John Wayne plays the titular Texan, who strikes gold with an old rancher played by Gabby Hayes, only to find themselves wanted for murder thanks to a crooked assayer.

The Lucky Texan is a sub-par Lone Star entry, notable chiefly for Gabby Hayes’s comedic turn in drag towards the film’s end.

The script by director Robert N. Bradbury is slow and talky. There’s a lot of setup getting Wayne and Hayes together and into the mining business, including some flat attempts at comedy and a laughable Lassie sequence.

The supporting cast is also uneven. While Yakima Canutt is fine a villainous henchman, Barbra Sheldon is wooden and ill cast as Wayne’s would-be love interest. Like most of Wayne’s Lone Star leading ladies, she has zero charisma and seems out of place in the old-west setting.

Despite all of this, the last ten minutes are great, featuring the aforementioned sequence where Hayes disguises himself in drag, and a well-done chase scene involving a motorized rail car.