ianlouisiana Review of Cattle Empire

Cattle Empire (1958)

A well made,thoughtful,low budget western.Mr McCrea splendid.

[7/10 · 14 December 2009]

Mr Joel McCrea appeared in two of cinema's finest works at opposite ends of his career,"Sullivan's Travels" near the start and "Ride the high country" near the finish over 20 years later.In between,many of his roles were like that of John Cord in "Cattle Empire",a tarnished hero with a past.A trail boss wrongly convicted of allowing his men to wreck a town in a drunken orgy,Cord returns to Hamiltonville after being released from prison and is promptly arrested and dragged through the streets by horses ridden by irate townsfolk,only to be rescued by a former friend who was blinded in the incident that put Cord behind bars. Hired to take 5,000 head of cattle across unforgiving country to save the town from bankruptcy,Cord also agrees to take another herd in opposition to the original one,thus virtually guaranteeing to ruin Hamiltonville and gain his revenge. Directed by Charles M.Warren,also an experienced writer and producer, "Cattle Empire" is a bit of a journeyman's movie but is enlivened by Mr McCrea deciding to play the part of Cord as if he were John Wayne. As if that wasn't enough to peak our interest there are two brothers called George Washington Jeffery and Thomas Jefferson Jeffrey who run the chuckwagon and shave each other's beards,a pretty gal who dumped Cord when he went to prison and married the blinded man,and a villain racked with guilt who knows the truth about what happened in Hamiltonville five years earlier. The villain rides along at night singing "Streets of Laredo" in a shaky tenor as a tribute to an earlier Warren movie of that name that earned him a W.G.A. nomination in 1950. Ambitious neither in reach nor grasp,"Cattle Empire" is nevertheless a good example of the sadly long - defunct genre of the low - budget but thoughtful and well made western.And Mr McCrea is splendid in it.