The Outlaw Deputy (1935) review: Tim McCoy stares down the bad guys

You should probably only watch The Outlaw Deputy if you have a soft spot for those dusty, lightning-fast 1930s Westerns where the good guys wear giant hats and the bad guys look like they haven't washed in a year. If you want deep characters or fancy camera tricks, you are going to absolutely hate this. 🤠

But if you just want to see a guy with incredibly intense eyes punch people in a saloon, it's a pretty fun hour.

Our main guy is Tim Mallory, played by Tim McCoy. Tim has this way of staring at the camera that makes you think he is trying to look through your soul, or maybe he just forgot his lines for a second.

He is an ex-outlaw looking for the guy who killed his buddy Chuck. He ends up stopping a robbery by one of his old pals, and the town is so impressed they just make him the deputy on the spot.

I love how easy it was to get a job in the old West. You just show up, do one good deed, and they hand you a tin star.

The whole town looks like it was built in about three days on a backlot. It has that same cheap, sandy look you find in Mystery Mountain, which came out around the same time and probably used the exact same horses.

Tim starts cleaning up the town, mostly by walking into places and looking very serious. But then an old gang member rolls in and exposes Tim's criminal past, so the sheriff immediately locks him up.

But right before they throw him in the cell, Tim notices this guy named Houger is wearing Chuck's pocket watch.

This is the funniest part of the movie. Why would you wear the stolen watch of the guy you murdered right in front of his best friend who is actively looking for you?

It is like Houger wanted to get caught. He might as well have worn a t-shirt that said "I killed Chuck."

The writer Johnston McCulley helped write this, which is wild because he created Zorro. You can definitely see some of that secret-identity flavor here, even if it's much rougher around the edges.

The fistfights are wonderfully bad. You can hear the thwack sound effect about half a second before the fist actually connects with anyone's chin.

And the extras in the background of the saloon scenes just stand there like cardboard cutouts. One guy in a plaid shirt doesn't move his head for like three minutes straight.

It is definitely not a masterpiece, but it does not pretend to be. It is just a quick, punchy Western that gets in and gets out in under sixty minutes.

If you like old-school B-movies where the plot moves like a runaway train, give it a look.