TEXAS rolled out Texas-sized brag with its ad campaign, yip-yapping at possible patrons that it was “ROARING…with Adventure! ROUSING…with Romance! RADIANT…with Spectacle!” That prods the he-bull more than a mite, but the 1941 western is a good deal of old-fashioned fun, well produced, cleverly written, smartly directed, performed with brio by a disarming brace of players. A gross of $2,400,000 ranked 99th in the year’s stellar array: it deserved better.

“Hey, this ain’t the kind of country a man comes to for his health.”

Rising lights William Holden, 23, and Glenn Ford, 25, play rambunctious young bucks who drift into the Lone Star State after the Civil War, unemployed and broke. A series of close calls and lucky breaks sees them going to work for ambitious cattlemen of dubious scruples. Chips are down, sides chosen. Both also spark with the same friendly gal, played by Claire Trevor.

“We’ve been hornswoggled!”

The guys have great natural camaraderie (they became lifelong friends) and Trevor is delightful. The tone is seriocomic under George Marshall’s direction (much like his earlier Destry Rides Again) and he stages set-pieces adroitly, including a great farcical boxing match Holden gets snookered into with Lyle Latell. A real plus is the sly scene-stealing from Edgar Buchanan, 38, as a pliers-happy dentist whose surface geniality is a front for a seedy manipulator. *

There’s plenty of amusing dialogue tossed around, trio scripted by Horace McCoy (Gentleman Jim, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?–the novel), Lewis Meltzer (The Man With The Golden Arm) and Michael Blankfort (Halls Of Montezuma).

93 minutes, with George Bancroft, Don Beddoe, Edmund MacDonald, Andrew Tombes, Addison Richards, Raymond Hatton, James Flavin, Carleton Young.

* Seven years later Ford and Holden teamed again (along with Buchanan) for another western, but the intervening war years (they both served) had darkened mood: The Man From Colorado is a downbeat exercise, lacking any of the humor and spirit that served to boost Texas.

Holden would do ten westerns, Trevor eleven, Ford twenty-five. Ford worked for Marshall six times. Buchanan served the genre in 43 features and later in scads of TV episodes.

Yank that bicuspid—Edgar Buchanan had been a dentist before he started acting. My father was one of his patients, up in Oregon, sometime during the 30s.