AllMovie

Bottom-of-the-barrel Western filmmaking on all fronts -- save perhaps hero Tom Tyler's usual competent performance and a restrained sidekick turn by Al St. John -- Pinto Rustlers was directed by Reliable producer Harry S. Webb under the pseudonym of Henri Samuels. Tyler plays Tom Evans, a young cowboy seeking to avenge the murder of his father by a notorious gang of rustlers. Badgering police inspector William Gould into deputizing him, Evans goes undercover as Tom Dawson, a wanted outlaw, and is quickly invited to join the rustlers. The gang is headed by Nick Furnicky (George Walsh), a bandit sporting an indeterminate accent, but the film's real villain is Bud Walton (Earl Dwire), the crooked head of the local cattlemen's association, who has his brother (Murdock MacQuarrie) kidnapped in an attempt to prevent the disclosure of his own dirty deeds. Badly directed, atrociously acted by a cast of veterans that should have known better, and featuring some of the weakest fight scenes in B-Western history, Pinto Rustlers only comes to life at the very end when the gang leader quite literally has the rug pulled from under him. Sadly, this meandering Western marked a rather less than glorious ending to the career of George Walsh, the brother of director Raoul Walsh and a major Fox star in the 1920s. Walsh, who had always traded on physique rather than acting capabilities, had become quite heavy by 1936 and could only find employment in Gower Gulch. Following Pinto Rustlers and Rio Grande Romance (which, despite the title, was a crook melodrama), even those offers dried up.