SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

MartinHafer The cast of "The Thundering Herd" is very impressive...with Randolph Scott, Buster Crabbe, Harry Carey, Barton MacLane, Noah Beery and Raymond Hatton--all very familiar western actors of the day. And, the story is based on a Zane Grey story. And, it has a salacious subplot involving a step-dad that is WAYYY too interested in his step- daughter. Yet, amazingly, it's not that interesting and you could easily do better. Now this isn't to say it's a bad film...but it should have been a lot better.The story is about a nice guy (Scott) who is in love with a nice girl. However, her sleazy step-dad (Beery) has way too much interest in her and it's obvious the film is STRONGLY implying incest. When the nice guy goes to get his girl in order to marry her, the sleazy step-dad shoots him and beats him up! The guy is too hurt to do anything but let his friends care for him and his desire to save the girl and get revenge will have to wait until he's healed AND they've gone on the buffalo hunt. This includes a lot of nice footage of the animals at Yellowstone...otherwise the big confrontation is a fizzle and the film was quite dull. The lack of any incidental music didn't help any.

Michael Morrison Action galore within a well-crafted and beautifully presented story make this one of the very best B westerns ever made.Randolph Scott's mustache is rather jarring, to those of us who have never seen him with one, but he gives an excellent and athletic performance, joined by one of the finest casts ever assembled in a B western.Bad guys are really bad, with Noah Beery giving one of his best performances as the worst of the bad guys ... although Mrs. Bad Guy is about as rough and evil as any woman I've ever seen in a B western.This is not only brilliant story-telling, but it is brilliant acting.And brilliant directing.Henry Hathaway surpasses other possibly better-known and more highly regarded directors with his moving camera and his shots of moving horses and wagons and buffalo. (His last years, though, saw him faltering badly as he almost ruined, with the aid of a miserable script from Marguerite Roberts, "True Grit." But admire his work here and don't think about how badly he stumbled toward the end.)One wonderful aspect of "The Thundering Herd" is an active female lead, played by Judith Allen. OK, maybe there was a stunt man, but so what? The character is one to admire, and one to wish there had been and were now more of: a strong and active female who did more than cower in her man's arms.Excellent writing, and an excellent and exciting bunch of characters, and an excellent action-packed finale."The Thundering Herd" is available at YouTube in a pretty good print. I highly recommend this movie.

classicsoncall Zane Grey Westerns were apparently good early vehicles for Henry Hathaway and Randolph Scott. Hathaway's first directorial effort was 1932's "Heritage of the Desert", which also featured Scott in his first starring film role. Scott also appeared in 1934's "Wagon Wheels", a remake of 1931's "Fighting Caravans", both based on the Grey story of the same name. One of the plot lines of this picture follows that of 'Caravans', whereby the hero Tom Doan (Scott) has intentions of marrying the story's romantic interest (Judith Allen as Milly Fayre), but a couple of grizzled old timers (Harry Carey and Ray Hatton) find it objectionable. Guess who wins out? There's also a creepy element offered here with the character of Randall Jett (Noah Beery), who has designs of his own on stepdaughter Milly. This doesn't sit well with Mrs. Jett (Blanche Friderici), who for my money, might be the meanest female character I've run across in just about any picture, and that includes Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West. Jett's also a mean cuss in his own right, operating a rival fur trade operation to the Sprague outfit, based on banditry against whites and Indians alike.The film utilizes a fair amount of stock footage at the opening as well as in sequences involving the buffalo stampedes of the title, which I learned from other posters on this board were first used in the silent version of this movie from 1925. There were a couple of other cool elements as well, like the use of a leveraged timber to temporarily replace a broken wagon wheel, and Randolph Scott's use of a tree limb during a running dismount to see his gal. The only question I have as far as the story goes - whatever happened to Buster Crabbe?

bkoganbing This is one of a group of westerns that Randolph Scott's home studio of Paramount assigned to him. Filmed previously as a silent and taking use of a lot of the action sequences from the silent version, Thundering Herd's source was one of Zane Grey's novels.This is not the Randolph Scott we became acquainted with post World War Two in the westerns he did then. He plays a callow youth here, although he's 35 in real life. He's in the employ of a Harry Carey and Raymond Hatton, partners in a buffalo hunting outfit. Carey and Hatton run an honest group, but there's a rival outfit headed by Noah Beery, Sr. which gets hides the easy way, murdering whites and/or Indians for them. Randolph Scott has a hankering for Judith Allen who's Beery's stepdaughter. Of course so has Beery to the discomfort of his wife, Blanche Frederici. Throw in a buffalo stampede and an Indian attack and I think you can figure the rest out.It's good action from Paramount's B picture unit.