the more well known silent westerns, The Covered Wagon.

A wonderful movie.

Yeah, it's very good then.

And speaking of the Covered Wagon, the leading lady in this is Lois Wilson and she was the star of the Covered Wagon.

And there's a couple of other recognizable actors in this.

Fred Kohler, Yeah, he's an interesting He's in a really interesting William ay Wellman pre code movie called Oh, Oh my gosh, I just blanked on other men's women, that's what it's called, Okay, and that's worth tracking down.

And he's also in Hell's Heroes, which I still need to see.

I know, it's one of several tellings of the Three Godfathers.

He died soon after this picture.

Oh did he really?

Okay, he died in like nineteen thirty six.

I think something of.

It, gotcha.

And then Willard Robertson is in this, and he has a small role in the ox Bow Incident.

He's the sheriff who shows up at the end of the movie, you know, when it's too late, unfortunately.

And then Francis Ford, who's also in the ox Bow Incident but is also John Ford's brother, is in this as well.

And finally, a non human member of the cast, Tony the.

Horse, Tony the Wonder horse, Yes, and.

Who is credited in forty six movies, and it looks like almost all of them are with Tom Mix but apparently he's in a couple three Stooges shorts as well.

But I think those are really all the major players that anybody would want to know about.

Now, Scott, I want to give you the option.

Do you want to do the plot summary?

Or should I just read one from IMDb?

You could do that?

Sure, Okay, I'll just do that.

I cannot summarize a movie.

It's just I can't do it.

I've tried, and I fail every time.

But all right, so here's the IMDb synopsis.

Rigby, Larrabee, and Grant each have one third of Bill Joyce's map locating his gold mine.

The three plus Joyce's sister Helen head for the mine.

An accident with a runaway horse carrying supplies leaves him stranded in the desert with very little water.

All right, So, Scott, what did you think of the writer of Death Valley?

So I wouldn't throw around the phrase like this is an undiscovered classic or a lost classic, but by this is a really good movie.

I mean, this is a solid Western and it's really fascinating for a whole bunch of reasons that I could talk about at length.

But the first is, you know you were talking about this is a Coral Lamley picture, and he made all the classic horror movies.

Look at how static a movie like nineteen thirty one Stracula is, for example, and then look at how fluid the camera work is here.

I mean in the whole first reel when they're in the Boomtown, almost all of the storytelling is done with the camera.

And the fact that you know it's directed by essentially a non entity.

You know, you mentioned a Rosal picture.

The only one I knew of was he directed The Black Cat years ago, years later with Basil Rathbone and Baylor Legosi.

It's a terrible movie.

So you know, here you have a you know, nobody's top tier director, you know, using the camera better than Todd Browning and James well Did and Frankenstein frankly, So it's it's it's a remarkable picture in that sense.

And then also while it's while it's not exactly a B movie and it's not exactly an A movie, it's it's probably like an as for anyone who would say it's like a harbinger of the B movies of Roy Rogers and Gene Auntry.

I would argue that it's a lot more sophisticated and a lot more gritty and meaner at heart and uncompromising.

This is going to sound ridiculous, But while I was watching it again, you know, the first thing I thought about is that, you know, just fifteen years later, Bud Botiker would have made this picture, and it I just kept on thinking, this is a Randolph Scott bug Botaker movie.

And it's so unlike the rest of Tom mix his corpus because you know, usually not always, but usually his pictures are much sunnier than this, and you get a sense of that in the early part.

But when it when it turns into a desert survival movie, this is a really brutal picture.

Yeah, I I have this.

This almost this is going to sound like an echo hearing my thoughts because it's very similar to yours.

Now.

Of course, I went in knowing really next to nothing about this, uh, and I actually assumed it would be more like B movies I had seen from this era.

But I completely agree it's like somewhere in between an A and a B movie and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I wouldn't say, like you, I don't think it's like an undiscovered gym.

But it's really solid and it opens with a pretty fun montage of a of like a town becoming a boomtown that kind of reminded me of the opening of Frontier Marshall.

Oh yeah.

Then and then it sets up you know, it kind of sets up this town.

You're where greed has completely taken over, and it seems like Tom's character and he plays a character named Tom.

He almost always played a character named Tom.

That's funny because when I did an episode on some of John Wayne's By movies, and he almost always played a character named John Yeah in those but but yeah, in this town, it seems like Tom and his ranch hands seem to be like the only decent people in the area.

And I think that it's pretty well made, and the direction is really solid, and there's some there's some very interesting shots, like there's a shot later on in the movie that I think is baffling where the character Lou Grant, which when I heard Lou Grant, I did think of Mary Tyler Moore Show.

But Lou Grant is crawling in the desert and he's crawling towards a mirage, Yes, and you see his reflection in the mirage, but the mirage keeps moving as he's crawling towards it.

It's a it's a remarkable shot.

Yeah, it's incredible.

And that's such a I mean, and that's the performance.

Of the movie.

I mean, oh, he is great.

Yeah.

And then and there are some shots that appear to be taken from silent westerns, like you can see there's like a frame rate difference or maybe just a different film stock.

Yeah, but I think it all comes together really nicely, and it is like surprisingly grim.

And you had even told me, like over email that it was a a gritty movie in advance, but it was like bleaker than I was expecting.

And then early on in the movie, a young girl's father is shot and then moments later dies in front of her.

Yes, And then later in the movie where they're in the desert and running low on water, like, it's very well performed overall, and it feels like just a genuinely desperate situation and I completely bought into it.

Yeah.

You know, the first third where or maybe first quarter where Tom is taking care of the daughter of the murdered man.

So that is more in line with the majority of Tom's pictures, because you know, he was also a very deft comic actor and so all of that.

You know, he's embarrassed when he takes a little girl to the bar and she says, oh, he met he he ironed my organ, deep pinner for it.

He you know, put perfect by me.

And you know, poor Tom is sinking lower and lower because you know, he's a human and and but there's this real genuine affection and you know, you know, at one point she's outside the bar, and he knows exactly what's going on.

She just picks her up and puts him on, puts her on his saddle.

And I can't tell you how many times in movies Tom reaches down and picks up a child and uh.

And and you know he was there was a reason that he was called the hero of America's youth.

I mean, you know, part of that, of course, is just hucksterism.

But Tom genuinely liked kids, and they genuinely liked him, and that whole first, you know, third or quarter is more what you know, the majority is certainly not all of them, but more what the majority of Tom movies are like, I mean, he's a he's a good guy, and he's accessible and people like him, and everybody says, oh Tom is here.

And then of course you you it has this incredible reversal and you know, suddenly you know it's a Peck and Pam movie and you're just like, and he pulled them both off, which is, you know, one of the other things that makes it quite remarkable, and it's it.

It doesn't feel it doesn't feel bisected, really it does.

It still feels wonderfully organic because it sort of lulls you into this, oh, okay, we have a Western, we have a Western, we have a Western.

And thenuddenly he turns into something much grimmer and much nastier.

And it never does it in a sort of self referential way where it's saying, look at this, you know, this smart thing that I'm doing.

It just sort of happens.

And you know, when Tom drinks or tries to drink from a canteen that's full of sand, it has a real emotional payoff.

You're like, oh my god, they actually went there with this picture, and you're so amazed.

And of course the heroine is so good, and she is unbeautified throughout the course of the film in a way that's unusual.

I mean, I mean, imagine Dale Evan's doing that or Marie Windsor and it just wouldn't happen.

But you know, they go there with her and it just has this wonderful honesty.

And and he's Tom is terrific.

I mean, I just I I adore Tom, and I can see where his strength really lay more in Silent Film, because you know, he's not the greatest deliverer of dialogue, but he's a wonderful presence and and and you believe him profoundly.

As a Westerner, it doesn't look costumely the way you know lader Roy Rogers films do.

So I think if you're a Western buffer and you haven't seen this, really track it down because you'll go, oh wow, this this sort of presages It doesn't presage the movies of the forties or presages the movies of the fifties.

Yeah, I totally agree.

Yeah.

Now, now one thing, now, the relationship between Tom and the little girl whose name is is Betty.

Yeah, I think there is some humor in that that might raise a few eyebrows, Like there's a moment where she asks if her aunt is in town and he says, no, I think that she is arriving on the stage coach and it hasn't come yet.

And she says that's good because she prefers for him to bathe and dress her right.

And then Tom tells her not to say that it's our little secret.

Well so, you know, so it's our little secret though, because he wants to be a he man as opposed to and you know, it's a shame, and this is not towards you.

It's a shame that people would see this and go, well, you know, because nineteen thirty two in many ways was a pre sexualized society, and after the sixties everything was sexualized.

And you know, there's this wonderful moment in Wings.

I don't know if you've ever seen it where the hero finds his comrade and he's wounded and he's on a cot and you know today, and when he finds him, he embraces him and kisses him and he rubs his hair and he kisses him again and again and again.

And you know, you'll find lots of people today who go, well, you know, this is you know, like one of the first great moments of gay cinema.

It's like, well, no, it's not it's gay cinema to people who've seen it after nineteen sixty's.

It's it's real life to people who started in nineteen twenty eight.

So yeah, I can see where people would go, Well, that's kind of interesting.

I think that's kind of bizarre.

But I.

One hundred percent guarantee in nineteen thirty two, the joke was that a he man is ironing a little girl's outfit rather than a he man is giving a little girl a bath.

But it's a shame, you know, because it's very hard not just that, but it's very hard for people to see movies in their historical prism because we're all sort of imprisoned by our own time.

That's true.

Yeah, I didn't really really I think about that actually, but because in Tom Mix, I mean, I do think that he is so wholesome that, like, I think he can get a get away with it.

Now saying now, an adult telling a child something is our secret?

Yes?

Now is coded?

Yes, yes, But and it did make me wonder and you did kind of already address this, So is it is this a pretty major outlier in his filmography is in regarding to it's like more grim elements.

Yeah.

So you know, uh, around this time he made another movie, uh for Universal with Mickey Rooney.

Uh so it's him with a child again called Which Which which is a wonderful picture called My Pal the King, where Tom is is uh a wild West showman who goes to a Uritanian nation in Europe, and of course people are trying to kill the King, who is little Mickey Rooney who's like eight or something, and of course you know, he ends up in Tom's saddle and uh uh Tom explains good old American values to him and and then the bad guys, you know, try to kill the king, and Tom and the Wild West Riders come in a womp in and a stomp and and and you know, restore order to Europe.

And that's more like wan a Tom Mix movie was.

But I you know, I just want to touch base on kids again.

You know, if you want to, uh, do a Google image search on Tom Mix, there are hundreds, I mean hundreds of photos of him at children's hospitals.

And you know that was you know, the cynic would say, well, you know that's his bread and butter in his audience.

But a lot of people didn't do that, and Tom did.

And when he had so Tom mix like Buffalo Bill.

When the movies dried up for him, uh started the tall mixed circus and he went on the road, you know, essentially doing his old his own wild d West show.

And you know, again there there are hundreds of pictures of him, you know, giving passes to kids because he loved kids.

And uh so, yeah, this is kind of an outlier because the the second half is just so unremittedly grim.

I mean, I don't know about you, but were you were you were you equally disturbed when he's beating Tony.

Oh yes, that is a really that is a pretty shocking scene.

Like you I, I was definitely like, wow, I did.

I did not see this coming at all.

And of course then and then, uh, I can't what is the name of the leading lady.

I know the actresses is Lois, but I can't remember.

Is it Helen?

Helen?

Yes, and you know, and she comes over and tries to stop him because and it does seem like a little bit like Tom has snapped here.

But yeah, that that is a pretty pretty strong moment.

Yeah, it's funny because you know, it's some weird way we're inured to in Westerns violence against other people, Like it's a Western, we shoot people, but you know, and then you hit a horse and you're like, oh, wait a minute, this is a bridge too far.

Oh yeah, yeah.

In fact, uh uh, you know, I think it's it's probably the most brutal scene in the picture.

And and Tom really sells it because you can see how much you hurts him.

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

He even tells, uh, Helen, like, you know, this is the first time I've I've ever done this, and and he and he and he says like how much he cares about his his horse, and his horse is like you've been with him through through everything.

Yeah, and the horse I think we should mention.

Now.

He he does add like quite a bit to the movie.

I mean, there is a like, you know, he he does like right off to go get Tom's ranch hands to come and help rescue them.

And now this is a moment in the movie that I actually thought was kind of amusing.

He stumbles upon this water hole, yes, basically like surrounded by bones, and there's a sign that says it's poison.

Does it say what it is.

On the sign?

Does it say alkali I think.

Or something.

I can't remember exactly what it was, but it does say I know it says at least poison.

Yeah, but uh, I don't know why.

But for some reason, the horse sniffing the water a few times and then running off was just a funny image to me.

Well, that's the kind of thing that you would see more in a Roy Rodgers movie later on, and not in a picture like.

This, right.

Yeah, But there is, especially with the horses, there is some some pretty good action this.

I mean it's pretty brief, but it is I think exciting, Like the scene where Helen is on the wagon and it's being led by horses that are running because they were startled by a gunshot and Tom chases after her.

I think is pretty fun.

And there's a couple shots in this that reminded me of john Ford, Like there is a shot where the wagon goes over a camera that's at a really low angle.

Yes, that's and this is like you know, pre stage Coach and john Ford.

I mean he may have done something like that in the Silent Movies era.

I've only seen one of his Silent movies actually, but then there there's also a shot.

So they end up at a at a mine, like they have the three pieces of a map that leads to a mine where there's gold and there is a kind of a cave or like there's like an opening to the mine, and he shoots from that opening and and characters are framed kind of like within a door, which is very much something that John Ford yes does in his movies.

Yeah, I like the direction.

I mean, we've touched on it already.

I do think this is not just like a programmer like I think there was some thought, in some care that went into your crafting this.

Oh definitely, you know, like we said earlier, this if you're if you're a serious West and Easter, you really have to see this one because it's it's it's so out of its time.

It really does feel like a nineteen fifties movie, and you know it's I mean, well, Tom had a really good life.

But it's a shame that Tom was fifty two in nineteen thirty two and not thirty two, because well, most Western actors and most cowboy heroes actually, the Western is the only genre where you can be an older hero.

It didn't matter that John Wayne was pushing seventy like he was still the hero, and or that Randolph Scott was you know, in his sixties, he was still the hero.

And it's you don't do that, you know, in secret agent movies or in romantic comedies.

In some odd way, you can really get away with it in a Western in ways that you can't with almost any other genre.

But but Tom aged hard and fast.

So even though he's only fifty two here, you know, if you had said to somebody that he was sixty two, you would believe it in a heartbeat.

And I just wish that he had another ten years of youth, you know, so he could have worked with John Ford or you know, so he could have made so he could have lasted until the nineteen forties when you know, Warners, for example, was still making some really champion westerns.

He wouldn't necessarily had to have been the lead, but you know he could have had a lot of those Willard Mitchell's parts, or or you know, the good heavens, that fellow who's in all of John Ford's early films, who's an older man, and it's coming to me Harry Carey sr.

Okay, Yeah, so you know I mean, I just it's it's you know, he had a great run in the twenties and nobody had a better run.

But it's a shame that that's what he had because so many of it, you know, Tom Tom made more than two hundred movies, and the overwhelming majority of them were lost.

So we're going on, you know, a handful of really excellent pictures and and and the myth that he left behind, and it's a hell of a myth.

But sometimes I think I would pass on the myth.

So I so we could have had you know, I wish his decade was the thirties instead of the twenties because we would have had you know, a whole corpus.

You know, those pictures would have survived.

Yeah.

Now, so he is fifty two when he made this.

Now, is he still doing all of his own horse riding?

Because I know that is one thing that he was known for, is is he was actually like a great like a legitimate great cowboy basically.

Yeah.

No, he did it all all the way through the Miracle Writer, and then he did a lot of his Yeah, I mean he did a lot of quote unquote rough writing in the late thirties when he toured with the Tommic Circus, and you know, you could see pictures of him, you know, even in his fifties, shirtless, and he's in remarkable shape.

I mean, I'm older than Tom Mix was when he made this movie, and I wish I was in that good shape.

But he had false teeth and it sort of hurt his delivery, and his face was really weathered in a way that made it sort of pitched as opposed to sort of you know, like Randolph Scott got better looking the older he got.

I mean, I would argue that Randolph Scott and Ride the Hard High Countries a better looking guy than Randolph Scott and she and Tom wasn't.

Yeah, so you know, he he aged like red Berry.

Yeah.

Now I'm trying to think of what else I have to say on this one.

Do you have any other notes or kind of final thoughts on the movie.

Yeah, I just wanted to say how remarkably sophisticated it is, and I was saying, you know, it's sort of like a harbinger of movies in the fifties.

The other thing that I was thinking of is that, unlike some of the other early westerns of the thirties, This really feels more like a pulp novel from a pulp magazine than a thirties even a minus West D because it had that sort of narrative drive and that sort of fearlessness that a lot of movies didn't have.

So I I just I love this movie to you know, I just saw it, you know, to do this interview, and I would like to go see it again.

Sorry, try and find a good copy.

But it's, uh, it's a remarkable film.

Yeah.

I am really happy that you recommended it because I I would definitely rewatch it, and I am putting a link to uh actually the link that you sent me.

I'm going to put that link in the show notes so that listeners can check out the movie as well, because it is definitely worth watching.

And and this is probably one of the more this might be the most obscure movie I've talked about so far on on on the on the podcast, but it's one that I think a lot of people even I'm not going to guarantee that you'll love it, but I think you'll at least appreciate that something like this came, you know, from from this era.

Oh, I you know so well.

First off, listening to your show a pre Wikers, it is that you like westerns.

Oh, yes, absolutely so.

My feeling is if you like westerns, you like this movie a lot.

I think so too.

Yeah, yeah, you know.

Oh and there is one other thing that it has very little to do with the movie, but a lot of Tom's movies at this time, like the Westerns of the forties, uh, exist in this weird western never never Land, where you know, some people ride horses and some people drive cars, and there are planes.

And if you've seen Tom mixed movies and you think that this is one of those, it is not.

This is definitely the Old West.

It's a boomtown that clearly went from a tent town to a boomtown over night.

There is a hooker in it, played by May Bush from the Laurel and Hardy movies.

She's delicious in this thing.

And I mean the little girl gets her beer by mistake, which is almost a Laurel and Hardy book move.

So this, I mean, this is definitely It transcends its circumstances and it transcends its limitations, and it's a real satisfying Western that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely definitely worth worth seeking out for sure.

All Right, now, Scott, did you want to Well, why don't you go ahead and and and plug your your most recent book.

My most recent book.

So so, I'm writing a series of novels about a marshal named Marshall Ezra Flint.

I think I'm on the ninth.

The latest one is called cry Flint, and Flint is in a remote town sort of besieged by religious fanatics.

And I had a lot of fun writing this one.

And then I have a contemporary Western thriller called Targets West, which is about a cattleman named Lucas Wheeler who gets involved in an international plot.

And I like them both, so you can't go wrong with either, says Scott McCrae.

All Right, well, Scott, this was excellent.

Thank you so much.

Oh it's a great pleasure.

I hope you enjoyed this episode.

It was great to have Scott on to talk about Tom Mix, and I'm sure he'll be back in the future.

What did you think of this week's episode?

And if you're a Tom Mix fan, what are some other movies you'd like to hear us talk about.

You can let me know by emailing me or messaging me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

All the ways you can get in touch with me are in the show notes.

Next week, we have a new guest and we're talking about a spaghetti western directed by one of my favorite directors of all time.

We're talking about Luccio Fulci's Massacre Time.

I can't wait to rewatch it.

I adore Folg so it'll be really fun to get a chance to talk about him and this movie in particular.

Until then.

If you're looking for more film related podcasts, please check out other shows on the Someone's Favorite Productions podcast Network.

Thanks for listening.

Do you love movies?

So do I?

What's up, y'all.

It's KB and I love movies, inviting you to listen to The Conversation, a film podcast where passion meets perspective and an opinion from the old school to the new.

I invite a guest on to discuss the movies that thrill us, challenge us, break our hearts, or even blow our minds.

There's always new episodes dropping wherever you get your podcasts, so join the Conversation.

We don't just watch movies, we love talking about them too.

A conversation with KB Loves Movies, a part of Someone's Favorite Productions Podcast Network.

Thank you for listening to hear more shows from the Someone's Favorite Productions Podcast Network.

Please select the link in the description