AllMovie

Universal's "Million Dollar Serial" Riders of Death Valley may well have cost far less but it did come with perhaps the best cast ever assembled for a chapterplay. Dick Foran may not be everyone's idea of a cowboy or serial hero but sidekick Buck Jones most certainly fits the bill and such stalwart second bananas as Leo Carrillo, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and Noah Beery, Jr. all add color to the proceedings. Jeanne Kelly, who came to prominence at RKO during World War II as Jean Brooks, is more intriguing than the standard issue serial heroine and Charles Bickford is his usual dependable self, an acting capacity seldom seen in such down-market surroundings. Add to that a rousing opening montage that includes On the debit side, Riders of Death Valley utilizes quite a bit of ill-matching stock footage and the canned background score, culled from the Universal stock library, seems overly intrusive at times. Worst of all, the cliffhanger solutions are not so much surprising escapes but a matter of the characters' total invincibility. In chapter two, to name but one example, Dick Foran, or a dummy representing the star, is visibly trampled down by a herd of wild horses. Yet when the dust clears, Foran emerges without a single scratch. Such "cheating" obviously lessen whatever impact cliffhangers may have had.