Actuakers
One of my all time favorites.
Console
best movie i've ever seen.
Deanna
There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.
JohnHowardReid
A United Artists picture, released on 31 January 1947, directed by George Archainbaud.CAST: William Boyd, Andy Clyde, Rand Brooks, Jane Randolph, Robert Emmett Keane, Stephen Barclay, Harry Cording, Earle Hodgins, Forbes Murray, William Davis, Benny Corbett, Fred (Snowflake) Toones, Bob Bentley, Glen B. Gallagher. Running time: 63 minutes. (Available on an excellent Platinum Disc DVD). Comment: Not a bad entry in the series which pleasingly focuses attention on Boyd himself rather than the garrulous Clyde or the colorless Brooks. It's also a pleasure to see Jane Randolph as the reluctant innkeeper and Robert Emmett Keane as the villainous spider man. The plot doesn't make much sense, but for all that, it's mildly intriguing and director Archainbaud has handled it with a bit of welcome atmosphere and even - dare we say it? - style!
classicsoncall
Well I've never seen William Boyd looking this dapper before. Going undercover as it were, Hopalong Cassidy dons a snazzy waistcoat and decorative cravat along with an assumed name, in the service of helping out an old Army buddy. Colonel Jed Landy's (Forbes Murray) son is on the run and facing court martial charges after striking an officer, and might turn into an outright desperado after hooking up with a gang in the town of Twin Buttes.There's an interesting Professor Dixon (Robert Emmett Keane) character here who's hobby of choice happens to be collecting poisonous spiders. It's a bit comical actually when we see samples from his collection because they all have this large, rubber-like phony quality to them and they don't move. When Hoppy shoots one off the headboard of a bed Lucky Jenkins (Rand Brooks) is resting on, I wondered what might have happened if he missed. Could have been curtains for Lucky. The good professor himself wasn't quite so lucky later on in the story when his minions got loose and did him in. Not a nice way to go.Anyway, the bad guys are about to rob a two hundred thousand dollar gold shipment by performing a switcheroo; they'll replace the gold bars with similar ones made of copper but covered with gold. Dressed as cavalry officers, the baddies will take the transfer of gold and replace it with the counterfeit stuff for it's final destination. If they had put this much effort into being good guys, they might have gone places.Well there's never any doubt that Hoppy would get this all sorted out by the finale. He even wins over the evil professor's daughter (Jane Randolph) who refused to rent him a room upon his arrival in Twin Buttes. She winds up convincing her fiancé Bruce (Steve Barclay), the colonel's son, that a life of crime just wouldn't work out in the end. Isn't that always the case?
bkoganbing
In Fool's Gold Hopalong Cassidy gets a request from a friend who's an army colonel to fetch the colonel's son Steve Barclay away from an outlaw band he's planning to join before he gets in real trouble. Barclay is a lieutenant in the army and he's going to be part of an intricate scheme in a gold robbery.Sad to say Fool's Gold has to go down as one of the lesser features in the long Hopalong Cassidy film series. In fact the series would shortly come to an end only to regain life on television in the early Fifties.The screenplay was strangely actionless and had they concentrated on the caper aspects of the plot it might have been better. It was in fact an interesting idea for a robbery and could have worked better with better writers.Even Andy Clyde's oafishness and yarn spinning was not as entertaining as normal Clyde's California character comes off as more stupid than amusing here.For devoted Hoppy fans only.
wrbtu
Hoppy's in black only for the first few minutes of this film, which, as readers of my other Hoppy film's reviews know, is a bad sign. This time, he plays a cattleman. There is very little action in this film. The only gunfight occurs in the last few minutes, & Hoppy isn't even involved in it, so he never actually fires his gun in this film! There isn't even a legitimate horse chase, although Hoppy & Topper do chase a buggy at one point! There's the standard latter day Hoppy-type mystery (in the sense of his being "undercover"), but there's no real mystery here either. Let's see, no mystery, no gunplay from Hoppy, no horse chase. What does that leave? Must be a lot of romance between Lucky & the female lead, right? Nope. She's involved with another character & hardly speaks with Lucky at all. Oh well, maybe it has some good funny parts supplied by California? Nope. One of the least funny of all the later Hoppy movies. I think what really happened here is that the cast & crew decided to take the week off, & just threw this product out there. Earle Hodgins is good in his very minor role (uncharacteristically, for him, playing a straight baddie instead of his usual charlatan snake oil salesman). The highlight of the film is actually watching Hoppy watch Hodgins spit on the ground several times while they're talking. And you know, if that's the highlight, this isn't a very good movie, even for the Hoppy fanatic that I am. I rate it 5/10, & would have rated it a point lower, but it never really got silly or stupid at any point. Miscellaneous comments: I thought I found a blooper when California referred to the baddies as "yellow dogs," a term which I had thought originated during WWII, but according to the "American Dictionary of Slang" (Harper Collins Publishers) this term was in use as early as 1881. In this film, a calendar on the wall shows June 1 as occurring on a Thursday. From 1881 to 1900, the only June firsts to occur on that day were in 1882, 1893, & 1899. Wasting my time trying to instill a little historical accuracy in a B western? Sure, but I take my Hoppy movies very seriously, it's all part of the fun!
