The Wyoming Whirlwind: Dust, Horses, and Not Much Else

Is it worth your time?

If you have a soft spot for grainy, black-and-white westerns where everyone wears ten-gallon hats and rides horses like they're late for dinner, sure. It’s a breezy watch. If you’re looking for character development or a plot that makes sense after the second act, you’re going to hate this.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Wyoming Whirlwind (1932) through its definitive frames.

Pete Morrison is doing his best, but the whole movie feels like it was put together on a lunch break. It's not trying to be Exit Smiling or anything high-brow. It just wants to get from point A to point B without anyone falling off their horse.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Wyoming Whirlwind (1932) through its definitive frames.

The Wolf and his antics

The bandit, "The Wolf," shows up and steals the payroll. It’s the kind of heist that would take five minutes in real life, but here it takes up half the movie. I spent a solid ten minutes wondering why the ranch hands didn't just walk the other way. The pacing is weirdly stop-and-start. One minute they're galloping across the plains, the next they're standing in a room talking about nothing in particular. It’s disjointed.

• Raven the Horse gets more screen time than some of the actual human actors.
• The dialogue is mostly just people shouting directions at each other.
• There is a scene in a canyon where the echo sounds like it was recorded in a tin can.

There's this moment near the middle where a character just stares at a hat on the ground for way too long. I don't know if the actor forgot his lines or if the director just liked the composition, but it felt like a lifetime. It made me miss the tighter editing you see in something like Forbidden Trail.

Don't expect much. The film is pretty thin, and it knows it. It doesn't pretend to be an epic. It's just a bunch of guys in dusters causing trouble. Sometimes that's enough for a rainy afternoon. Just don't look for the logic, because it clearly didn't show up on set that day. 🐎