Frontier Horizon Reviews

Maybe any one of the other 50 entries in the Three Mesquiteers franchise are actually good, enjoyable B-movie westerns that manage to thrill within their limited scope, but New Frontier is not one of them. Even at barely under an hour it feels padded and stretched thin. There’s no nuance or texture to the story, characters, and complicating factors so everything goes in a perfectly straight line from beat to beat.

The most enjoyable thing about New Frontier, or Frontier Horizon as it’s also known but where that name came from is anyone’s guess, is the flagrant disregard for history on display. The Three Mesquiteers work as Pony Express riders in 1914 despite the Pony Express having stopped around 1860 or so. Then there are the modern dress and makeup styles on display, the fact that the characters drive covered wagons still for some reason despite the presence of the automobile en masse around this time, and the inability to hide phone and power lines in numerous shots.

This came out the same year as Stagecoach, and one can clearly see John Wayne counting time before his big star-making turn would land him in better material. He appeared in eight of these films, and New Frontier would prove his final appearance in the franchise. Keep a lookout for Jennifer Jones in her debut and billed under her real name, Phylis Isley, in a thankless role as the granddaughter to a curmudgeon. Jones recites her lines, manages not to embarrass herself, and hits her marks all the while displaying none of the flexible acting range or innate complex vulnerability her later work would highlight so effectively or utilize to subvert her movie star image.

New Frontier is only of interest to fans of Wayne or Jones right before their careers would skyrocket. We already knew what better work Wayne was capable of thanks to his first pairing with John Ford, so it’s interesting to watch him in “dues paying” mode. Once David O. Selznick got his hands on Jones and finessed her career a bit, he would remove this and Dick Tracy’s G-Men from her resume. Who could blame him as New Frontier is so immediately forgettable.