This is the eighth of the Falcon series. At this point, the series gets a bit silly. Perhaps inspired by The Marx Brothers Go West (1940), this misguided attempt to combine a detective thriller with a stagecoach (still used by an eccentric) and men riding around with six-shooters on their hips (although it is 1944), seems a bizarre attempt to import an urban thriller into a Roy Rogers movie. The rocks and trees are the very same ones remembered from childhood, past which all the cowboys rode in all those black and white Westerns. There are even morose Indians, useful for a few gags, since when a white man says 'How' to one of them, the Indian answers: 'Very well, thank you.' There is a lot of humour, and some lively lines are spoken. The plot is sound, with some interesting twists like a ring containing rattlesnake venom with two sharp spikes, which can be jabbed into someone to simulate a rattlesnake bite. If some restraint had been shown (but none was, and all was thrown to the winds), this thriller-out-west could have worked, cowboys and all, with Tom Conway wryly observing the quaintness of Texas customs. However, all the good points of this Falcon thriller are drowned in a sea of Western silliness, like a gun floating in a bowl of mush. Falcon fans will want to watch it anyway, because they are forgiving souls.
Review of The Falcon Out West
