A Warner Archive release, Dick Foran Western Collection presents all 12 Foran series Westerns generously spread across four DVDs, entries running between 51 and 63 minutes apiece. The films are Moonlight on the Prairie (1935), Song of the Saddle, Treachery Rides the Range, Trailin' West, California Mail (all 1936), Guns of the Pecos, Land Beyond the Law, Blazing Sixes, The Cherokee Strip, Empty Holsters, The Devil's Saddle Legion, and Prairie Thunder (all 1937).

Rather foolishly, mentioned nowhere on the packaging or on the Archive's website is that, in addition to fine video transfers drawn from good film elements, the set includes trailers for each film plus a Technicolor Dick Foran short subject, bonus features one usually doesn't see on Archive titles.

Dick Foran (1910-1979) had a diverse background, studying geology at Princeton while taking theater courses and playing on the football team. Soon after he studied music in New York, at the Leibling Studio, before becoming a singer in several big bands. Warner Bros. signed the strapping, six-feet-two-inch redhead with fleshy features and breezy screen presence, casting him in a wide range of movies, including supporting parts in The Petrified Forest and The Black Legion before sending him out on the range.

The year after his Western series ended Foran moved over to Universal, sometimes in Westerns but also in pictures of all kinds. Probably like many classic film fans, I knew Foran more through his Universal movies (The Mummy's Hand, Abbott & Costello's Ride ‘Em Cowboy) and his later work as a prolific guest star on ‘50s and ‘60s TV shows than as a singing cowboy star in Bs.

Musically, Foran resembled Gene Autry not at all. Gene's voice was rooted in early hillbilly-blues while Foran's was closer to a classical-big band hybrid, singing the kinds of songs Dick Powell sang in Warner Bros. musicals than Gene Autry in his. Some have compared Foran's singing voice to the operatic Nelson Eddy, but Foran's is much less formal and more relaxed than Eddy's ever was.

Such films were generally the purview of B-picture specialists like Republic and Monogram, but that didn't stop Warner Bros. from attempting B-Westerns during the late-silent era and well into the 1930s. Ken Maynard and his white stallion, "Tarzan," starred in a successful and fairly epic (by B-Western standards) series of silent films. After John Wayne's starring debut, The Big Trail (1930), bombed at the box-office, Wayne was blamed in part and within three years he was starring in Warner's very low-budget B-Western series produced by Leon Schlesinger, movies built around the stock footage from those earlier Maynard Westerns.

The Maynard footage, projected at the wrong speed as silent and sound camera speeds were incompatible, turns up yet again in the Dick Foran Westerns, though less extensively than in Warner's John Waynes.

The budgets for Foran's Westerns were significantly higher than the earlier Wayne pictures; "The Old Corral" website (www.b-westerns.com) helpfully reports budgets of between $56,000-$99,000, twice or more the cost of the Wayne pictures. The first one, Moonlight on the Prarie, is notably odd for its cast of players who typically appeared in Warner's signature fare: gangster movies and backstage musicals. Foran's sidekick in this entry, for instance, is Polish-born George E. Stone, who specialized in playing dapper gangsters or wisecracking stage managers.

As the series progressed, however, the films relied more and more on established genre character actors like Glenn Strange, Charles Middleton, Wayne Morris, and others. In Song of the Saddle, the Sons of the Pioneers perform with Foran, including a young Leonard Slye, two years before he changed his name to Roy Rogers.

Foran's 12 Warner Bros. starring Westerns did respectable business, with the actor ranking sixth, fourth, and tenth on the Motion Picture Herald's ranking of B-Western stars, and the movies made decent profits throughout their run. But Autry, meanwhile, had become a Depression-era sensation and Warner's threw in the towel. Foran's movies have fairly typical B-Western plots, but are well made and enjoyable.

Video & Audio

Dick Foran Western Collection offers excellent transfers of the 12 features, three per single-sided disc. The English Dolby Digital mono is also clean and free from damage. No alternate audio options or subtitles, but the discs are region-free.

Extra Features

Supplements include trailers in excellent condition for all the films, as well as The Sunday Round-Up (1937), a three-strip Technicolor two-reeler with Foran playing an Old West parson trying to drum up business in a rowdy dance hall/saloon. In great condition, the short is especially noteworthy for fans of veteran character actor Glenn Strange (billed here as Glenn ‘Peewee' Strange). He's corralled into a knife-throwing act, with all manner of knives, axes, and even a couple of battleaxes, thrown within an inch of his life. Usually for such scenes in movies and TV shows, no blades are ever actually thrown, but through careful choreography spring out from behind the target area. In this case, however, there's no question that nearly all the knives and axes are really being lobbed Strange's way, and the look of terror on his face is priceless.

Parting Thoughts

Though not the high-water mark of B-Westerns or even singing cowboy films, Dick Foran Western Collection nonetheless consists of entertaining escapist fare, with good transfers and some nice extra features. Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His new documentary and latest audio commentary, for the British Film Institute's Blu-ray of Rashomon, will be released this September.