WILD WEST FILMS DEAD

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 March 1934, Page 5

WILD WEST FILMS DEAD

ONLY ONE ‘COWBOY’ LEFT. There is sad news for all who love clean romance, the lovely Western deserts and galloping horses (writes Campbell Dixon, in the London “Daily Telegraph.) The Western film is dead. Of the dozens of cowboy actors who took the world by storm only one, Ken Maynard, is still working “horse opera.” George O’Brien and Tim McCoy have just retired, Tom Mix has joined a circus, Hoot Gibson is in eclipse, and Buck Jones has retired into the ’obscurity that long since enveloped William S. Hart and “Bronco Billy” Anderson. \ Others actors who have been seen in cowboy pictures, such as Randolph' Scott and Tom Keene, will go on working, but only in straight roles. And to think that Scott works’for Paramount, the company that made “The Covered Wagon,” one of the greatest successes of all time—and a Western. The Western slump has hit Hollywood hard. Scores of cowboy extras hang disconsolately around their “Water Hole” rendezvous; hundreds have drifted away, all in the Western phrase, headed for the last round-up. J In one studio, Universal, which 15 years ago had 40 two-reel cowboy pic-

tures in production simultaneously,] there is to-day one solitary horseman,, Ken Maynard. | In the same studio, just before the] coming talk and sophistication, was ] signed Tom Mix’s famous contract for ] £lO,OOO a week, with percentages that ( brought his earnings to £3,000 a week i —the highest salary ever paid. ■ Will Westerns come back? Formula ; Westerns, probably never. The mod-, ern boy, brought up on flying and | motor-racing, regards the horse as too slow. But I believe hoys of all ages

] will always like genuine dramas of I the West such as “The Covered Dagon” and “The Virginian” were, and such as !(I hope) Gary Cooper’s coming j “Frontier Marshal,” based on the line ] of Wyatt Earp, will prove to be.