ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

edwagreen Am still wondering why this 1942 film got the name that it did. It was idiotic to say the least and diminishes the brutal way the Indians were treated in the 1880s and before.With Lucille Ball in it, you would know that the film would turn to comedy which was probably the best part of this inane film.Part of the picture is the attempts by James Craig, who tried to help 3 Indians accused of stealing what was really theirs and winds up with a prison sentence, along with Cedric Hardwicke to break up the impending marriage between the Ball character and Dean Jagger. Some of the antics used to do this were funny especially throwing those itchy aunts down on Jagger at the wedding scene.It doesn't take Ball long to realize that she is making a mistake and that her true love has become the Craig character.This is one hour and nineteen minutes of sheer nonsense.

bkoganbing Valley Of The Sun is an offbeat comic western that stars Lucille Ball in a role you would normally see Dale Evans do over at Republic with Roy Rogers. But Lucy and the rest of the cast acquit themselves well under the handling of director George Marshall.Lucy runs the Busy Bee Cafe in Yuma where she's all set to marry Indian agent Dean Jagger who makes a nice living cheating the Indians. That was a great racket in the old west and who's to complain as they don't have the right to vote as yet. Army scout James Craig cares however, but he's had to bust jail after helping a couple of falsely accused Apaches escape.In making his escape Craig runs into both Lucy and Jagger and then has a dual mission to stop that wedding and get some justice for the Indians. Do you doubt he will succeed?This western moves at a really nice clip with the comedy some of the rough house kind like Jagger having a stagecoach run over some cactus to dislodge Craig who is riding by hanging on to the boot. Nevermind though Craig pays him back good in stopping that wedding and I won't reveal how. George Marshall was one of the great comic directors from the last century and never gets the due that he should. This minor picture for RKO shows him at his best.I remember back in the day in New York City when I was a kid, Valley Of The Sun was run frequently on WOR TV as they owned the entire RKO Library. It seems to have fallen out of favor in the past several years though for reasons I can't explain. This is a really fine film.

moonspinner55 Curious head-scratcher of a western directed by George Marshall features James Craig as a drifter in 1868 Tucson who disrupts the wedding of feisty barmaid Lucille Ball, later stopping a war between the white man and an Apache Indian tribe! Lucy-completists will want to take a look, but this may be one example of why her movie-career never caught fire. The picture is just a second-string quickie, despite writers Clarence Budington Kelland and Horace McCoy tossing in some comedic overtones (which help). Unfortunately, it just doesn't add up to much. I'd trade all those tumbleweeds for a cameo by William Frawley. ** from ****

sddavis63 Not being a particular fan of westerns, I watched this primarily because I wanted to see Lucille Ball in something other than an "I Love Lucy" or "Lucy Show" type of role. Here she plays Christine Larson, owner of a saloon in the Arizona Territory in 1868 who's about to be married to the unscrupulous local Indian agent (Dean Jagger.) Ball's performance was OK - nothing really more than that; she didn't blow me away. It succeeded for me in that the role was very different from what I'm accustomed to seeing her in - there was very little of the outrageous physical comedy she later became famous for, although the movie tried to maintain a gently amusing feel throughout. (A typical funny line - "there's two ways to deal with women - and no one knows either one of them!") I didn't find the story all that compelling, although I appreciated that the Indians were shown as the victims of the Indian agent. There's typical shootout action and a lot of horses - your typical western in other words. As to Christine - we pretty much can guess from the beginning how her planned marriage is going to end up; it's just a question of how she's going to get there. If you like westerns, this would be a pretty typical one with a bit of humour thrown in. If you're not big on the genre, this will be lacking. I'm not big on the genre. 3/10