Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . watching Fox "News," with BEYOND's trios of guys shooting at each other during Great Canoe Chases and packs of gunmen firing a whole War's worth of bullets as their horses bite the dust left and right. Frequent references to "half-breeds" are thrown around, and the Dead keep popping back into the Land of the Living during BEYOND. But viewing Fox "News" before and after BEYOND, things are equally mashed up in its version of Real Life, 2016. First, one cop is dead, and some guy wearing a young D. "Rock" Johnson mask is identified as the shooter at large. Then, two officers have expired, done in by a couple of guys who fled in a Mercedes. Next, three Men in Blue have passed, and there's a lady in the ring of DPD attackers. Fox then says four policemen are fatalities, and a cornered rifleman has shot himself dead. Finally, Fox reports that ONE Veteran Gone Bad exterminated FIVE police, who blew him up with a robotic bomb! During BEYOND, the "half-breed" is a killer, but at least he has a girl. Then Mr. Multi-Racial's "victim" miraculously revives, but John Wayne steals his chick because she's inheriting a gold mine AND a cattle ranch! After the Mountie they're holding at gunpoint is fatally shot, Wayne prevents his corpse from going over a huge waterfall, so it revives (unlike BEYOND's main villain, who rolls off a cliff after a cop shoots him for picking up a rock!). Ask yourself, WWRD? (That is, What Would Rambo Do?)

Bill Slocum The canoe overtakes the horse and the Mounties become the cavalry as the Canadian West is the setting for this rather different but still weak Lone Star oater starring a young John Wayne.Rod Drew (Wayne) journeys to the wilds of western Canada to seek out the niece of a man named John Ball. On the train ride over he reacquaints himself with a college chum, Wabi (Noah Beery, Jr.) who quickly finds himself on the wrong end of a bad poker game. With Drew's help, the two make a daring escape by jumping off the train while it crosses a river, the first of many big splashes in this splash-happy film.Give director Robert N. Bradbury credit for shaking up the usual Lone Star formula. The stunts this time are better than usual, and more smoothly integrated into an unusual story, adapted from the novel "The Wolf Hunters" by James Oliver Carwood, a noted writer in his day. Noah Beery, Jr. makes for an interesting foil, playing a decent fellow but one with a hidden agenda where a woman named Felice (Verna Hillie) is concerned. Several reviews here mention the scenic vistas, which are indeed impressive, California playing Canada nicely.The problem with "The Trail Beyond" is it's a cheapo Lone Star film with jerky cutting, repetitive situations, and weak acting. Normally Wayne is pretty good in these films, but he's actually very wooden here. Just as bad is another Lone Star vet I have come to like, Earl Dwire, who is stuck with another of those bad-accented villain characters he can't pull off, this time as a French-Canadian who is two-timing his boss and plots to steal Rob and Wabi's gold-mine map.Wayne just can't get out of his own way delivering bad dialogue like "Well, this is your little game, is it?" An opening exposition scene is painful for the way Wayne nods amateurishly at the wooden lines of some unnamed fellow for whom he is undertaking this expedition. In case you wonder about that, the script has Drew exclaim at one point: "I haven't forgotten that you were Dad's best friend," an awkward bit of excessive fat-chewing made worse by Duke's sheepish grin when delivering it.Beery is better, but he's got problems, too, as the dialogue really pushes his character to dopey depths."I owe him my life but I'm not going to let him come between us!" he tells Felice."Why, Wabi, I never realized you felt that way, about me," she replies.This whole jealous-Wabi thing could have been a more worthwhile plot point, but it's never developed. Wabi acts a bit squirrelly for a while, until he fesses up about misleading Drew. For his part, Drew just pats the guy on the shoulder and the story continues like nothing happened.There are good moments in the film. I like Wayne's line after he and Wabi take their jump off the train: "Nice day for ducks." It's a classic Wayne one-liner for those of us who like to keep score.The film does move quickly in the standard Lone Star way, and there is a nice subplot where we learn the fate of John Ball. The fact is a good story could have been told in the short running time afforded, which Bradbury shows us by nearly pulling it off. Watching Lone Star Wayne movies is usually a case of seeing a classy performance in search of a vehicle; here Wayne never finds the right handle and proves this film's most surprising disappointment.

Leslie Howard Adams Stuntman Yakima Canutt, in a 1978 interview,had no problem recalling 1934's "The Trail Beyond." He recalls it as... "the one where John, Eddie Parker(stuntman) and I stayed wet more than we were dry" and said he told producer Paul Malvern to count him out of any more films where people spend most of the time paddling canoes up and down a river, and just call Buster Crabbe instead."The Trail Beyond" was easily the most water-logged Wayne film until he lost encounters with an octopus/octopii in "Reap the Wild Wind" and the later "Wake of the Red Witch." Within "The Trail Beyond", Canutt, Parker or Wayne(and sometimes all three because of close-ups)leap off a train into a lake;paddles up the river in a canoe; leaps off a bluff and swims to a canoe; paddles up the river a second time and jumps in the water to swim back and upset LaRocque's canoe; jumps in the water from a bank to prevent a canoe from going over the falls and, in general, is wet more often than dry.In the department of Be Careful What You Wish For, an IMDb commentator writes an informed and loving piece about the California locale of this movie, and then wishes it had just been shot in color. One viewing of the colorized video version may have left him him thinking his beloved countryside looked very well and better in Archie Stout's b&w original photography.A distraction may have been the reward poster on John Wayne, as "Gat Ganns" from his earlier "West of the Divide" that shows up on the wall of Beery's "Waninosh House" trading post (which also shows up in "The Man from Utah"), but a much larger distraction was Robert Frazer's and Earl Dwire's attempts at French accents, or whatever accent they tried to employ.And the reward posters aren't a "goof." Monogram and resident-art director E. R. Hickson didn't go in much for redecorating standing sets. Those posters showed up for years in later Monogram westerns post 1937.

Garvis Frazier Getting this John Wayne early film on DVD as a gift was one that brought back pleasant memories from my childhood. I realize that it's not "Oscar" quality but it was the kind of thing a six year old kid took pleasure in. John Wayne shows a strong hint of the super stardom to come.