Stormy

Wild horses couldn't have dragged some film crews to Sedona in 1935, but not so for Stormy, a now-obscure Western melodrama notable for its still-impressive climactic stallion stampede.

Back in the 1930s, shooting a Western on location was as much an adventure as anything an audience could see on screen. It meant transporting bulky cameras, cumbersome sound equipment, and a large cast and crew over hazardous roads to primitive locations with non-existent accommodations. But in 1935, a hearty group from Universal Pictures braved the trek to Arizona's desert to shoot Stormy, an amiable, if now largely forgotten, melodrama, notable for a horse stampede that was one of the most spectacular action sequences of its day and splendid views of old-time Sedona.

Stormy stars Noah Beery Jr., then age 22 and already 18 films into a Hollywood career that would extend into the 1980s, in the title role; Jean Rogers, who would go on to co-star in a sci-fi serial that George Lucas claims as an inspiration for Star Wars, and Rex, "the King of Wild Horses," joined by 1,500 of his loyal four-legged subjects.

Stormy premiered on Oct. 17, 1935, to generally positive reviews. Film Daily called it "one of the best outdoor dramas ever shown. Don't class it as a regular western, for it has much more class than anything like that. The location of the Painted Desert of Arizona serves as a beautiful backgroundand Dick Fryer's photography of the massed horse movements, some of the shots seeming to take in thousands of wild horses, is especially outstanding." But a tenderfoot at a New York newspaper sniffed, "Except for an effective stampede of horses in the final reel, Stormy has nothing todistinguish it from run-of-the-mill sagebrush sagas."

And indeed, over the past seven decades Stormy has fallen into obscurity; it's rarely seen these days, and barely a footnote in film history books.

Text © 2006 Sedona Monthly

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