Texas (1941)

Glenn Ford and William Holden play two drifters named Tod and Danny heading south to Texas after the civil war. There they get involved with romancing a girl named "Mike" (Claire Trevor), and become interested in the shipment of cows to a railhead in Abilene, with Tod taking a more honest approach to the procurement of cows than Danny. This—and their love triangle—sets them at odds with each other. There's some interesting diversions involving the railroad boss and a local dentist(?) who are involved in organising the cattle rustling. (Wikipedia suggests that Edgar Buchanan, who plays the dentist, had retired from dentistry a couple of years before the film was made.)

Texas feels pretty inconsequential, but is enjoyable all the way through. The first half of it is taken up by Tod and Danny's escapades on the way down to Texas, with the plot-proper not really starting until 45 minutes into a ~90 minute film. To give it credit, all the escapades do feed in to the main plot and none of it drags, but there's still a good chunk to get through before it feels like anything is happening.

Spoilers ahead One of the more unsatisfying aspects of the plot is the resolution to the love triangle. Mike and Danny as obviously in love (and it's fairly clear that Danny isn't bad, just opportunistic), but clearly standards at the time weren't going to allow the nominal villain to get the girl. Therefore Danny has to have a convenient death so that the girl can end up with the hero, even if it doesn't quite fit. This "solution" reminded me of the ending to Union Pacific (made around the same time), and doesn't entirely seem satisfactory in either film. That said, it's a small complaint, and apart from that nothing about the film comes across as especially dated. end of spoilers

Given the age of the film, the UK DVD (from Universal) looks really quite good, and pretty similar to the US DVD. Hardy's Encyclopaedia of Westerns suggests that the film was originally sepia, not black and white, however. There's nothing in the way of extras, but I've never been hugely bothered by them. Note of warning: the DVD didn't want to play on my computer which made taking screenshots a bit of a faff. It's worth bearing in mind that many Sony are pretty scummy: they break their DVDs so that they don't play on all players for copy protection reasons.

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