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3.5/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 3.5/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Rocky Rhodes remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you have an hour to spare and love dusty, old-school Westerns where the heroes wear impossibly clean white hats, then Rocky Rhodes is absolutely worth your time tonight. But if you cannot stand crackly 1930s audio or plots that resolve themselves because the bad guys are incredibly dumb, you should probably skip this one. 🤠
It is a Buck Jones vehicle, which means you get exactly what you pay for. Buck has this amazing, goofy energy where he looks like he is about to laugh even during a fistfight.
The story kicks off with Rocky coming back home only to find his dad is dead. To make matters worse, his best friend Joe is taking the blame for it.
Enter Murtch, played by Stanley Fields with a face that just screams "I steal candy from babies." Murtch has this brilliant plan to let Joe escape from jail just so he can shoot him in the back. It is so unnecessarily complicated, I love it. 😅
Naturally, Rocky starts poking around, so Murtch decides to frame him too. Getting framed for murder in these old B-movies is like getting a parking ticket; nobody seems particularly stressed about it.
Rocky just shrugs it off and goes on the run with his horse, Silver. Honestly, Silver might be the best actor in the whole film. The way that horse looks at the camera is pure gold.
There is a scene where Rocky is hiding out in the hills that goes on for a bit too long. You can tell they were just trying to stretch the runtime to hit that 60-minute mark.
But the action scenes are surprisingly snappy. Buck Jones did a lot of his own stunts, and you can really tell when he throws himself off a cabin roof.
It is not quite as chaotic as some other stuff from the era, like the goofy antics in Blow Me Down!, but it holds its own. The pacing is weirdly fast except when it suddenly stops for a song or a long ride through the sagebrush.
One thing that drove me crazy was the sound design. Whenever someone fires a gun, it sounds like a wet paper bag popping. 💥
And the extras in the saloon scenes look like they were pulled off the street and told to "look busy." Half of them are just staring blankly into space while Rocky is literally tearing the place apart.
The climax is a big, messy shootout that ends so fast you might miss it if you blink. Rocky basically solves the whole mystery by just being louder and punching harder than everyone else.
It is a comforting, silly piece of history. It does not try to be art, and that is why it works.
If you want a cozy Sunday afternoon watch with some popcorn, give it a spin. Just do not expect any deep life lessons from a guy named Rocky Rhodes. 🐎
IMDb —
1934
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