Western Heritage

Western Heritage (1948)

Runtime: 61 minutes

Directed by: Wallace Grissell

Starring: Tim Holt, Nan Leslie, Richard Martin, Walter Reed, Harry Woods

From: RKO

Here's a film so obscure that as of now, only me and someone else has ever admitted to seeing it on Letterboxd. I watched this in conjunction with a movie I'll post a review of a little before midnight; they have similar plots but unlike that, this is something which took the general idea and modified it for a typical B Western of the time. The Letterboxd review is below:

The reason why I watched this movie is not just that I don't check out nearly enough in the Western genre or that it relates to something else I saw last night-the review of which I'll post in the early evening-but that as of the time I post this, only one other person on the site has seen it, and I am the first to rate & review it.

This relates to the Gadsden Purchase; in 1853 the United States paid for what became the lower sections of Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico as not only was it disputed, but a company wanted to build a railroad through that land. The deal was that if anyone had a land grant from Mexico or Spain, it had to be honored. A fraudster attempts to acquire some land and as first he's successful but...

There are some twists & turns but otherwise this is a standard programmer, a B movie Western barely an hour long with gunfights, fistfights and the rest, the sort of genre entry where the villain is a villain in part because he has a mustache and wears a black vest. There isn't much to say about it besides that. It's not awful but it's not great either.

About the only interesting thing I can mention is that Holt's co-star was Richard Martin, who played an Irish-Mexican and he's a stereotypical Latin Lover with the stereotypical name of Chito Jose Gonzalez Bustamante Rafferty. He actually played that character in at least 29 different films. A time or two, I was wondering if Rafferty and Holt's character of Ross Daggert had a Brokeback Mountain sort of relationship, but maybe I was misreading it.