The Laramie Kid

"The Laramie Kid" (1935) is a paper-thin "B" oater with Tom Tyler, Alberta Vaughn, Murdock MacQuarrie, Al Ferguson, George Chesebro, 'Snub' Pollard, Steve Clark, and many others who rather standardly were in these Westerns. The saving grace of this one is the fact that Alberta Vaughn can act! Many leading ladies in the "B" outing oaters could barely speak a line and sound genuine. Vaughn is easily the equal, perhaps the better, of Tyler here. Her father is played by Murdock MacQuarrie, an early leading man and star in silent short subjects, but who definitely should have stayed in the silents as he acts his part as if he's playing in front of an audience on a stage rather than in sagebrush country with lots of air around him. He'd been doing Westerns since 1913, but his sound pictures ended with him generally playing judges or station masters and going uncredited. The other actors range from decent heavies to those who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. Tyler has a couple of decent fight scenes, but he wasn't nearly as good as, say, Bob Steele or John Wayne (who often was seconded by Yakima Canutt). Overall, the plot about the bank being robbed and then the train by the same gang, led, of course, by the bank manager, is so old and so common that I didn't care about the plot, just about Alberta Vaughn. She has a lovely presence and a lot of charisma. Of course, too, she's the same Alberta Vaughn who starred in dozens of silent comedy shorts and ended in dozens of "B" oaters, including a couple of John Wayne's. Tyler himself acquits himself in fine fettle, but the picture isn't any great shakes. By the way, isn't Laramie in Wyoming? That's 825 miles from Texas where the action takes place. There's never a single reference to Laramie, or a kid from Laramie, or if Tyler's from Laramie, or any other thing that references Laramie in the film. Where'd the title come from?