Picturing Justice, the On-Line Journal of Law and Popular Culture



Francis M. Nevins
Professor of Law
Saint Louis University School of Law

 

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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."


Feature article

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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