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Judge Gene Autry
by Francis M. Nevins
GOLDTOWN GHOST RIDERS (Columbia, 1952, directed by George
Archainbaud from a screenplay by Gerald Geraghty) was one of
the last features starring cowboy hero Gene Autry and the only
Western I've ever seen where the protagonist is a judge. Not
only is the story built around a legal gimmick but the hard-riding
straight-shooting hero gives a whole new meaning to judicial
activism. Circuit judge Autry happens to be present when Goldtown's
corrupt political boss (Carleton Young) is shot down on the street
by an ex-convict (Kirk Riley) recently released after serving
ten years for murder. Riley then claims that trying him for what
he just did would constitute double jeopardy, because Young is
the same man for whose murder he'd been convicted ten years before!
 This is a ploy today's law-trained
moviegoers are familiar with from DOUBLE JEOPARDY (1999),
in which the framed and imprisoned Ashley Judd got out and set
about tracking down her husband with the same intent as Kirk
Riley in GOLDTOWN and on the same nonsensical legal theory. I've
traced the gimmick as far back as the 1920s when English thriller
writer "Seamark" (Austin J. Small) used it in the short
story Query (collected in OUT OF THE DARK, Hodder
& Stoughton 1931).
When the story was reprinted in the US in the August 1948 issue
of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, it came to the attention
of a number of people in Hollywood who liked the legal gimmick
so much they appropriated it---without credit or payment to Austin
J. Small. The Query ploy served as the basis of Double
Jeopardy (1949), a 15-minute filmed episode of the TV anthology
series FIRESIDE THEATER, and a few years later was put
at the center of this Autry film. I'm sure it popped up on the
tube many more times before migrating to the big screen in the
Ashley Judd picture.
Most of GOLDTOWN GHOST RIDERS consists of a long long
flashback
describing how the characters got to where we saw them in the
first ten minutes. When asked to accept an appointment as circuit
judge, Autry first objects that he's a rancher with zero knowledge
of law, but agrees to serve after he's told that "law's
just common sense." By the
time the flashback is over we've learned that, after escaping
from Kirk
Riley's death trap, Carleton Young came back to Goldtown and
took it
over again, undisguised and unrecognized by Autry or anyone else
in the picture. Yeah, right. Finally we return to the present
as Riley in turn is shot down by Young's cronies, who themselves
are gunned down by the phantom riders of the title. This is hardly
a great movie or even a first-class shoot-em-up, but in any survey
of the cinematic frontier or the cinematic judiciary its corkscrew
plot, plus its juristic and supernatural overtones (both minimal)
and the easy-on-the-eyes desertscapes that were French-born director
Archainbaud's passion, entitle it to a moment in the (blazing)
sun.
Posted October 8, 2003
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