Wells Fargo (1937)

Though it does capture a little of the pioneering spirit of the folks travelling west, it’s just too episodic and becomes even a bit dull. It gets off to a lively enough start as we meet “Ramsay” (Joel McCrae) who is bidding for a contract to shift goods from the east coast past the terminus of the railway and out into the rapidly populating wilderness. It’s while he is trying to prove he can get live oysters to the table that he encounters the broken down carriage of “Justine” (Frances Dee) and her mother (Mary Nash) and so soon has a little extra romantic impetus as his career starts to expand just as quickly as his network of deliveries. Along the way he has to compete with the postal service, ambitious competitors and marauding Apache but little prepares him for the impact of the Civil War. By now he is managing the service as far as California, and it’s their goldmines that are funding the Yankee army. This news isn’t wasted on the Confederacy who decide that these shipments could be diverted, and this puts their travels in even more danger as well as causing consternation at home with a family who might just have Johnny-Reb sympathies. When the story focuses on the adventure elements, it works fine. McCrae holds it together well enough as the stagecoach gets chased, burned and robbed. Sadly, though, as civilisation reaches the Pacific coast it rather stupefies those action scenes and replaces them with something altogether more mediocre.