B-Western Heaven: The Star-Director team of Roy Rogers and William Witney

This entry is part of CineMaven’s Classic Symbiotic Collaborations Blogathon, which highlights star-director teams of note from Hollywood’s classical era. I have chosen to cover director William Witney and his most frequent star collaborator, Roy Rogers.

William Witney was a director who specialized in action and is probably best known today for directing or co-directing several of Republic Pictures’ finest serials of the 1930s and ’40s, including SOS COAST GUARD, ZORRO RIDES AGAIN, FIGHTING DEVIL DOGS, DICK TRACY RETURNS, DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE, ZORRO’S FIGHTING LEGION, ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL, and G-MEN VS. THE BLACK DRAGON, to name a few. He went on to devote the years 1946-1951 to directing Roy Rogers westerns in the final years of Roy’s reign as Republic Pictures’ top western star. He directed 27 Rogers westerns, including all 19 of Roy’s Trucolor westerns. Roy was the only western star to make this many B-westerns in color. Trucolor was a two-strip color process perfected by Republic’s house lab, Consolidated Film Industries, and used exclusively by Republic Pictures. (The most famous film to be shot in Trucolor is probably Nicholas Ray’s JOHNNY GUITAR, 1954.)

Precursors to THE HATEFUL EIGHT

When I first read a pre-production description of Quentin Tarantino’s THE HATEFUL EIGHT and its tale of hardbitten characters waiting out a blizzard in a mountain outpost in the post-Civil War west after a stagecoach drops off its quartet of passengers, joining four suspicious characters who are already there, I immediately thought of several films with similar plots, but the ones that first leapt to mind were a western from 1951 and a samurai film from 1970.