Zeus

• John Wayne
• Duke
• Sheila Terry

John Wayne's road to stardom needed some giddyup in the early 1930s; after a leading-man turn in The Big Trail, he quickly fell into B-movie obscurity. While waiting to vault to first-tier status in 1939's Stagecoach, he honed his talent with a set of six B-Westerns at Warner Brothers, shot in 1932-33. The series of snappy little films (under an hour each) allowed Warners to recycle footage (and plots) from a string of silent Westerns made with Ken Maynard, with the young Mr. Wayne stepping into Maynard's saddle. Haunted Gold adds a dose of haunted-house shenanigans to an awkward tale about a hidden cache of gold. The comic relief comes from character actor Blue Washington, who unfortunately has the kind of wide-eyed, scaredy-cat role that too many black actors of the era got stuck with. Wayne, 25 years old, plays the same naively heroic hero in each of the six films. He's lean and handsome and not yet grown into his talent. But you can see how much the camera likes him--as his future director Howard Hawks might have put it--and how much that famous stride is already coming into step.