The Man from Utah (1934)

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

John Wayne made a number of crummy movies at Lone Star. Trying to decide which was worst is not easy, but "The Man From Utah" is hard to beat.John Weston (Wayne) rides into a new town looking for work, and immediately jumps in to stop a robbery in progress. U. S. Marshal George Higgins (George Hayes, later known as Gabby Hayes) then asks Weston to help solve a series of mysterious rodeo deaths he believes are caused by insiders running the rodeo, whose hired hands always win when these rodeos end in sudden death."It's mighty peculiar that these outsiders fall off those tough broncs sufferin' from snake bite," Higgins says. "I tell you it just ain't natural." That's some mighty fine po-lease work, I tells yuh.Everything about "The Man From Utah" suggests a cut-rate, hurry-up production, more so than the usual Lone Star offerings Wayne made with director Robert N. Bradbury. The movie is slathered with minutes of footage of real rodeo action which seems a decade older than the rest of the film. Parading American Indians, steer roping, stagecoach races, people in stands waving and cheering, it just goes on and on.Wayne is terrible in this one, stiff and wooden. He talks in a monotone and barely seems engaged in what he's doing. A weak script supplies his character with zero motivation to do more. Asked by this guy he never met to go undercover and risk his neck to solve the rodeo mystery, Weston simply smiles and says "Sounds great to me!" without even asking about pay."I'm kind of green at this racket," he says at one point. Green don't cut it here.For some reason, the film introduces Weston on a horse and singing. I think it was him singing, and not the horse, though each seems to lip-sync as well as the other. When Weston reaches town, he puts the guitar behind a tree and the singing never comes up again. Why bring it out in the first place?Padding. It's the reason for the stock footage, too, and a lot of other things in this movie. Take a sequence where Higgins takes Weston to meet a man chopping wood, who then takes Weston to a canoe on a river, whereupon they paddle to a small corral where the guy gives Weston a horse and tells him there's a trail to the town where the rodeo is being held. Why did we need to see all this, if not to fill time? Fifty-two minutes never seemed so hard to fill.Everything is off in this film, from the opening gunfight (everyone including Wayne wave their pistols up and down when firing them, like finger jabs) to the closing battle, where Wayne rides up on two men who shoot and shoot at him, not breaking stride until he jumps off and tackles them to the ground simultaneously.Hayes is fun to watch at times, and so was Polly Ann Young as the pretty love interest, though like everyone else she's saddled with bad dialogue trying to shoehorn a love story in the off minutes. Everyone else plays their parts like rejected extras from a social- disease short.It's hard to rustle much love for this one. Even one of the more positive reviews of this movie notes: "Looking too deep into the story shows its flaws." I second that sentiment, provided "looking too deep" means watching it for more than 90 seconds. "The Man From Utah" is something you don't want to watch unless you are a John Wayne fan, in which case you REALLY don't want to watch it.

Oh, brother, this one starts out with John Wayne riding his horse and singing like he's high on wacky tobacky. His singing voice is dubbed but that just makes it more embarrassing, I think. Anyway, this singing cowboy rides into town just as the bank is being robbed. He helps marshal Gabby Hayes stop the robbers and is immediately recruited to do some undercover work with a gang that's fixing rodeos...or something like that.Polly Ann Young plays the female lead and she wears 1930s clothes even though this is supposed to take place in the Old West. There are also telephone poles throughout the entire movie that they don't even try to shoot around. They use stock footage during the rodeo scenes that clearly have people in 1930s attire in the audience. Historical accuracy was not a concern to the good people at Lone Star. This is one of many B westerns Wayne made in the '30s before he hit it big. The vast majority of these were forgettable but watchable oaters with little or nothing to recommend about them. A select few were better than average and many others were worse than average. This one's kind of crappy but if you have a good sense of humor and like to poke fun at bad movies, you might like it. Beware modern copies that have a terrible electronic score that often just starts at random spots in the movie.

This film holds up better than some of the early westerns. John Wayne is a hero in this - all the way. His Weston character is a well drawn two fisted hero who can do it all. Of course you have to watch the film until the ending to find out who his character really is. That is what I mean about the plot being good- it keeps you guessing exactly who Wayne is until the end.The DVD I saw of this has some very dark sequences. A fight sequence is dark deliberately, but some of the other ones really should be better lit. Think this had to do with the tight shooting sequences of these films. There were times in this era when these films would be shot in the matter of just a few days.Overall, while the special effects are crude & some of the sequences a loosely tied, if your a fan of the Duke or like these old westerns, this is a pretty good film. It is not on the level of The Searchers, but it was not meant to be. This is one of many early films Wayne did to establish himself as a true cowboy hero of the silver screen.

"The Man From Utah" is another of the Lone Star Westerns Wayne made in the 30's. This one has a rodeo setting with the Duke trying to outsmart the gang behind the murders and deceptive practices occurring therein.The producers make extensive use of footage shot at some long forgotten rodeo. With the money they saved they actually were able to come up with a pleasant enough musical score, a rarity for poverty row quickies. They even were able to incorporate a left over "musical" number from one of Wayne's ill-fated "Singin'" Sandy Saunders efforts at the beginning, even though it has nothing to do with the rest of the picture.The cast includes Polly Ann (sister of Loretta) Young as the heroine and Anita Compille as the good/bad girl competing for the Duke's affections. George (pre-"Gabby")Hayes is along again, this time as a Marshal. Edward Piel Sr. is the chief bad guy and once again proving that as an actor, he made a great stuntman, Yakima Canutt.Not the best of the Lone Star series, but not the worst either.