Guns of the Pecos on AllMovie

Warner Bros.' resident singing cowboy, the amiable Dick Foran, warbles "The Prairie Is My Home" and "When the Cowboy Takes a Wife" (by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl) in between battling a corrupt judge in this pleasant B-Western produced by the studio's busy Bryan Foy unit. Foran is Steve Ainslee, a Texas Ranger who goes undercover as a cowboy in order to solve the killing of rancher Major Burton (Gordon Hart). Watching a gang of rustlers re-brand Burton's horses, Ainslee discovers that their leader, Hank (Henry Otho), is working for Judge Blake (Robert Middlemass), a corrupt jurist whose courtroom is the local saloon. Attempting to arrest the judge, Ainslee is accused of being a rustler himself and Burton's daughter, Alice (Anne Nagel) believes that he killed her father. But Ainslee and his bucolic sidekick, Jeff Carter (Eddie Acuff), obtain proof of the judge's guilt and are able to make an arrest following a climactic and quite exciting shootout. Although nothing out of the ordinary, Guns of the Pecos is never dull and contains several pleasant performances, including those of Acuff, the brother of country singer Roy Acuff, and Fay Holden, as the heroine's lovesick aunt. The latter was billed under her stage-name, "Gaby Fay," in this film. The director of this Western, Noel Smith, had begun his career helming Jimmy Aubrey comedies in the late 1910s. Not one of filmdom's most exciting personalities, Dick Foran, a baritone, looked good enough on a horse and was actually more convincing than some of his colleagues in clinches with the heroine.