ward bond would be 109

And in honor of his birthday on April 9th, TCM gave us twelve straight hours of hard-to-find selections from the vast, rich Golconda that was his oeuvre. Since I no longer have cable, I parked myself on my mom's couch to watch four films, all, delightfully, from 1936. I wanted to stay and watch Santa Fe Trail again, which doesn't have much Bond to it (or anything to do with the Santa Fe Trail, as I recall), but offers a lot else, including Errol Flynn and Van Heflin and Raymond Massey as John Brown. Alas, though, the way life is shaped, sometimes you have to do other things besides watching Ward Bond movies. It's a dirty jip, copper, but there it is.



*SPOILER ALERT*
Avenging Waters: (1936. dir: Spencer Gordon Bennett) These first two are old Ken Maynard westerns. This was back when cowboys were musical and wore insanely huge hats. My mom wandered in halfway through and said are those good guys or bad guys and I said look at the hats! The hats are white! Those guys are good! Yes, life was that simple once.

This poor plot has Texas-sized holes torn in it. Ward Bond is a not-very-smart but certainly evil cattle-baron hoist by his own petard when he dams the river to drive another rancher off his land, then a storm (sent by a vengeful god, I guess) takes out the dam and it floods Ward out. He jumps on the back of a horse, leaving the heroine to drown (she just stands there instead of running for the hills like a normal person, so maybe this was the vengeful god's way of cleaning out the gene pool). Luckily, white-hatted Ken Maynard is in town on his faithful white horse Tarzan, and so she lives, probably to slow the evolution of the race by procreating.

The worst part of this movie is the party-scene, an excuse for bad jokes and lots of musical ridiculousness. The best part is at the beginning, when the heroine is attacked by a mountain lion (a real mountain lion!), with no suspense-music or anything, just a nice build-up and attack, and Ken Maynard shoots the poor beast just in time but it spooks her horse which goes barrelling head-first off a cliff into the river, with Maynard on Tarzan right after it. I don't even want to think about how they did those stunts. Did those horses even survive? If I could watch it again, I'd put money on it that they didn't risk the real Tarzan. That horse had a stunt-horse on call, I'm sure of it.

There's another part where Maynard is being dragged by a horse, gesticulating madly in close-up while racing scenery is projected behind him, and he's rescued when Tarzan gallops abreast and somehow he mounts up and gets his leg free... Truly ridiculous. Yakima Canutt would have been red-faced and sputtering foul-mouthed curses.


Cattle Thief: (1936. dir: Spencer Gorden Bennett) Now, THIS one is worth watching. Maynard is not just the white-hatted hero riding Tarzan, he is also in disguise as a doltish wares-salesman. A double role! He wears a little mask when he rides out in his big white hat to do his good deeds.

Ward Bond has more interesting matter to chew on here as the evil ranch-manager trying to clean up at the expense of local cattlemen while his boss is temporarily incapacitated. And the stunts are far better: there's one of those great overtaking-the-runaway-wagon-at-full-gallop things that I love so much. There's also a silly scene in which cattle are stampeded in a bottle-neck, which John Wayne could have told you would result in a sort of meat-grinder effect, but these beeves emerge miraculously unscathed, no doubt due to the spotlessly good intentions of Ken Maynard and Tarzan in their ongoing quest to make the world just, fair, and safe.


The Man Who Lived Twice: (1936. dir: Harry Lachman) Ah, my favorite of the four! A nice stretch for Ralph Bellamy, who gets a doubling role as a hardened criminal who undergoes brain surgery to become a model citizen. It's well shot, too, with the action scenes done in quick, effective montage. If only the expository scenes were also done with such snappy aplomb, it'd be a very good film. As it is, it's a lot of fun, mostly because Ward Bond will steal your heart as a good-hearted, steadfast ex-boxer who is the criminal's stalwart sidekick.

Get a load of some dialogue:

Moll: What’d you do, swap your heart for a bowl of chicken salad?
Sidekick: Chicken salad ain’t bad.

If that kind of illogical sass appeals to you, you'll be won like I was.


Muss 'em Up: (1936. dir: Charles Vidor) A witty parlor-room whodunnit in the style of the Thin Man, although somewhat thinner on the charm and wit and very much thinner on the charisma. Decent as he is, Preston Foster is nobody's William Powell. That said, Vidor helms it well with decent comic timing and whoever wrote it had the chops to carry it without knocking off our collective socks. Bond has a small but recurring role as a hired goon who turns out to be neither the smartest nor the baddest hombre in the mansion.