The Range Feud (1931)
When a rival rancher is gunned down, suspicion falls hard on Clint Turner because of his family's long-running feud with the dead man, and Sheriff Buck Gordon has to sort out the truth before the wrong man hangs for it.
Pairing established star Buck Jones with a 24-year-old John Wayne still years from headlining his own pictures, The Range Feud was, per Wayne biographer Ronald L. Davis, the first of the “cheap, assembly-line pictures” that filled out his early career at Columbia.
Background
Directed by D. Ross Lederman for Columbia Pictures and produced by Irving Briskin, The Range Feud was released December 2, 1931, pairing the studio’s established cowboy star Buck Jones with 24-year-old John Wayne in a supporting role. Jones plays Sheriff Buck Gordon, called in after a rival rancher is shot dead; suspicion immediately falls on Clint Turner (Wayne), whose family had feuded with the murdered man for years, and whose romance with the dead man’s daughter, Judy Walton (Susan Fleming), complicates the investigation. Running 64 minutes, the film is a B-western built around a wrongful-accusation plot rather than Jones’s usual action set pieces.
What to watch for
The film’s chief interest today is seeing Wayne, still years from stardom, play a man who has to be cleared rather than the one doing the clearing, with Jones occupying the authoritative lawman role Wayne would later make his own trademark. The central mystery follows a simple logic: because Clint’s family history makes him the obvious suspect, Sheriff Gordon has to work past easy assumptions to find the real killer before the circumstantial case against Turner gets him hanged. Columbia reused the same premise in 1934 for a fifteen-chapter Buck Jones serial, The Red Rider, made without Wayne.
