The Falcon Out West! You know what that means. Indians, horse chases, cowpokes,
rattlesnakes, gun fights and runaway stagecoaches. In his fifth appearance
as the Falcon and the eighth Falcon film overall, a murder in the city apparently
by a rattlesnake forces Tom Lawrence aka The Falcon aka Tom Conway to head
out west to solve it. Why he does so is never clear with the Falcon because
no one ever seems to hire him or pay him - it is usually a pretty face that
motivates him; in this case three of them. It is a solid entry in the series
with plenty of suspects with most of them arrested at some point by Inspector
Donovan (Cliff Clark) and his dimwitted deputy (Edward Gargan) who follow
the Falcon out West.
The Falcon is meeting Mrs. Irwin (Joan Barclay) in a nightclub - we need
our nightclub scene - where her former husband Tex (Lyle Talbot) is drinking
it up with his party including the next Mrs. Tex when he keels over and dies
from a rattlesnake bite. The fiancée runs for their ranch in the west
and The Falcon follows her. And so does everyone else in the film. The horses
on the stagecoach take off and they are all saved by Della Street -
I mean Barbara Hale. That makes the three pretty faces. She is the daughter
of Tex's partner. A few attempts on the Falcon's life, another murder and
lots of flirting takes place before The Falcon figures it out.
This was very early in Barbara Hale's career - she was to appear in another
Falcon film later in the same year - of course as a different character.
The fiancée is played by Carole Gallagher who is very lovely - a Lana
Turner type which probably most of the new actresses at the time tried to
be - blonde with an hour glass figure and she is fine but this was the best
role she ever got in a short career. And Joan Barclay was in some 80
films and as best as I can tell nearly all B films. I am not sure if Barclay
wrote a book but she has a bunch of quotes listed on IMDB - "Samuel Goldwyn
chased me around a desk one day. Nothing came of it. I seemed to elude people.
Maybe, if I'd gotten into the picture business deeper and gotten to be a
big star, I would have had more problems." and "[on Bela Lugosi] Very nice
man but I met his wife [Lillian Arch] and son [Bela Lugosi Jr.] and they
both looked like they belonged in horror pictures. Big, tall, skinny . .
."
