cult film freak: CHUCK NORRIS IN 'LONE WOLF MCQUADE' WITH DAVID CARRADINE

Title: LONE WOLF MCQUADE Year: 1984 Rating: ****

The reason for Chuck Norris's eventual laurel-resting television series WALKER TEXAS RANGER is the fact his best, most solid, well-crafted and outright entertaining peak-1980's feature featured a titular Texas Ranger, herein deemed LONE WOLF MCCQUADE, backed by a Spaghetti Western theme so familiar in its tension-filled guitar-picking build-up and lonesome whistling, you'd think Ennio Morricone was composer...

Or that by the time you see the face of the mountain-top, gun-in-hand ranger up close... with director Steve Carver intentionally emulating Italian Western auteur Sergio Leone... that it would be Clint Eastwood himself...

Poster Art for LONE WOLF MCQUADE

And like Clint, Chuck Norris is surrounded by talented exposition-spouting veteran character-actors like LQ Jones as his newly-retired boss/mentor, RG Armstrong his current by-the-books leader, and a middle-age actor known for practicing and starring in KUNG FU, who actually has a strangely similar speaking voice to Norris...

Making David Carradine the perfect rival: as an arms-dealing killer, he's as brooding and soft-spoken as the hero he winds up in the usual martial arts climatic fight with... but so much happens beforehand, mostly involving the location-hopping investigation alongside Norris' young Mexican sidekick/partner Robert Beltran and ingenue Barbara Carrera...

Steve Carver's LONE WOLF MCQUADE

Initially saving the life of McQuade's twenty-something (11th hour kidnapped-trope) daughter Dana Kimmel (actually resembling the kind of girl Norris would date), Carrera is more a hands-on ingenue than the kind of wispy girlfriend type that looks on from afar...

But the most credit should be given to director Carver, strategically corralling the characters while knowing exactly when to use Norris's narrowed-eyed expressions and sporadic kick-fighting moves that made him a legend.