This the third of the Hopalong Cassidy series finds Hoppy going to the aid fellow rancher Howard Lang. But he's got to catch up with Jimmy Ellison who has a big head start. Ellison's likes Jean Rouverol the rancher's daughter, but she's getting a whirlwind courtship from an elegant English dude Henry Worth who is secretly behind all the rustling going on.Worth proves to be one of the more interesting villains in the whole Cassidy series. He's got some rather high falutin' ideas on good living out in the west and surprisingly for an Englishman he admires Napoleon Bonaparte. His men are even exasperated with his ideas, but he is making them money. That covers a multitude of sins.I swear Hoppy ought to keep Ellison on a leash with a muzzle. That young man is more headstrong and keeps getting into jackpots in every Cassidy film. The guys have more than one reason to leave the Bar 20 to help a friend. Buck Peters's sister Ethel Wales is in for a visit and she has all the cowhands doing her interior and exterior decorating. Facing outlaws is better than living with her and her tasks.Watch and see what I mean.

So often cast as a dour villain or stern-faced sheriff in his sound era westerns, J.P.McGowan here brings genial and knowing good humor to the role of foreman Buck Peters. He shows an easy authority among the ranch hands, then goes into ironic self-effacement when the dragon sister arrives. In his mid-fifties and getting heavy in build, with more than one hundred and eighty roles behind him (and that counts all his appearances in The Hazards of Helen as just one!), JP takes readily to the humorous business at the ranch which counters the serious purpose of Hoppy's mission as the film develops. Not a big role, but one that the Mulford fans would have insisted on being done to rights. As a much experienced producer of inexpensive but popular light dramas himself, JP may have enjoyed working for the veteran producer Harry Sherman. He would have enjoyed, too, the adroit and vigorous direction of the sole sequence in which he appears, set in front of the bunkhouse. All in all, the audience sees a different and happy side of J.P.McGowan, Hollywood's first Australian.

Cassidy's short films were shown at boy's birthday parties in Brazil in the early fifties. That was before TV . When he came out on TV a couple of years later in the U.S.A. there was a lot of expectation because all newspapers were writing about what a fortune he made by this deal. Unfortunately there was very little you could do in half an hour. More than fifty years have gone by since I was so deceived by that TV episode that I never saw any Cassidy film again. Seeing "Bar 20 rides Again" made me realize how his films were above average "B westerns. There was none of that "Roy and Gene" stuff. Cassidy was 40 years old and this was his third film as Hop- A-Long as he is shown in the final credits. The film has a comic start as an elderly woman arrives to the Bar 20 bossing the cowboys who try to avoid her orders without being indelicate. The bad guy is called Pardue and models himself after Napoleon, giving orders with a chess game on his desk. Hoppie acts like one of the rustlers and even shoots his pal Johnny Nelson to prove he is one of them . The great final scenes show all the cowboys of the Bar 20 riding together in a gigantic showdown with the rustlers. "Bar 20 Rides Again" is not a sequel. Hoppy made a film named "Bar 20" much later in 1943.

Rancher George Perdue is secretly running a band of rustlers under the moniker Nevada, incorporating his obsession with the life and military strategies of Napoleon Bonaparte, as well as chess, in his mad dream of becoming an emperor of the west. When he tries to rustle off the stock of his neighbor, Jim Arnold, the latter writes a letter to Hopalong Cassidy to come, along with Red Connors, to help stop the outlaws. Johnny Nelson also goes to the Arnold ranch, but only to see Arnold's daughter Margaret, but he doesn't realize that Margaret is sweet on Perdue and his civilized manner (brought on more by her school days in Boston). In order to join Nevada's gang and get a better chance to attack the outlaw, Hoppy takes on the disguise and manners of Tex Riley, a card shark. Nevada lets Hoppy/Tex join and gives him his first assignment of killing the man who is responsible for the rift in his relationship with Margaret, Johnny Nelson. Hoppy is forced to shoot Johnny, while he is trying to work with Red, Arnold, and Windy (Hayes in his first appearance as the character) to round up Nevada's gang, while not being discovered for whom he really is. Another great entry in the series, aided immensely by Worth's portrayal of the sinister, yet prim and proper Nevada. A great scene in the film is when he tells Hoppy (as Tex) he can use him, while fondling a chess pawn in his hand. Boyd also plays the Tex role to the hilt, with a foppishness soon to be seen many times in later films. A good climax ends another winning film in the series. Rating, based on B westerns, 8.