Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is the first sound version and the only precode film version of "Three Godfathers", and it has a coarseness and therefore redemptive power that the later films just lack in spite of the primitive nature of the early sound technology. Four hardened partners in crime meet up in the old west desert town of New Jerusalem shortly before Christmas to rob a bank. Bob Sangster (Charles Bickford) has written for the other three outlaws to join him since he has the town's only lawman and the bank pegged as a soft touch. Before the robbery Bob gets two saloon girls involved in a cat fight over him just for the fun of it. While at the bank, one outlaw keeps putting his leg up searching for the boot rail while leaning across the counter, insinuating that he is only used to leaning on bars in saloons, and after one of the tellers draws his gun and is shot dead, two of the outlaws fight over whether the shot was through the heart or not. One robber doesn't make it out of town - he's shot by one of the townspeople. Bob returns and rescues one of the gold sacks, not his com-padre. Later, when the surviving trio spots a lone covered wagon with an ill woman inside the three have a bit of an argument in what amounts to who is going to rape her.All of this is just to illustrate that these guys seem to have no redeeming value whatsoever - they are savages in a savage land. But when they discover the lone woman is ill because she is about to give birth, their demeanor changes completely, and they become the child's guardian promising to return him to civilization. They do have some of their own problems themselves - their horses have stampeded in a sandstorm, and the place they hoped to refill their canteens is now dry as a bone. Thus they can go back to New Jerusalem and a noose and save the child - and even then it's questionable whether or not they have the water to make it, or they can stay in the desert where they all will perish.Now for 1929, this is a good little Western with much more gritty reality and less unnecessary sentimentality than its two successors, and very natural performances and dialogue considering its early sound pedigree, but I guess what I remember this one for is Charles Bickford's description of it in his autobiography. He gives a description of director William Wyler as a product of nepotism run rampant at Universal and "an inarticulate nose-picking golem" and says that the film would have been a disaster if not rewritten by himself, Charles Bickford, and that he was stuck with a cast of silent screen actors that he had to teach to act before the camera in a situation that required dialogue.Bickford does give a great performance, and the film has become a bit of a minor Christmas classic among classic film buffs, and I've always wondered about the veracity of Bickford's description of the set and why Wyler didn't sue since he was still alive and well when Bickford's book was written. Watch this rare old film and see what you think.

This is an early version of John Ford's "Three Godfathers" and is itself a remake of Ford's still earlier "Three Badmen." I've never seen the last but "Three Godfathers" has more of Ford's rough humor and corny sentiment. It's also in crisp and impressive color."Three Godfathers" had John Wayne in the lead and you pretty much know he's going to survive -- at least long enough to reach the town of New Jerusalem with the baby he holds in his arms, thoroughly dehydrated, and order a tall cold beer in the saloon before collapsing."Hell's Heroes," directed by William Wyler, isn't at all funny or sentimental, though the religious symbolism is unavoidable. Four men rob a bank. One is killed outright. The other three escape into the desert, lose their horses, and adopt the newborn infant of a mother dying alone in an abandoned wagon. There isn't enough water for all of them. The three bandits trudge off towards New Jerusalem but, one by one, they fall dead by the wayside until only Charles Bickford is left. He dislikes the baby. ("What the hell do you want now?") He blames the infant for the deaths of his best pals.In the end, having shed all his accoutrements except the wrapped-up baby, he reaches the end of his rope at a well. The well is poisoned but Bickford can walk no farther. So he sacrifices himself. He drinks his fill of the arsenic water and it gives him an hour before it kicks in. By that time he should have made it to the town. He does make it successfully, but instead of collapsing in a saloon he dies in a church, having saved the infant.It's one of the earliest talkies and is pretty rough hewn. All the bandits talk tough but Bickford is the toughest of them all. He winds up dead and in rags on Christmas day, and no one applauds his arrival. Well, it's a noble death. I suspect these days that some of us would have drunk all the water without sharing it with the infant and, when it quivered and was still, would have eaten the child. It's a Social Darwinist world out there.

I viewed this film as a historical piece on locations. It is footage of the town of the old mining town of Bodie, pre-fire which destroyed 90% of the remaining town in 1933. It is now a state park and the official ghost town of Calif. Having visited several times, it was amazing to see actual businesses and buildings that no longer stand. And the ones that do - 80 years later. The church that is seen in several of the exteriors is still there today, but none of the buildings seen between it and the main street exist. This would have been, in 1929, a long way to travel for a location shot with crew and equipment. I'm glad they did.

There is something captivating about this, the second film adaptation of Three Godfathers. For one, the settings bear the marks of reality.the dusty western town surrounded by vistas of nothingness.the gritty contrast thrown into stark relief by the desert sun. I kept wondering why this film's settings seemed like the real west(or at least my imaginings of it) so much more than today's westerns. Perhaps it was merely the fact that this film, from '29 was only that many years from the real thing. Another early talkie which benefits from the technological limitations of the time. No music scoring.just the plodding of boots, horse's hooves, and the spare dialogue of the three characters. It brought home the isolation of the main characters and the desolation of their surroundings. Yes, the ending was symbolically top-heavy and dialogue was stagy, but there was still that economy of story Hollywood so sadly lacks now. Point made, fade out.