Reb Russell Western Movies

Born Lafayette Russell on May 31, 1905, "Reb" Russell grew up in
Coffeyville, Kansas. A superb athlete all through his school years,
he was a star running back on the University of Nebraska football team,
and gained even more fame when he switched to Illinois' Northwestern
University, where he played fullback and was named an All-American in 1930.

It was inevitable that a big, good-looking, famous football star would
be courted by Hollywood, and Russell was eventually given small parts
in a few films at Fox Pictures, but nothing really came of them.
However, he did sign a contract with independent producer Willis
Kent to star in a series of low-budget westerns. He made nine of them,
with titles like The Man from Hell (1934) and Lightning Triggers (1935)
for Kent during 1934 and 1935, and "low-budget" is perhaps a charitable
description of them. For all his athletic prowess, riding ability and good
looks, Russell just wasn't much of an actor, but even if he had been
he wouldn't have been able to overcome the threadbare production values,
lame and trite scripts and overall shoddiness of the films themselves.
They were distributed through the states-rights syndication system,
which meant that basically not a whole lot of people saw them, and
Russell never really made an impression on either fans or Hollywood
itself. By 1935 he and Kent had parted ways. He left Hollywood and
toured with several traveling circuses during the rest of the 1930s.
In the 1940s he returned to Coffeyville, married and raised a family.
He bought several ranches, becoming somewhat of an expert on
livestock breeding. He died in Coffeyville of a heart attack in 1978.

8 Classic westerns in this collection of movies

Fighting to Live 1934
The Man from hell 1934
Lighting Trigger 1935
Border Vengeance 1935
Range Warfare 1934
Outlaw Rule 1935
Arizona badman 1935
Fighting Through 1934

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