Dreadfully Boring

An action-packed slog

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Dorothy Wilson was a charmingly natural actress who started her career as a "secretary to the stars". Her boss, director Gregory La Cava organised a screen test and she was on her way. Even the Westerns she appeared in were among the more memorable and quirky.Around the mid thirties, an entertaining Western spin off series came about - the making of Western movies ("The Cowboy Star", "Hollywood Cowboy") often combining real cowboys with "reel" cowboys. Tom Keene was RKO's Western star (they were the only major studio with a regular "B" Western schedule) so he fitted in right at home in "Scarlet River" as a Hollywood cowboy who was more than a match for the real McCoy!!! The film is a real delight as an intrepid group of movie makers try to film a western but civilization keeps getting in the way - the wagon train breaks down, the settlers are done for - suddenly an estate agent's bus pulls up, they try to film in front of a lonely mountain hut but it is being converted into a Southern Fried Chicken Restaurant and in the middle of a love scene they are invaded by a cross country marathon ("say "52" looks kinda cute"). Where can the company go to get away from modern life. They find the perfect place - "Scarlet River Ranch" - but the ranch is falling on hard times. The bank is foreclosing on the mortgage - ranch hand Ulysses (Roscoe Ates) is too busy sending in movie scripts to attend to ranch business. His latest plot is about a crooked foreman who is robbing the girl he is working for!!! He doesn't realise how close to home he is - but the foreman does!! Jeff (Creighton Chaney, before he became Lon Chaney Jnr.) is in cahoots with an agent and is trying to force Judy, the owner, off the ranch. Dorothy Wilson is such a peach as Judy, it was very unfortunate that she didn't have a bigger career. The motion picture company is a welcome relief - Judy will now have the money for the next payment. After the first day, Tom is taken for a tour of the ranch and starts putting two and two together as far as Jeff, the foreman is concerned - there have been too many odd accidents - hay ricks catching fire in the middle of the night, drinking water being mysteriously poisoned so the cattle have to be shot. In addition he is disgusted at Jeff's influence over Judy's little brother, Buck (Billy Butts), who has been taught to smoke and lie!!! Buck soon comes to his senses and, together with Tom, sets out to rescue Judy, who has been kidnapped. There is more action in this film than in a whole swag of Westerns as Tom Keene (with a lot of help from Yakima Canutt) does some fancy riding and stunts and shows "reel" cowboys are every bit as tough as the real thing. In addition to all this fun, you get a sneak peak at "stars at play" - okay, they are only in RKO's cafeteria but still you can see Myrna Loy (she flew in to RKO for a couple of pictures) sitting with Frances Dee (just a glimpse). Julie Haydon (a Ann Harding / Virginia Bruce lookalike), Bruce Cabot and Rochelle Hudson engage in small talk and Joel McCrea gets to tell a joke at the newstand.Highly Recommended.

Viewers of this little Western get some interesting surprises near its beginning when Tom Keene visits the studio commissary. Brief bits from a very young Joel McCrea, Myrna Loy, Bruce Cabot, Rochelle Hudson, and other stars of the 1930s add an extra dimension to the picture. Note also Yakima Canutt's famous jump to the horses, this time pulling a wagon instead of a stagecoach. Location shooting was done at Vasquez Rocks, so film fans watching this film will see the same terrain that you can find in "The Flintstones" and episodes of "Star Trek." This is a Western that wasn't afraid to kid the genre, so if you take the opening scene very seriously, you're in for a big surprise.

Until this movie popped up on TCM, the only time I ever saw Tom Keane was in a commie propaganda movie from 1934 called "Our Daily Bread". I would never have remembered him in that except his overacting was so bad, it was hard to forget. I'm not much for Saturday am oaters, but when I saw his name, I thought it would be good for a laugh. I was really surprised.This was a movie in a movie. A notch up from the standard western programmers of the day. Tom plays a cowboy hero with a poverty row production company trying to find an isolated ranch to film their two reelers on. He's ably supported by Edgar Kennedy as the director, Betty Furness as his heroine, and Yakima Canutt as a stuntman. (Of course, everybody who knows anything about the genre, realizes that he was the ultimate western stuntman in real life.) They eventually find an isolated ranch outside LA only to get tangled up in a complicated land grab plot. The pretty owner is played by Dorothy Wilson who seems to have vanished from film history. The crooked foreman is played by Lon Chaney Jr in a very early role, and the comic relief is played by Roscoe Ates. I won't bother to outline the plot except to say that the hero saves the day.The surprise is that this was a thoroughly enjoyable movie. Tom Keane was likable and hardly overacted at all, the heroine and love interest were both lovely, and the contrast between make believe movie magic and what passed for real life was entertaining. One added bonus: I'm in the business myself, and the opportunity to see the primitive cameras, lights, and sound equipment was really amazing. They really had to work at it in those days. The boom mikes looked like telephone poles. The cameras were the size of dog houses. Humping that stuff around must have been murder. Watching the crew strut around in jodphurs, leather jackets and silk scarfs was a delight.All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Anybody interested in the nuts and bolts of film making should enjoy it as well.

Tom Keene vehicle has our hero as a movie star who can't find any open land in Hollywood -- a very funny scene opens the film in which his film crew encounter real estate agents and customers and other obstacles while trying to film in Hollywood itself. This is a good joke for those who know of the situation in Hollywood in the early 30s -- after all, Hollywood's first productions (including the famous "Squaw Man") were mostly westerns and a major reason for its selection as "film capital" had to do with its convenience for filming western movies, always (until the 60s) the staple of the film industry.Keene and crew find a ranch outside of town, and end up getting mixed up in a land dispute engineered by the lovely ranch owner's main hired hand (Chaney Jr. in an early role, credited under his proper name of "Creighton"). Ates and cast add a lot of good laughs (and Wilson her spunk and appeal) to this fairly standard Hollywood oater.