Budding Stars

[Old Doc]

Like a lot of us, I enjoy looking at old movies and spotting actors in parts before they got famous. The fifties TV westerns are a gold mine for this. The other day I was watching "Lone Star Trail" on the Westerns Channel, a black and white western from 1943. It was one of those movies teaming Johnny Mack Brown and Tex Ritter. I recognized one of the bad guys as Robert Mitchum. The movie was pretty good but at one point I said to myself, "Hey, it's 1943. How come these guys aren't in the army?"

[Dances With Coyotes]

In the river pirate scenes of How The West Was Won you can spot a younger Lee Van Cleef as one of the sons of Walter Brennan's character.