In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Kit Carson is sent to escort a gold wagon train, but Cyrus Kraft (posing under the respectability of a general store owner) has his masked Mystery Riders ambush the train. Carson is led away and returns to find everyone massacred and he framed by Reynolds (a Mystery Rider) as a traitor. One other person survived the massacre and that is Matt Fargo, who hid the gold, but is now a prisoner of Kraft and his men. Kit, Nakomas, (an Indian chief whose father was murdered by Kraft's agent), and Joan Fargo (the 11 year old daughter of the prisoner who is posing as a boy - don't ask) to find Joan's father and recover the gold to clear Kit's name and expose Kraft. Noah Beery, Sr. gives probably his best serial performance here playing Kraft sneaky, clever, cunning, and ruthless, but once you get past his performance, everyone else is pretty weak, which is an improvement over the repetitive storyline and ship-shod production values. The cliffhangers contain numerous cheats or are just plain weak and there are too many recap chapters that take way too long. I have no idea why Joan kept on pretending she was a boy throughout the entire serial, but it only distracted me from the boredom of this serial. Rating, based on serials, 3.

This is an excellent early sound serial, with an wonderful cast -- including the always hissable Noah Beery Sr. as the villain, the now too frequently forgotten Tully Marshall and, of course, Johnny Mack Brown in the lead. The crew is also topnotch, including Demille cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff and some great stuntwork by Yakima Canutt, including the famous falling-under-the-stagecoach gag. Oh, and the story is pretty good, too. And that's just the first chapter of this twelve-episode serial! To top it off, Sinister Cinema, which has just transferred this to DVD -- look them up online -- has managed to find an almost perfect print, and the beautiful camera-work is, as always, a revelation --all too often black and white movies are preserved in muddy prints, transferred to safety stock in an offhanded fashion. Not this one! If you enjoy western serials, hunt this one out. If you've never seen one, this is a fine introduction.