This 1938 John Wayne Western is most noted as the film with which Louise Brooks rode off into the sunset. She describes her swansong in her introduction to “John Wayne and the Movies”: “Prompted by some inner sense which proved correct, I felt that I was reaching the end of my career in 1938 when I signed to make a Western picture with a two-week schedule.... And the sorely needed three-hundred-dollar salary did little to cheer me up at the prospect of working in a typical Hollywood Western whose unreality disgusted me.”
One of the 3 Mesquiteers series, of which Wayne was the star, Overland Stage Raiders was a slick, stunt-packed, modern story, in which aeroplanes take over where horses left off, flying gold out of a mining town when shipments by motor coach have been hijacked. (William K. Everson notes that “A modern locale...sits rather uneasily with traditional Western action, but that was ever a complaint with the Mesquiteer films, which ranged in story-lines over a 100-year span and several different wars!”) (JB)