Mary Castle (Texans Never Cry & Prairie Roundup)

How in tarnation, you may ask, did that frightful-looking Minerva Urecal ever manage to beget a cutie like Gail Davis? Well, this bizarre mother and daughter duo appears in Gene Autry's Texans Never Cry (1951), a better-than-average entry with a better than average heroine in the redoubtable Miss Davis who, in the style of her Annie Oakley of television fame, mistakenly decks poor Pat Buttram in the opening scene in a misguided effort to demonstrate how Gene Autry had just incapacitated villainous Richard Powers (aka Tom Keene). Alas, this time Autry regular Davis isn't the top-billed female. That distinction, courtesy, no doubt, of the powers at be at Columbia, belongs to one Mary Castle, whose resemblance to the studio's reigning queen bee, Rita Hayworth, is hardly coincidental. And to make sure you get the point, the screenplay actually names Miss Castle's tough-talking character Rita. Mary, or rather Rita, makes eyes at Gene (why these dames make fools of themselves over someone as, well, homely as Gene Autry is one of those inexplicable Hollywood mysteries) despite the fact that she is the girlfriend of Richard Powers and that her father, the town's newspaper publisher, is also in Powers' employ. The girls are front and center in this Western, unusual, to be sure, but much appreciated when played by the likes of Castle, Davis, and Urecal all three of whom had a way with a line.

Mary Castle didn't have to share the screen with other dames in her second Columbia Western, the Durango Kid effort Prairie Roundup (1951), but that did not mean more screen time. She plays a fiery lady trail boss who's being swindled by nefarious Frank Fenton. To the rescue comes Charles Starrett, alias the Durango Kid, who is wanted for murder in the killing of a Durango impersonator (don't ask) and the inevitable Smiley Burnette who, at this late stage in his career has rid himself of some of his most annoying comedic habits and is almost watchable. This is a typical Durango Western, short on logic and long on riding and shooting. It does, however, come with a nifty little scene where a bartender blithely pours an unused drink back in the bottle while its owner is passed out.

Mary Castle's face, they claimed, had been surgically altered by Columbia Pictures to make her look like the studio's biggest box-office draw, Rita Hayworth, who kept threatening to leave Hollywood for good. Mary did indeed resemble Hayworth, albeit in a rather toughened version, but it was Universal-International and not Columbia that offered her the best opportunities, Texans Never Cry and Prairie Roundup notwithstanding. Those, however, were mostly secondary roles and Mary Castle probably gladly accepted an offer from Republic Pictures to co-star as railroad detective Frankie Adams on the television Western Stories of the Century (1954). Off-screen, she dated a host of Hollywood bachelors, including an Orbach department store heir and screenwriter Cy Bartlett, but her name was increasingly mentioned on police blotters for behaving drunken and disorderly, and she was eventually replaced by a more sober Kristine Miller on Stories. At one point in 1957 she was arrested and charged with biting a couple of Hollywood deputies and the following year ended up in a Malibu emergency room after taking a nude dip in the ocean while drunk. Castle's dipsomania seemed to have culminated with an attempted suicide by hanging while in the Beverly Hills drunk tank in 1959. The following year, she was discovered sleeping it off in a Hollywood parking lot. By then, sadly, her career had come to an end. She died age 67 in Palm Springs, CA, in 1998.

Kathy Frye (Crossed Trails)

Five-year-old Kathryn Frey was a member of Hollywood's legendary children troupe the Meglin Kiddies (Shirley Temple was, famously, one of the graduates of the group) when she was picked to play the Indian Prince in Max Reinhardt's lavish A Midsummer Night's Dream (Warner Bros., 1935). She became Kathy Frye and performed a Spanish dance in Gene Autry's Mexicali Rose (Republic, 1939), one of Gene's very best New Deal Westerns. She was one of the children in Luana Walters' orphanage, a nearly bankrupt institution threatened by William Royle and his nasty oil company. During the ensuing melee, little Kathy and her friend Hardie Albright get themselves both kidnapped and teargassed in a fiery finale. Fast forward a decade and a nearly grown Kathy turns up at Monogram in Johnny Mack Brown's Crossed Trail (1948), perhaps no match for Gene Autry in his heyday but pleasant nonetheless. The distaff side is very well represented in Crossed Trails (1948),which has former MGM contract starlet Lynne Carver decked out as a spirited prairie version of Lillian Russell and utilizing every trick in the book to persuade Johnny to use his influence over teenage landowner Kathy, whose land Lynne's boss (Douglas Evans) desires. Despite the period trappings, Frye plays her part like a typical 1940s movie brat, much in the style of Paramount's teenyboppers Diana Lynn or Mona Freeman, or David Selznick's equally adolescent Shirley Temple. A bit tomboy, a bit coquette, and quite a bit irritating. It was, of course, a stock character on its way out in a post war era of teenagers beginning to find the voice that would eventually lead to the Blackboard Jungles and the Rebels Without a Cause of the mid-1950s. Frye also did the low-budget wartime drama Women in the Night (Film Classics, 1948), as Virginia Christine's doomed daughter (the film is in public domain and available everywhere), and then retired.

NOTE: Playing a small part as William Royle's secretary in Mexicali Rose is Kaaren Verne, a glamorous supporting player and sometimes leading lady who, late in life, became a huge thorn in the side of Donald Trump.