Trivia: Arguably the most popular -- and certainly the busiest -- movie leading man in Hollywood history, John Wayne entered the film business while working as a laborer on the Fox lot during summer vacations from U.S.C., which he attended on a football scholarship. He met and was befriended by John Ford, a young director who was beginning to make a name for himself in action films, comedies, and dramas. Wayne was cast in small roles in Ford's late-'20s films, occasionally under the name Duke Morrison. It was Ford who recommended Wayne to director Raoul Walsh for the male lead in the 1930 epic Western The Big Trail, and, although it was a failure at the box office, the movie showed Wayne's potential as a leading man. During the next nine years, be busied himself in a multitude of B-Westerns and serials -- most notably Shadow of the Eagle and The Three Mesquiteers series -- in between occasional bit parts in larger features such as Warner Bros.' Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck. But it was in action roles that Wayne excelled, exuding a warm and imposing manliness onscreen to which both men and women could respond. In 1939, Ford cast Wayne as the Ringo Kid in the adventure Stagecoach, a brilliant Western of modest scale but tremendous power (and incalculable importance to the genre), and the actor finally showed what he could do. Wayne nearly stole a picture filled with Oscar-caliber performances, and his career was made. He starred in most of Ford's subsequent major films, whether Westerns (Fort Apache [1948], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949], Rio Grande [1950], The Searchers [1956]); war pictures (They Were Expendable [1945]); or serious dramas (The Quiet Man [1952], in which Wayne also directed some of the action sequences). He also starred in numerous movies for other directors, including several extremely popular World War II thrillers (Flying Tigers [1942], Back to Bataan [1945], Fighting Seabees [1944], Sands of Iwo Jima [1949]); costume action films (Reap the Wild Wind [1942], Wake of the Red Witch [1949]); and Westerns (Red River [1948]). His box-office popularity rose steadily through the 1940s, and by the beginning of the 1950s he'd also begun producing movies through his company Wayne-Fellowes, later Batjac, in association with his sons Michael and Patrick (who also became an actor). Most of these films were extremely successful, and included such titles as Angel and the Badman (1947), Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954), and Hondo (1953). The 1958 Western Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks, proved so popular that it was remade by Hawks and Wayne twice, once as El Dorado and later as Rio Lobo. At the end of the 1950s, Wayne began taking on bigger films, most notably The Alamo (1960), which he produced and directed, as well as starred in. It was well received but had to be cut to sustain any box-office success (the film was restored to full length in 1992). During the early '60s, concerned over the growing liberal slant in American politics, Wayne emerged as a spokesman for conservative causes, especially support for America's role in Vietnam, which put him at odds with a new generation of journalists and film critics. Coupled with his advancing age, and a seeming tendency to overact, he became a target for liberals and leftists. However, his movies remained popular. McLintock!, which, despite well-articulated statements against racism and the mistreatment of Native Americans, and in support of environmentalism, seemed to confirm the left's worst fears, but also earned more than ten million dollars and made the list of top-grossing films of 1963-1964. Virtually all of his subsequent movies, including the pro-Vietnam War drama The Green Berets (1968), were very popular with audiences, but not with critics. Further controversy erupted with the release of The Cowboys, which outraged liberals with its seeming justification of violence as a solution to lawlessness, but it was successful enough to generate a short-lived television series. Amid all of the shouting and agonizing over his politics, Wayne won an Oscar for his role as marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, a part that he later reprised in a sequel. Wayne weathered the Vietnam War, but, by then, time had become his enemy. His action films saw him working alongside increasingly younger co-stars, and the decline in popularity of the Western ended up putting him into awkward contemporary action films like McQ (1974). Following his final film, The Shootist (1976) -- possibly his best Western since The Searchers -- the news that Wayne was stricken ill with cancer (which eventually took his life in 1979) wiped the slate clean, and his support for the Panama Canal Treaty at the end of the 1970s belatedly made him a hero for the left. Wayne finished his life honored by the film community, the U.S. Congress, and the American people as had no actor before or since. He remains among the most popular actors of his generation, as evidenced by the continual rereleases of his films on home video.

Trivia: Born in Ranelagh, Ireland, near Dublin, Maureen O'Hara was trained at the Abbey Theatre School and appeared on radio as a young girl before making her stage debut with the Abbey Players in the mid-'30s. She went to London in 1938, and made her first important screen appearance that same year in the Charles Laughton/Erich Pommer-produced drama Jamaica Inn, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She was brought to Hollywood with Laughton's help and co-starred with him in the celebrated costume drama The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which established O'Hara as a major new leading lady. Although she appeared in dramas such as How Green Was My Valley with Walter Pidgeon, The Fallen Sparrow opposite John Garfield, and This Land Is Mine with Laughton, it was in Hollywood's swashbucklers that O'Hara became most popular and familiar. Beginning with The Black Swan opposite Tyrone Power in 1942, she always seemed to be fighting (or romancing) pirates, especially once Technicolor became standard for such films. Her red hair photographed exceptionally well, and, with her extraordinary good looks, she exuded a robust sexuality that made her one of the most popular actresses of the late '40s and early '50s.O'Hara was also a good sport, willing to play scenes that demanded a lot of her physically, which directors and producers appreciated. The Spanish Main, Sinbad the Sailor, and Against All Flags (the latter starring Errol Flynn) were among her most popular action films of the '40s. During this period, the actress also starred as young Natalie Wood's beautiful, strong-willed mother in the classic holiday fantasy Miracle on 34th Street and as John Wayne's estranged wife in the John Ford cavalry drama Rio Grande. O'Hara became Wayne's most popular leading lady, most notably in Ford's The Quiet Man, but her career was interrupted during the late '50s when she sued the scandal magazine Confidential. It picked up again in 1960, when she did one of her occasional offbeat projects, the satire Our Man in Havana, based on a Graham Greene novel and starring Alec Guinness. O'Hara moved into more distinctly maternal roles during the '60s, playing the mother of Hayley Mills in Disney's popular The Parent Trap. She also starred with Wayne in the comedy Western McLintock!, and with James Stewart in the The Rare Breed, both directed by Andrew V. McLaglen. Following her last film with Wayne, Big Jake, and a 1973 television adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony, O'Hara went into retirement, although returned to the screen in 1991 to play John Candy's overbearing mother in the comedy Only the Lonely, and later appeared in a handful of TV movies. In 2014, she received an Honorary Academy Award, despite having never been nominated for one previously. O'Hara died the following year, at age 95.

Trivia: Despite his being selected as a candidate for "The Most Obnoxious Child Performer of All Time" in one of those vitriolic "Worst of Hollywood" books of the 1970s, Claude Jarman Jr. was in fact one of the better and more tolerable juvenile performers of the 1940s. Jarman was a Nashville elementary school student when, in 1945, he was chosen from hundreds of candidates to play backwoods youth Jody Baxter in the film version of Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's The Yearling. His sensitive, believable performance in this film won him a special 1946 Oscar for "most outstanding child performer of the year." His later film performances weren't quite as impressive, with the notable exception of his work in Intruder in the Dust (1949), which, like Yearling, was directed by Clarence Brown. Retiring from acting at the age of 22 in 1956, Jarman later headed his own movie company, Tel-West Films, and was executive producer of the "rockumentary" Fillmore (1972). Claude Jarman Jr. has also served as director of Cultural Affairs for the city of San Francisco, where his executive responsibilities ranged from the San Francisco Opera House to the city's annual film festival.

Trivia: Born in Oklahoma of Cherokee-Irish stock, Ben Johnson virtually grew up in the saddle. A champion rodeo rider in his teens, Johnson headed to Hollywood in 1940 to work as a horse wrangler on Howard Hughes' The Outlaw. He went on to double for Wild Bill Elliot and other western stars, then in 1947 was hired as Henry Fonda's riding double in director John Ford's Fort Apache (1948). Ford sensed star potential in the young, athletic, slow-speaking Johnson, casting him in the speaking role of Trooper Tyree in both She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950). In 1950, Ford co-starred Johnson with another of his protégés, Harry Carey Jr., in Wagonmaster (1950). Now regarded as a classic, Wagonmaster failed to register at the box office; perhaps as a result, full stardom would elude Johnson for over two decades. He returned periodically to the rodeo circuit, played film roles of widely varying sizes (his best during the 1950s was the pugnacious Chris in George Stevens' Shane [1953]), and continued to double for horse-shy stars. He also did plenty of television, including the recurring role of Sleeve on the 1966 western series The Monroes. A favorite of director Sam Peckinpah, Johnson was given considerable screen time in such Peckinpah gunfests as Major Dundee (1965) and The Wild Bunch (1969). It was Peter Bogdanovich, a western devotee from way back, who cast Johnson in his Oscar-winning role: the sturdy, integrity-driven movie house owner Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show (1971). When not overseeing his huge horse-breeding ranch in Sylmar, California, Ben Johnson has continued playing unreconstructed rugged individualists in such films as My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (1991) and Radio Flyer (1992), in TV series like Dream West (1986, wherein Johnson was cast as frontier trailblazer Jim Bridger), and made-for-TV films along the lines of the Bonanza revivals of the 1990s.

Trivia: The son of actors Harry Carey and Olive Golden, Harry Carey Jr. never answered to "Harry" or "Junior"; to his friends, family and film buffs, he was always "Dobe" Carey. Raised on his father's California ranch, the younger Carey spent his first six adult years in the Navy. While it is commonly assumed that he made his film debut under the direction of his dad's longtime friend John Ford, Carey in fact was first seen in a fleeting bit in 1946's Rolling Home, directed by William Berke. It wasn't until his third film, Three Godfathers (dedicated to the memory of his father) that Carey worked with Ford. Honoring his promise to Harry Sr. that he'd "look after" Dobe, Ford saw to it that the younger Carey was given a starring assignment (along with another of the director's proteges, Ben Johnson), in Wagonmaster (1950). Though he handled this assignment nicely, exuding an appealing earnest boyishness, Carey wasn't quite ready for stardom so far as the Hollywood "higher-ups" were concerned, so he settled for supporting roles, mostly in westerns. John Ford continued to use Carey whenever possible; in 1955's The Long Gray Line, the actor has a few brief scenes as West Point undergraduate Dwight D. Eisenhower. Carey was also featured on the "Spin and Marty" segments of Walt Disney's daily TVer The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-59). In later years, Carey's weather-beaten face was seen in choice character assignments in films ranging from The Whales of August (1987) to Back to the Future III (1990); he was also hired by such John Ford aficionados as Peter Bogdanovich, who cast Carey as an old wrangler named Dobie (what else?) in Nickelodeon (1976), and as an ageing bike-gang member named Red in Mask (1985). In 1994, Harry Carey Jr. published his autobiography, Company of Heroes. Carey died of natural causes at age 91 in late December 2012.

Trivia: A boy soldier during the Boer War, British actor Victor McLaglen later worked as a prizefighter (once losing to Jack Johnson in six rounds) and a vaudeville and circus performer. He served in World War I as a captain with the Irish Fusiliers and as provost marshal of Baghdad. In the early '20s he broke into British films. He soon moved to Hollywood, where he got lead and supporting roles; his basic screen persona was that of a large, brutish, but soft-hearted man of action. He appeared in many John Ford films, often as a military man. McLaglen made the transition to sound successfully, and for his work in Ford's The Informer (1935), he won the Best Actor Oscar. He remained a busy screen actor until the late '50s. Five of his brothers were also film actors: Arthur, Clifford, Cyril, Kenneth, and Leopold. He was the father of director Andrew V. McLaglen.

Trivia: He began performing in early childhood, going on to appear in tent shows, vaudeville, and stock throughout the Southwest. He formed Chill Wills and the Avalon Boys, a singing group in which he was the leader and bass vocalist, in the '30s. After appearing with the group in several Westerns, beginning with his screen debut, Bar 20 Rides Again (1935), he disbanded the group in 1938. For the next fifteen years he was busy onscreen as a character actor, but after 1953 his film work became less frequent. He provided the voice of Francis the Talking Mule in the "Francis" comedy series of films. In the '60s he starred in the TV series "Frontier Circus" and "The Rounders." For his work in The Alamo (1960) he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In 1975 he released a singing album--his first.

Trivia: Though descended from a highly respected family of Irish politicians and civil servants, actor J. Carroll Naish played every sort of nationality except Irish during his long career. Naish joined the Navy at age sixteen, and spent the next decade travelling all over the world, absorbing the languages, dialects and customs of several nations. Drifting from job to job while stranded in California, Naish began picking up extra work in Hollywood films. The acting bug took hold, and Naish made his stage debut in a 1926 touring company of The Shanghai Gesture. Within five years he was a well-established member of the theatrical community (the legendary actress Mrs. Leslie Carter was the godmother of Naish's daughter). Naish thrived during the early days of talking pictures thanks to his expertise in a limitless variety of foreign dialects. At various times he was seen as Chinese, Japanese, a Frenchman, a South Seas Islander, Portuguese, an Italian, a German, and a Native American (he played Sitting Bull in the 1954 film of the same name). Many of his assignments were villainous in nature (he was a gangster boss in virtually every Paramount "B" of the late 1930s), though his two Oscar nominations were for sympathetic roles: the tragic Italian POW in Sahara (1943) and the indigent Mexican father of a deceased war hero in A Medal For Benny (1954). Naish continued to flourish on radio and television, at one point playing both a priest and a rabbi on the same anthology series. He starred in both the radio and TV versions of the melting-pot sitcom "Life with Luigi," essayed the title role in 39 episodes of "The New Adventures of Charlie Chan" (1957), and played a comedy Indian on the 1960 sitcom "Guestward Ho." Illness forced him to retire in 1969, but J. Carroll Naish was cajoled back before the cameras by quickie producer Al Adamson for the 1970 ultracheapie Dracula vs. Frankenstein; even weighed down by bad false teeth, coke-bottle glasses and a wheelchair, Naish managed to act the rest of the cast right off the screen.

Trivia: Strappingly handsome leading man Grant Withers worked as an oil company salesman and newspaper reporter before he turned to acting in 1926. One of the more popular second echelon stars of the early '30s, Withers was unable to sustain his celebrity. By the end of the 1930s, Withers was pretty much limited to character roles and bits, with such notable exceptions as the recurring role of the brash Lt. Street in Monogram's Mr. Wong series. In 1930, Withers eloped with 17-year-old actress Loretta Young, but the marriage was later annulled. Some of Withers' later screen appearances were arranged through the auspices of his friends John Ford and John Wayne. Grant Withers committed suicide in 1959, leaving behind a note in which he apologized to all the people he'd let down during his Hollywood days.

Trivia: The younger brother of comic actor Nat Pendleton, Gaylord "Steve" Pendleton entered films in 1923. He was usually cast as collegiate types (undergrads, military school cadets), with a few weaklings and villains thrown in. Fans of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby will remember Pendleton as tuxedoed "other man" Gordon Wycott in Road to Singapore (1940). Active in films until 1960, Gaylord Pendleton was generally confined to minor roles, with a handful of leads and second leads in serials and comedy two-reelers.

Trivia: Born in Puerto Rico, actor Alberto Morin received his education in France. While in that country he worked briefly for Pathe Freres, a major film distribution firm, then studied theatre at the Escuela de Mimica in Mexico. Upon the advent of talking pictures, Morin was signed by Fox Pictures to make Spanish-language films for the South American market. He remained in Hollywood as a character actor, seldom getting much of a part but nearly always making an impression in his few seconds of screen time. Morin also worked steadily in radio and on such TV weeklies as Dobie Gillis and Mr. Roberts, sometimes billed as Albert Morin. During his five decades in Hollywood, Alberto Morin contributed uncredited performances in several of Tinseltown's most laudable achievements: he played Rene Picard in the Bazaar sequence in Gone With the Wind (1939), was a French military officer at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca (1942), and showed up as a boat skipper in Key Largo (1947).

Trivia: Chuck Roberson was a rancher before serving in World War II. Upon his discharge, he sought out film work as a stunt man. While under contract to Republic Pictures, Roberson doubled for John Wayne in Wake of the Red Witch (1948). Thereafter, he worked in virtually all of Wayne's films as stunt double, action coordinator, second-unit director and bit actor. His best speaking part was Sheriff Lordin in the Duke's McClintock (1963). Chuck Roberson's career served as the inspiration for the Lee Majors TV series The Fall Guy (1981-86).

Trivia: It was while attending Colorado College that American actor/singer Ken Curtis discovered his talent for writing music. After an artistic apprenticeship on the staff of the NBC radio network's music department in the early '30s, Curtis was hired as male vocalist for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, then went on to work for bandleader Shep Fields. Preferring country-western to swing, Curtis joined the Sons of the Pioneers singing group in the 1940s, and in this capacity appeared in several western films. Columbia Pictures felt that Curtis had star potential, and gave the singer his own series of westerns in 1945, but Ken seemed better suited to supporting roles. He worked a lot for director John Ford in the '40s and '50s, as both singer and actor, before earning starring status again on the 1961 TV adventure series Ripcord. That was the last we saw of the handsome, clean-shaven Ken Curtis; the Ken Curtis that most western fans are familiar with is the scraggly rustic deputy Festus Haggen on the long-running TV Western Gunsmoke. Ken was hired to replace Dennis Weaver (who'd played deputy Chester Good) in 1964, and remained with Gunsmoke until the series ended its 20-year run in 1975. After that, Ken Curtis retired to his spread in Fresno, California, stepping back into the spotlight on occasion for guest appearances at western-movie conventions.

Trivia: WWI-veteran Jack Pennick was working as a horse wrangler when, in 1926, he was hired as a technical advisor for the big-budget war drama What Price Glory? Turning to acting in 1927, Pennick made his screen bow in Bronco Twister. His hulking frame, craggy face, and snaggle-toothed bridgework made him instantly recognizable to film buffs for the next 35 years. Beginning with 1928's Four Sons and ending with 1962's How the West Was Won, Pennick was prominently featured in nearly three dozen John Ford films. He also served as Ford's assistant director on How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Fort Apache (1947), and as technical advisor on The Alamo (1960), directed by another longtime professional associate and boon companion, John Wayne. Though pushing 50, Jack Pennick interrupted his film career to serve in WWII, earning a Silver Star after being wounded in combat.

Trivia: A legendary stuntman/stunt coordinator, Cliff Lyons was as handsome as any of the stars he doubled and had indeed starred in his own series of silent Westerns under the name of Tex Lyons. Having begun his professional career performing with minor rodeos, Lyonsdrifted to Hollywood in the early '20s, where he found work as a stuntman in such films as Ben-Hur (1925) and Beau Geste (1927). In between these major releases, the newcomer did yeoman duty for Poverty Row entrepreneur Bud Barsky, who produced eight Westerns in Sequoia National Park starring, alternately, Lyons and Al Hoxie. Lyons would do a second series of eight equally low-budget jobs for producer Morris R. Schlank, filmed at Kernville, CA, and released 1928-1930. This time, he would alternate with another cowboy star, Cheyenne Bill. Commented Lyons: "We would go on location and make two pictures at a time -- one of Cheyenne Bill's and one of mine -- and also play the villain in each other's." Sound put an end to Lyons' starring career and he spent the next four decades or so as a riding double for the likes of Johnny Mack Brown, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and even Tom Mix (in the 1935 serial The Miracle Rider). In his later years he became closely associated with good friends John Wayne and John Ford, for whom he also did some second-unit directing. Although not as remembered today as Yakima Canutt, Lyons was a major force in the burgeoning stunt business and many of his innovations are still used by modern practitioners of the craft. He was married from 1938 to 1955 to B-Western heroine Beth Marion, with whom he had two sons.

Trivia: The son of actor John Wayne, Patrick Wayne made his earliest film appearances at 14, playing bits in The Quiet Man (1953) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), both directed by "the Duke"'s mentor John Ford. The younger Wayne's first real film role was in Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955); the following year, as Lieutenant Greenhill, Wayne acted opposite his father in The Searchers (1956). After attending Loyola University, he was given an opportunity to co-star in The Young Land, a film which neither starred his dad nor was directed by John Ford. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't ready for stardom just yet, so it was back to supporting parts in The Alamo (1960), Donovan's Reef (1963), McClintock (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1965), The Green Berets (1968) and Big Jake (1971). On his own, Patrick Wayne played leads in the special effects-laden adventures People That Time Forgot (1977) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), co-starred on the TV series The Rounders (1965) and Shirley (1979), and hosted the syndicated variety weekly The Monte Carlo Show (1980).

Trivia: Western film star Harry Carey was the Eastern-born son of a Bronx judge. Carey's love and understanding of horses and horsemanship was gleaned from watching the activities of New York's mounted policemen of the 1880s. He worked briefly as an actor in stock, then studied law until a bout of pneumonia forced him to quit the job that was paying for his education. He reactivated his theatrical career in 1904 by touring the provinces in Montana, a play he wrote himself. In 1911, Carey signed with the Bronx-based Biograph film company, playing villain roles for pioneer director D. W. Griffith. Though only in his mid-30s, Carey's face had already taken on its familiar creased, weatherbeaten look; it was an ideal face for westerns, as Carey discovered when he signed with Hollywood's Fox Studios. Under the guidance of fledgling director John Ford, Carey made 26 features and two-reelers in the role of hard-riding frontiersman Cheyenne Harry. Throughout the 1920s, Carey remained an audience favorite, supplementing his acting income with occasional scripting, producing and co-directing assignments. At the dawn of the talkie era, Carey had been around so long that he was considered an old-timer, and had resigned himself to playing supporting parts. His starring career was revitalized by the 1931 jungle epic Trader Horn, in which he appeared with his wife Olive Golden. While he still accepted secondary roles in "A" features (he earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as the Vice President in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1939]), Carey remained in demand during the 1930s as a leading player, notably in the autumnal 1936 western The Last Outlaw and the rugged 1932 serial Last of the Mohicans. In 1940, Carey made his belated Broadway debut in Heavenly Express, following this engagement with appearances in Ah, Wilderness (1944) and But Not Goodbye (1944). By the early 1940s, Carey's craggy face had taken on Mount Rushmore dimensions; his was the archetypal "American" countenance, a fact that director Alfred Hitchcock hoped to exploit. Hitchcock wanted to cast Carey against type as a Nazi ringleader in 1942's Saboteur, only to have these plans vetoed by Mrs. Carey, who insisted that her husband's fans would never accept such a radical deviation from his image. Though Carey and director John Ford never worked together in the 1930s and 1940s, Ford acknowledged his indebtedness to the veteran actor by frequently casting Harry Carey Jr. (born 1921), a personable performer in his own right, in important screen roles. When Carey Sr. died in 1948, Ford dedicated his film Three Godfathers to Harry's memory. A more personal tribute to Harry Carey Sr. was offered by his longtime friend John Wayne; in the very last shot of 1955's The Searchers, Wayne imitated a distinctive hand gesture that Harry Carey had virtually patented in his own screen work.

Trivia: A tough-looking, often mustachioed supporting player in B-Westerns of the 1940s, Lee Morgan could portray lawmen and thugs with equal conviction. Morgan's career lasted well into the television Western era where he added such programs as The Cisco Kid and The Gene Autry Show to his long list of credits. He should not be confused with the legendary African-American jazz musician of the same name.

Trivia: At the height of his screen career (1945-1946) American Western star Sunset Carson ranked an impressive eighth in a national B-Western popularity poll, beating out most of the old-timers who had been around since the silent days. Handsome and boasting quite a following among female audience members -- a rarity in the field of action adventures -- Carson, alas, was also perhaps the era's least impressive thespian and his time in the sun proved brief. Born Winifred Maurice Harrison, the future star claimed to have been named "All Around Champion Cowboy of South America" in 1942, but like the earlier Tom Mix, Carson was no stranger to exaggerations. He was billed plain Michael Harrison in his first two films, the all-star Stage Door Canteen (1943) -- in which he figured prominently in the wrap-around story -- and Janie (1944). Signed by genre specialist Republic Pictures, the youngster was given a new moniker, Sunset Carson, and co-starred with former Gene Autry protégé Smiley Burnette in four well-received low-budget Westerns. Despite his lack of acting prowess, Carson looked great on a horse and was awarded his own series, beginning with Sheriff of Cimarron (1945), directed by stunt expert Yakima Canutt. The Sunset Carson vehicles benefited from generally good production values, pretty leading ladies who could also act (Linda Stirling and Peggy Stewart), and such solid character villains as Roy Barcroft and Kenne Duncan. Carson's uneasiness with dialogue, however, did not bode well for longevity and he was summarily fired by company boss Herbert I. Yates after reportedly showing up at a studio function inebriated and with an underage girl on his arm. There would be a very low-budget series released by a company known as Yucca Productions ("Yucca is right!" as Western film historian Don Miller once put it), but Carson was basically a finished man in Hollywood after leaving Republic. He would turn up in a couple of barely released low-budget films -- including the wretched sci-fi opus Alien Outlaw (1985) which also featured his successor at Republic, Lash LaRue -- and was a frequent guest at B-Western fairs. But Carson is today perhaps best remembered as the host of Six Gun Heroes, a series of B-Western revivals broadcast in the early '80s by a South Carolina public television station. A great deal heavier and still having trouble delivering lines, Carson was nevertheless the real McCoy and the show remained successful for years.

Trivia: Bobby Clark was a comedy star three times over (four, if you count his stint as a clown with the Ringling Bros. circus) in vaudeville and in movies in partnership with Paul McCullough, and finally on Broadway. Clark was born in Springfield, OH, in 1888, and as a boy he befriended the slightly older McCullough. The two learned to play music together -- especially the bugle -- and later took a tumbling class at the YMCA and got their first engagement as an acrobatic act at a local Elks Club-sponsored circus. They began hiring themselves out as entertainers and worked in minstrel shows as tumblers, buglers, and general handymen. Clark also had aspirations to act that he never gave up -- and which would serve him well four decades later -- and made his debut in a legitimate play called Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks in 1902. He was soon partnered again with McCullough, working a minstrel show touring the southern and midwestern states. In 1906, they were hired by the Ringling Brothers as clowns, and in 1912 they made the leap to vaudeville. For the next ten years, their reputations as comics grew, and in 1922 they made their European debut in London in Chuckles of 1922. They worked in the Music Box Revue on Broadway that same year and, after two more Music Box Revues, the duo, billed as "Clark & McCullough," got star billing in The Ramblers on Broadway in 1926. The year 1928 brought them to the big screen in a series of excruciating funny short films for Fox, which were so successful that the studio signed them to make a series of full-sound featurettes, some running to three and four reels each. They followed these up in the early '30s with a series of shorts for RKO, which proved to be their most enduring legacy. One of the reasons for their success was that Clark & McCullough defied the expectations of audiences -- though they were billed as "Clark & McCullough," which would have led audiences to expect Clark to be the straightman and McCullough the comic, originally both of these guys were funny in complimentary ways. Clark was a ridiculous-looking dialogue comedian with painted-on glasses, spouting rapid-fire verbal shots, and was also given to spontaneous improvisation on the soundstage -- for that reason, the producers of their films liked to keep at least two cameras running at all times, to follow him in his moments of inspiration; the heavier, more physically imposing McCullough usually sported a racoon coat and a toothbrush mustache, and gradually moved into Clark's shadow as the '30s wore on. By the mid '30s, Clark was identified as the more creatively engaged half of the team, working with the director and the crew to lay out the stunts and comic bits, and doing the rehearsals while McCullough only showed up for the actual shooting. Overall, Clark & McCullough were like a two-man answer to the early Marx Brothers, although they never graduated to feature-length movies or got writers of the caliber of George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, et al. Eventually, Clark became the dominant member of the team while McCullough became the straight man feeding him lines and setting up his humor, but when asked, the older man professed not to mind the change in the dynamic between them. The duo never entirely abandoned the stage, had another success in 1935 with Thumb's Up, both on Broadway and on tour. The following year, they spent a season in 1936 with Earl Carroll's Vanities, doing an abbreviated version of the same show -- it was to be the last time they would work together. In March of 1936, following the end of the production, McCullough entered a sanitarium suffering from what was thought to be exhaustion. According to one source, later that month, Clark was driving McCullough home after leaving the sanitarium when his partner remarked that he needed a shave -- stopping at a barber shop, he went in and sat down in a barber chair, talking to the barber, and suddenly slashed his own throat with the razor; McCullough died two days later. Clark was so grief stricken over the sudden loss of his partner that he never went back to movie work or went forward with the duo comedy act again. In effect, he remade himself and was reborn -- keeping some of the same trademark attributes, including the painted-on glasses -- as a comic actor and star on the legitimate stage. Clark appeared in a string of stage successes over the next decade and a half, including Streets of Paris, Love for Sale, Star and Garter, Mexican Hayride, Sweethearts, and As the Girls Go. He also directed some of the scenes in the 1950 production of Peep Show, and made his last stage appearance in a touring company of Damn Yankees in 1958. He passed away of a heart attack in 1960 at the age of 71, after three successful runs at stardom in a career of nearly 60 years. Because his work after 1936 was confined almost entirely to the stage (apart from an appearance in The Goldwyn Follies and some television work in the early '50s), the visual record of his work is confined to the earlier phase of his career, the RKO shorts that he made with McCullough. The latter were revived in the late '60s and syndicated to television along with similar short subjects by Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol under the title "Reel Camp."