Cheap The Texas Rangers (Video) (King Vidor) Price

At the outset, three young desperadoes get separated during some dirty work. Jim (Fred MacMurray) and Wahoo (Jack Oakie) run for cover by enlisting as Texas Rangers. Their pal Sam (Lloyd Nolan) continues to ride a crooked trail, and Jim and Wahoo do their utmost to be looking the other way whenever he passes through. Then, the dangedest thing happens: the workaday courage and resourcefulness of their fellow Rangers start to get to our two reluctant law keepers, till eventually you couldn't tell them from honest men. Neither can Sam, and he doesn't like it one bit.

John Ford made more poetic Westerns, and Anthony Mann, more demonically driven ones. But King Vidor had the most rugged sense of landscape, light, rock, dust, and the way death can come in startling yet matter-of-fact ways. Edward Cronjager was just the right cameraman to serve this vision, and frame after frame of The Texas Rangers is a thing of rough, angular beauty. Jean Parker is nicely feisty as the Ranger commandant's daughter, and the old boy himself is played by that pillar of American Gothic, Edward Ellis. --Richard T. Jameson