UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

classicsoncall I love these old Westerns, but I have to call 'em as I see 'em. This one requires a major suspension of disbelief with the character of the Phantom Rancher, a pretty good gimmick except that he and Ken Mitchell (Ken Maynard) rode the same horse and no one could figure that out. Maybe that's why by the time Columbia Pictures put Charles Starrett to work as The Durango Kid, they had it all worked out that Durango would switch off between a white one and a black one.But whoa, wait a minute! Did they really use a trip wire to make old Tarzan go down the way he did in that crazy spill he took early in the picture? Like many cowboy movie stars of the era like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Maynard owned the horse he rode in his pictures, so I can't imagine he would allow that just to make an exciting scene. Maybe I'm wrong about the trip wire, but watch the scene closely and both horse and rider take a mean tumble. Later on Maynard (or a stunt rider) do another gimmick where he drops off Tarzan saddle and all making a getaway from the bad guys. That one wasn't as dangerous but still takes some kind of effort to pull off.Story wise, what you have is the hero making the scene as a result of his uncle's will that puts him in charge of the Mitchell ranch. Only thing is, the uncle was hated in these here parts because he held the mortgages on the other ranchers and began foreclosing on them. He was in cahoots with the film's main villain Collins (Ted Adams), but was murdered on orders from Collins because he wasn't playing ball the way he should have been. Nephew Ken's plan is to smoke out the bad guys using the Phantom Rancher gimmick, dropping money off with the neighbor victims so they can buy back their mortgages from Mitchell. Like the man said, that roll of money was getting just about worn out.You can say what you want about aging cowboy star Maynard, well past his heyday as a top flight draw for this flick. The real show was put on here by Tarzan, who somersaults, leaps fences, rolls in the mud and limps on command to fool the baddies. If he had a better agent, he'd be as well known as Trigger and Champion.

dongwangfu Spoilers below:I assume that Ken Maynard's horse Tarzan has some Jedi mind control tricks, because no one ever recognizes the fact that the "Phantom Rider" and one of the main characters ride the same horse. At one point, Tarzan rolls in the mud, to become a horse of a different color, and feigns lameness. Then, the next scene, Tarzan appears without mud and not lame. Good thing that cowboys don't pay any attention to anything besides the color of horses!That is only one of a number of deeply implausible aspects of "The Phantom Rider". In its favor, the title character is likable and the plot a little different than the standard -- the writer plays a little with whitehat/blackhat conventions. While he doesn't break the cardinal rule of westerns of this era that it has to culminate in a fight on a rock outcropping, at least the lead doesn't ever break into song. His telepathic horse, though, is worth at least three stars.

kidboots Ken Maynard was heading towards the end of his career when he made this film in 1939 - come to think of it "Tarzan" was getting long in the tooth as well (he died in 1940). Seeing this is almost Maynard's last film and age and weight issues were catching up with him, I think it is wrong (like one of the reviews) to judge his popularity on his last few films. He had been a big cowboy star since the mid 1920s.Ken Mitchell rides into a hostile town. He has been sent a will from his uncle, begging him to come and help at the ranch and in the event of his death to take over. By the time Ken gets to town his uncle has been killed. His uncle, Jim Mitchell, was the most hated man in town, squeezing out the small ranchers and foreclosing on mortgages. Ken vows to help the ranchers and to try to fix things. He swears he will never be like his uncle. However, to find out if Collins is at the bottom of things, Ken decides to pretend to go in with Collins' mob - sabotaging the heroine's water supply, foreclosing on poor farmers with starving children. He then becomes the "phantom rancher" - anonymously giving money to the ranchers so they can pay their mortgages.Harry Harvey, who has almost 400 film credits in his resume, plays Gopher.Dave O'Brien (from "Reefer Madness" (1936) and the hapless guy from Pete Smith Specialities) plays the chief henchman, Luke.Dorothy Short (star of the cult exploitation films "Reefer Madness" and "Marihuana: Assassin of Youth" (1937) - I wonder if she smoked!!) plays the heroine Ann. Surprise, surprise - she was married to Dave O'Brien for quite a few years!!!I thought that it was an okay western.

Dave (dbfirelo2) I've seen about a half dozen of the low budget poverty row B westerns that Ken Maynard made in the 1930s, and I am consistently amazed at how poor an actor he was. How did he ever get to be a leading cowboy actor? They say that he could ride pretty well back in the silents, but he doesn't do anything particularly impressive in these later sound films. Still, maybe he got the leads because he was big and could ride.Phantom Rancher isn't as bad as some of the other Ken Maynard films I've seen, but it still isn't much. Some of the other characters refer to him a couple of times as a "young fella," where it appears to me that he's just as old as the other older actors.And if that's not silly enough, there's a rather significant script problem in this film. At one point, one of the characters makes a remark about how the phantom had prevented the poisoning of a well, something that hadn't happened yet. Just a couple of minutes later, we then see that particular scene. No, it wasn't a flashback. At first I thought perhaps that when Treeline Films was doing the DVD transfer, they might have reversed two of the reels. But in those days film reels contained approximately 11 minutes of film, and the whole reversal only took about 3 or 4 minutes tops. Everything else was in a logical order. So, it looks like that was a genuine continuity problem in the original film. Maybe that's one reason why Colony Pictures didn't last very long.