Pony Post (1940) User Reviews

The mails get through, after a fashion

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 4 January 2017]

Pony Post is about that fabled if short lived Pony Express which carried mail to and from the west in 1860. Johnny Mack Brown takes over a troubled express station because the former manager Stanley Blystone has used the place to cover a lot of his gambling debts.

When Brown fires Blystone, Blystone starts getting into all kinds of criminal activities in uneasy partnership with brothers Ray Teal and Jack Rockwell.

Two women vie for Brown's attention. One is Nell O'Day whose father's horse ranch supplies a lot of the mounts for the riders. The other is Dorothy Short whose father Tom Chatterton is the big boss of the Pony Express who put Brown in charge.

Lots of criminal activity, suspected double crossing, and enough riding and shooting for any front row kid. Together with the comedy and comic songs of Fuzzy Knight who is the horse wrangler at the station but wants to be a rider. He even invents a trampoline like device for easy mounting. You have to see how that works out.

Pony Post

[coltras35 · 5/10 · 24 March 2024]

Atkins is the boss of one of the Pony Express relay stations. He has been causing trouble and is replaced with Cal Sheridan. Atkins now gets the Richard brothers to raid one of the relay stations and they kill Norma's father. Cal sees that the horse of one of the raiders has a broken shoe and Norma sets out to find that horse.

I always found the pony express story interesting and there have been a few - Pony Post stars Johnny Mack Brown and there's the usual formula western with the adequate amount of shootout and villainous schemes. There's some nice locations. Comic sidekick is Fuzzy Knight is a very good sidekick, however his comic interludes here spoil the flow of the main story. There's too many of them.

He don't like no cow.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 30 March 2024]

That's the consensus of the silly sidekick Fuzzy Knight, singing about his preferences to the daughter of the murdered rancher (Nell O'Day). Johnny Mack Brown shows up to aide Ms. O'Day. The slight story (consistently interrupted by the antics of Knight) involves the theft of pony express horses. Knight wants to be a rider but really isn't in shape to do that so there's lots of gags at his expense.

The villain of the piece is Stanley Blystone Who sits around with his gang of bad men all in black, and you wonder if like Austin Powers they have a closet filled with the same suit. Brown has two women interested: O'Day and Dorothy Short, daughter of major Tom Chatterton, and all you have to do is see who's top billed to know who ends up winning. Good musical interludes with Jimmy Wakely and his rough riders are preferable to some of Knight's corny antics. But definitely above average as a Universal B western.