The Oregon Trail (1936, John Wayne, Ann Rutherford, Joseph W Girard) – Classic Movie Review 10,630

Director Scott Pembroke’s 1936 Republic Pictures black and white short (59 minutes) Western film The Oregon Trail stars the 29-year-old John Wayne as retired US Army Captain John Delmont, out to avenge his father’s killer, left to die by a renegade, in a movie with a plot similar to the one in Wayne’s first star movie, The Big Trail (1930).

Ann Rutherford, Joseph W Girard [Joe Girard], Yakima Canutt, Frank Rice, E H Calvert, Ben Hendricks Jr, Harry Harvey, Jack Rutherford, Marian Ferrell, Roland Ray, Gino Corrado, Edward LeSaint, Octavio Giraud and Fern Emmett, all have substantial if stereotype roles.

Unfortunately, it is a lost film with no known prints remaining.

However, in 2013, film collector Kent Sperring discovered 40 photographs taken during the making of the film.

Production started on 29 November 1935, at Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, California, and it was released on 18 January 1936.

Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation says half of all American films made before 1950 and more than 90 per cent of films made before 1929 are lost for ever. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1926 The Mountain Eagle is the British Film Institute’s most wanted lost film. London After Midnight, directed by Tod Browning in 1927, is another key lost film, along with the 1928 silent version of P C Wren’s story Beau Sabreur, starring Gary Cooper.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,630

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