VCI Entertainment Announces The DVD Release Of Buck Jones' 15-Chapter Serial The Roarin West On May 28

VCI Entertainment revealed this past week that a year-long classic serial promotion will be kicked off on May 28 with the 2K film restoration (from the original 35mm film elements) of director Ray Taylor’s 1935 Universal Pictures serial, The Roaring West, starring Western screen legend Buck Jones.

A real cowboy, Buck Jones (aka: Charles Frederick Gebhart), broke into motion pictures as a stuntman during the silent era and eventually became a star in his own right.  At the beginning of the Great Depression his fledgling film production company failed and a subsequent “wild west show” failed as well … he went from working cowboy to film star and back to the bottom.  

But the arrival of the sound era, his husky voice and his skill-set as a Western actor saw his fortunes once again take a turn for the better, by the mid-1930s, when The Roaring West hit theatres in the summer of 1935, he was once again a star.   

Ironically, the cycle of highs and lows in Buck Jones’ life would repeat one more time.   Now an established Hollywood film star, he was in Boston during the Thanksgiving period of 1942.   Buck Jones was among the many revealers at the famed Cocoanut Grove nightspot in Bay Village on Saturday night, November 28, when shortly after ten in the evening a fire broke out.   

Reports from the period say that he successfully escaped the inferno, returned to help others, but was severely burned and died within days.   The fire itself claimed an astonishing 492 victims.

As to The Roaring West, before the arrival of television in the early 1950s, the theatrical serial was a huge draw and served as the forerunner; the roadmap to episodic TV programming.   Cliffhanger!!   Back again and again to see how the hero would overcome impossible odds for 12, 13 or 15 chapters.   

In the case of The Roaring West, Universal Pictures developed it as a 15-chapter Western adventure featuring Buck Jones as Montana Larkin, a cowboy with a map showing where valuable ore deposits — perhaps even gold — are to found.  So, along with his sidekick, Jinglebob Morgan (Frank McGlynn, Sr. — Little Miss Marker, Boom Town, The Plainsman, etc.), they set out to stake their claim, but things don’t go as planned.

Filmed on location in Lone Pine, The Roaring West finds Montana pitted against the shady Gil Gillespie (Walter Miller — The Last of the Mohicans, The Call of the Savage, Gordon of Ghost City, etc.), who surreptitiously files a claim on the proposed claim site, only to find out that Montana’s map was not correct.  

When the ruse is revealed it is all out war.   
 

Oh yes, Montana even finds time to save the rancher’s daughter, Mary (Muriel Evans — Manhattan Melodrama, The House of Secrets, Headline Crasher), from certain death and then strikes up a romance … naturally, Gillespie wants her for himself.   

Riches are at stake, shootouts, a beautiful woman stalked by the villain and double-dealings galore wrapped up in 14 suspense-filled cliffhangers, with a final episode to bring the action to a fitting conclusion!