One of the last of John Wayne's "Lone Star" westerns, The Dawn Rider casts "the Duke" as two-fisted frontiersman John Mason. Searching for the dirty rats who murdered his father, Mason pauses long enough to romance pretty Alice (Marion Burns), thereby earning the enmity of his former buddy Ben (Reed Howes). Eventually our hero catches up with the villains, only to discover that their ringleader is Alice's own brother Rudd (Denny Meadows). On the verge of being done in by the crooks, Mason is rescued by his "friendly enemy" Ben, who'd previously sought revenge by loading Mason's gun with blanks. And they managed to squeeze all of this into 53 minutes!