mark.waltz Review of Roamin' Wild

Roamin' Wild (1936)

It sometimes takes a great deal of patience to watch certain genres.

[3/10 · 9 December 2017]

I've seen some B or D grade westerns that move fast, have believable and challenging plots and are a pleasure to watch. Not so much for those from here today/gone tomorrow studios that released dozens of these each year, cranking them out like daily newspapers. After a while, you begin to hear every horse step, every gunshot, every wagon wheel bouncing over a rock, and wondering when there will be some dialog, something to remind you of what the plot is, and some redeemable quality in a bad guy or amusing flaw in the good guy. For this slow moving but complex western (dealing with attempts to steal a mine out from under its owners), there are some extremely long stretches of film without dialog, overly lengthy horse chases that do nothing but stretch out the time, and when they do speak, the long pauses become excruciating. Tom Tyler tries his best, and heroine Carol Wyndham is lovely, but that's not enough to keep this interesting. To quote a line from "I Love Lucy", "Speed it up a little!" No. Make that a lot.