A common gambit in Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd) movies seems to be Hoppy getting shot out of his saddle during a bad guy ambush. I just saw it in the last Hoppy movie I watched, "Border Vigilantes", and it happens in this one too. Usually Hoppy fakes getting hit like he did here because he just gets up, brushes himself off and is good as new. Comes in handy for chasing down the bad guys but the gimmick gets worn out after a while.
This story involves a counterfeiting ring printing both American and Mexican fake money, so Hoppy rides into the town of Silver City with his pals Lucky (Rand Brooks) and California (Andy Clyde) to try and locate the hoodlum gang involved. An element in the story involves a comet trailing star that's sketched on a note sent to Cassidy by the informer, so one needs to keep an eye out for that connection.
There's an odd scene in the story where a henchman named Longhorn (Francis McDonald) trails Hoppy and his guys out of town preparing for yet another ambush, and catches the trio sleeping on the trail. As the outlaws stampede a nearby cattle drive into the camp, somehow Hoppy, Lucky and California are watching from behind some cover. It seemed weird because there was no explanation of how they just suddenly woke up to witness the stampede.
I was also taken aback by an unusual tactic that Lucky and California used to avoid getting run out of town, along with Nora Murray (Elaine Riley), who arrived in Silver City to lay claim to her father's Silver Bell mine - they bought the local lunch room from a Chinese cook (Lee Tung Foo)! It seemed like a pretty good deal for Wong, who pocketed a hundred forty six dollars (and fifty cents), and then turned around and hired himself as the cook!!! How can you beat that?
Well, not to get distracted, Hoppy and his pals locate the Silver Bell mine, it's original owner John Murray (Herbert Rawlinson), and shut down the counterfeit operation in pretty short order. All of which led me to think about the menu options at the new Comet Lunch Room, which had chop suey for a quarter, steak and spuds for forty five cents, Chinese chicken for sixty cents, ham and eggs for forty cents, hot cakes for fifteen cents, and FREE coffee with any meal! Not a bad deal, but how were Lucky and California ever going to make a profit with those prices? Especially when they rode out of town with Hoppy at the end of the story!
This story involves a counterfeiting ring printing both American and Mexican fake money, so Hoppy rides into the town of Silver City with his pals Lucky (Rand Brooks) and California (Andy Clyde) to try and locate the hoodlum gang involved. An element in the story involves a comet trailing star that's sketched on a note sent to Cassidy by the informer, so one needs to keep an eye out for that connection.
There's an odd scene in the story where a henchman named Longhorn (Francis McDonald) trails Hoppy and his guys out of town preparing for yet another ambush, and catches the trio sleeping on the trail. As the outlaws stampede a nearby cattle drive into the camp, somehow Hoppy, Lucky and California are watching from behind some cover. It seemed weird because there was no explanation of how they just suddenly woke up to witness the stampede.
I was also taken aback by an unusual tactic that Lucky and California used to avoid getting run out of town, along with Nora Murray (Elaine Riley), who arrived in Silver City to lay claim to her father's Silver Bell mine - they bought the local lunch room from a Chinese cook (Lee Tung Foo)! It seemed like a pretty good deal for Wong, who pocketed a hundred forty six dollars (and fifty cents), and then turned around and hired himself as the cook!!! How can you beat that?
Well, not to get distracted, Hoppy and his pals locate the Silver Bell mine, it's original owner John Murray (Herbert Rawlinson), and shut down the counterfeit operation in pretty short order. All of which led me to think about the menu options at the new Comet Lunch Room, which had chop suey for a quarter, steak and spuds for forty five cents, Chinese chicken for sixty cents, ham and eggs for forty cents, hot cakes for fifteen cents, and FREE coffee with any meal! Not a bad deal, but how were Lucky and California ever going to make a profit with those prices? Especially when they rode out of town with Hoppy at the end of the story!