An odd oater, with little hard riding and no fast shooting or flying fists. Instead combat takes place between two old airplanes, plus well-aimed lassoes. Hollywood cowboy Buck (O'Brien) shows his grit off-screen by helping ornery old rancher Violet Butler resist a shakedown by conniving city slicker Kramer (Middleton). Most of the storyline, however, is taken up with talk, maybe too much. But there is some good footage of the fabled Alabama Hills and scenic eastern Sierras. Also, some good bird's-eye footage of the maneuvering airplanes interspersed with process footage of the pilots against a backscreen. O'Brien's cowboy is more affable than tough, a rarity for matinée heroes, while Parker makes a comely blonde sweetie who'd make any guy stick around. Too bad the deliciously evil Middleton doesn't get more screen time, even though he's more subdued than usual. Anyway, it's definitely not a formula western, but has enough appealing novelties to satisfy an old matinée fan like me.A "6" on the Matinée Scale

Hollywood COWBOYThis was a pleasant little surprise, a clever and entertaining programmer western. It's a modern day western, a mix of roadsters and horse riding, familiar as the so called Autry Fantasy. In this case it seems that some actual logic entered into the existence of these two dimensions to exist side by side. The cattle ranchers who have to round up their cattle are saddle bound. Visitors from the outside world drive cars. But that's just one little witticism.The picture begins with a series of newspaper headlines to the effect that the city is cleaning up the gangsters who are running the protection racket. The head bad guy, played by Charles Middelton, none other than the immortal Ming the Merciless himself, decides to lay low for a while and take their racket to the countryside and inopportune the cattle ranchers. Their techniques are very up-to-date, using an airplane to buzz the herds and scatter them preventing their going to market. So there's that, somewhat typical western plot, somewhat updated.There's Maude Eberne playing the crusty old dame role to the hilt, resisting the evil entreaties of Charles Middleton. She has, wait for it, a beautiful daughter. Now throw in a joker in the form of George O'Brien, star of an enormous string of 30s cowboy pictures playing Jeffrey Carson, star of western movies. They are filming in the area and have just completed the last shot. A writer chum from New York (G. Gatsby Holmes (!)) running away from a divorce subpoena wants O'Brien to go camping for a few weeks and is in the habit of quoting Shakespeare. Yeah, this is a western where the Bard is liberally quoted. The henchman of the villain rough up the beautiful daughter and O'Brien saves the day while still in character. Known as a "meet cute". She doesn't realize that he's a movie star and for the rest of the film he has a wry smile on his face as people think he's just some sort of saddle bum named Buck. Satirizing class differences lends a farcical aspect to the story.O'Brien has a sidekick played by Dan Wolheim, for a programmer he was more than just good. He plays it as a rough precursor to Fred Mertz, grouchy. Buck and his two sidekicks have been taken on by Eburne as cowpunchers. Then we have the heat turned up on the farcical as the rancher's beautiful daughter is being courted by a New York scion to a Park Avenue fortune or whom she has no regard whatsoever. But he is total denial. Check out his name: Westbrook Courtney and he wears an ascot and drives the most beautiful Rolls Royce roadster. The comedy comes when he notices beautiful daughter and "Buck" getting together and he takes Buck aside to tell him, for his own good, to know his place because he's only going to be disappointed and hurt if he tries to romance a lady above his station. Of course George O'Brien finds the whole affaire amusing. As a movie star he outranks the Park Avenue scion. So Courtney is out in the RR roadster and come across a wanted poster with George O'Brien's picture on it. Of course its a prop left over from the movie he was filming. Courtney can't wait to tell everybody they have been harboring a criminal. Everybody, including the Cattleman's Association, gets hot under the collar that they've caught a dangerous criminal, so beautiful daughter goes to warn "Buck". More farce as she lets on that she knows his secret, which means to him that she's found out that he's a movie star and to her that he's a wanted criminal with a price on his head. Courtney calls the sheriff who arrives expecting to arrest a criminal. Now if this had been most any other programmer western, O'Brien would have spent the last twenty minutes of the film under suspicion as the bad guy in disguise, put in jail and breaking jail to capture the real bad guy and prove himself innocent. Here the sheriff walks in on this proto lynch mob and has a good laugh because he knows that he's the actor from the recently departed film company and the wanted poster is just a prop. In these pictures the Sheriff is usually a boob willing to believe the first superficial story placed before him.Of course it seems as though O'Brien doesn't take anything seriously because he's the only one aware that he's in a movie and can rise above it. He finally speaks up and asks if anyone's noticed that all of their cattle troubles began when Middleton, remember, he's the villain, arrived in town and began selling protection? How many westerns, how many movies in general, is it so obvious that all of their troubles are easily identified as being a villain's doing, yet they always focus on some innocent, usually the hero, because really without it there's maybe 20 minutes of story? And the crime is usually the murder of the heroine's father which she reacts to with mere petulance and anger. Hey, its just a programmer western! Significantly they were referred to as "juveniles in the day.Then it really begins to get good. O'Brien has a plan. He calls a movie stunt friend to fly out and when they commence their cattle round up the bad guys bring out their beat up biplane only to be trumped by this beautiful all silver Ryan ST monoplane. They force the biplane down and he tells them where the bad guys hide out is. They bomb it sending them scurrying and they are rounded up by the cattlemen and O'Brien and the beautiful daughter kiss and all's right with the world.

I saw this picture under the title "Wings Over Wyoming", opening with a nod to the Franklin Roosevelt administration as newspaper headlines demand that 'Rackets Must Go'! With the heat on, mobster Doc Kramer (Charles Middleton) moves his enterprise out West, forming a racket called the Cattlemens Protective Association. If you're a Western fan, you've probably run across that name dozens of times in dozens of Westerns, although in 1937 it probably wasn't as generic as modern day fans know it today.So as common as the theme is, the picture gives it a bit of a twist with the identity of the principal player. George O'Brien portrays a 'picture actor' who's just wrapped up filming a movie, and is persuaded by film writer G. Gatsby Holmes (Joe Caits) to take some time off to go camping and fishing. Holmes' real motivation is to dodge a high profile divorce case brought by his wife, and it doesn't take much to talk Jeff Carson (O'Brien) into taking some time off.Once that's all established, it's a fairly routine good guys/bad guys story, with O'Brien's character falling for pretty Joyce Butler (Cecilia Parker), daughter of shrewd cattle rancher Violet Butler (Maude Eburn). Old Vi isn't falling for the protection racket business, even if Kramer's going rate is a penny a pound. I don't know, that sounded pretty reasonable to me, except for the fact that it was a shakedown with no value offered in return. It might have been worth it though just to have the guy get lost.The finale was a fairly inventive affair, as one of Kramer's henchmen who was about to stampede the Butler herd one more time using an old fashioned biplane became engaged in sort of a duel with a single wing aircraft enlisted by the cattlemen. It looked cool, but I didn't really see the point of it all, because there was no way they could have made contact with each other without both planes crashing. The way the film writers got around that was for the villain to run out of gas, thereby being forced to land. Meanwhile, the sheriff's posse on the ground ran down the rest of the baddies and hogtied them into submission. The best part about that was seeing the sixty two year old Butler lady lasso one of the villains, as Carson demonstrated the old 'ride off into the sunset' with the younger Miss Joyce.

This is not a great movie but it is a hoot. I mean where else can you see gangsters coming from the big city using aircraft to bomb their prey and disrupt a cattle drive. The accuracy of those ex-World War I pilots was uncanny and the secret ability of a hand grenade to blow up a dam should be exploited for modern day ordnance specialists who can only dream of such power in a small package. And all these gangsters wanted was a penny a pound to "protect" cattle from threat of non-delivery – very reasonable I would think.Silent film star George O'Brien is effective as the hero and enjoyable to watch in his role. His biography is most interesting and worthy of your time. Charles Middleton is excellent as the heavy but I still prefer him as Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials. Maude Eburne turns in another great character actor performance.The film quality of the version "Wings Over Wyoming" that I just saw on TCM was a bit grainy but the joy at watching such a unique B movie more than compensated. Some of the aviation sequences were likely lifted from other filming but what the heck, who cares. Better than most B Westerns and worth watching because it is so different.