That was an excellent one.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It's almost as though the other reviewers here were reviewing another movie than the one I saw. It was decent, and perhaps pretty good for the time it was made (1936), but I found it pretty creaky, mediocre, almost juvenile with all the Windy-Johnny banter.For me, one sign of a weak adventure movie is seeing the hero easily start a brush fire to deter the bad guys, here the bad guy's herd of cattle.Another thing that threw me was that Hoppy suddenly is convinced to organize a cattle drive to deliver cheap food to a hungry town. I couldn't understand why it would make any difference as to whose herd reached that town first -- benevolent Hoppy's herd (which would be sold by Hoppy for a fair low price) or a greedy bad guy's rival herd (who would charge a lot for his cattle). What was the rush? Why should a day or two matter? Hoppy could have easily sent a horseback rider to the town, telling the townspeople to wait for Hoppy's inexpensive cattle.

It's a Depression time in the old west just as it was for the movie going public when Trail Dust came out in 1936. The price of beef cattle is sky high and a greedy rancher played by Morris Ankrum wants to keep the price high. So he looks askance when a relief committee seeks to buy cattle for relief purposes, including the herd from the Bar 20 Ranch where Hopalong Cassidy is the foreman.Hoppy and the gang have to drive the herd to the railroad terminal to be paid. Ankrum's one ruthless dude however. He joins the trail drive under an alias and continues any number of nefarious schemes to prevent Hoppy's herd from arriving.Of course Bill Boyd, Jimmy Ellison and Gabby Hayes are up to the challenge. Trail Dust is a bit unusual in that Hoppy is for once dealing with a plot that involves his chosen profession, ranch foreman. Most of the Cassidy features involve him getting in all kinds of circumstances that have nothing to do with being foreman of the Bar 20. Perhaps this one sticks to the trail because it is taken directly from one of Clarence Mulford's novels.The plot involving a depression and relief certainly struck the right note with a 1936 movie audience. Trail Dust holds up fairly well today for B western film of the time.

This is the one Hopalong Cassidy adventure that really stands out in my mind as being the best. It's a little more gritty than some of the later ones, and more like a real western than an episode of a tv show. Later on Hoppy would get a bit more corny and more like a wandering doo-gooder, but here he's just an ordinary cattle-man, trying to get his herd on down the trail. Gabby Hayes is, as usual, excellent as Windy, while the rest of the cast make great cowboys. My dad taped a whole bunch of these off PBS for us, and this is what I watched growing up, instead of cartoons or other things, and I think I'll always love these classic adventures. This is definitely the best of them all.

"Trail Dust" is a pleasing example of how a simple "formula" western can, with a bit of imagination and a good cast, can be turned into a first-rate adventure. Hopalong Cassidy, together with his usual sidekicks Windy and Johnny Nelson, volunteer to sell their herd at a reasonable price during a food shortage. This does not set well with some greedy cattlemen (led by Morris Ankrum, who was to become a familiar staple in later Hopalong adventures, usually as an unctuous villain). The bad guys set out to sabotage the cattle drive at every turn, and the action scenes are vintage Hopalong Cassidy. There are some pleasant diversions along the way - including an understated Beth Clark - and the climatic denouement seems a natural to the scenes which precede it. There is a little singing along the way, but - as in most of the early Cassidy movies - the music is pleasant, authentic to its genre, and does not interfere with the plot or action. Also, Trail Dust contains some good scenes of cattle-droving, using some real-life cowboys. Quite Enjoyable.