Monogram Monday: Northwest Territory

Corporal Rod Webb of the Mounties (Kirby Grant), assisted by his dog Chinook and storekeeper Anne DuMere (Gloria Saunders), investigates the murder of a prospector who had discovered oil. This is quite an enjoyable little film series, particularly when Chinook takes an active part. It’s a pity that, unless things have changed fairly recently, only …

Wednesday Pulp: Top-Notch Magazine, March 15, 1923

Street & Smith’s Top-Notch Magazine started as a magazine aimed at boys but soon changed to a general-interest adventure pulp, lasting from a start in 1910 until 1937. The March 15, 1923, issue is the first I’ve read, and it has the expected assortment of long and short fiction, including serial parts, filled out with …

Weekly Reader — February 12 – 18

I finished three books during this week, as well as one pulp magazine issue. Books Scarlet Riders: Pulp Fiction Tales of the Mounties, ed. by Don Hutchison — as an anthology, the usual mixed bag, with some stories straightforward adventure (e.g., “Red Snows,” by Harold F. Cruikshank, and “Doom Ice,” by Dan O’Rourke) and some …

Monogram Monday: The Wolf Hunters (1949)

Trapper Paul Lautrec (Edward Norris) is shot and framed for a string of fur robberies and killings, and it’s up to Mountie Rod Webb (Kirby Grant), aided by his faithful dog Chinook, to untangle the scheme. This is another entertaining programmer in the Monogram series starring Grant and Chinook.   Recommended. Otto finds this one pleasing …

Monogram Monday: Yukon Manhunt (1951)

Kirby Grant, best known as TV’s Sky King, starred as a Mountie in a series of 10 movies for Monogram Pictures that prominently featured Chinook, a dog who later played White Shadow in Disney’s Corky and White Shadow (and my dog’s favorite actor — the only one for which she pays attention to the screen). …

The Fighting Trooper (1934)

Stalwart Kermit Maynard has the lead role in this low-budget northern, as Trooper Burke, a Mountie in pursuit of a noted outlaw (LeRoy Mason) who apparently killed the first officer who tried to apprehend him. But more is going on than at first appears to be the case. Will the trooper get his man? Maynard …

Nomads of the North (First National, 1920)

Lon Chaney stars in this melodrama, based on a novel by James Oliver Curwood, set in northern Canada. He plays an earnest young man set up for prosecution for killing a man in a fight (he acted in self-defense) by the dishonest son of the local factor for the Hudson Bay Company; that son desires …