Waste of time

Better Late Then Never

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

1933's "Scarlet River" was a Tom Keene Western depicting how a Hollywood studio (in this case RKO) goes about making such films, the same thing Lugosi's "The Death Kiss" did for murder mysteries. Judy Blake's Scarlet River Ranch is the perfect location for Keene's latest, but the unscrupulous foreman, Jeff Todd (Creighton Chaney), is in cahoots with villainous 'Clink' McPherson (Hooper Atchley), seeking to put her out of business and foreclose. Judy (Dorothy Wilson) has a younger brother who falls under Todd's bad influence, smoking, chewing tobacco, even lying to his big sis, until Tom manages to get things straightened out by the 54 minute mark. One scene shows a galloping horse making a pickup with the camera speeding alongside by car, in case you were wondering how it was done in those early days. Despite its lack of background music, it's 54 minute running time keeps things moving. The most famous sequence takes place early on in the studio commissary, as Keene is greeted by Joel McCrea, Myrna Loy, Julie Haydon, Bruce Cabot, and Rochelle Hudson, all playing themselves (in that order). In only his fourth film, 'Creighton Chaney' was to change his name two years later, building on these RKO efforts as 'Lon Chaney Jr.' Impressively third billed, 26 year old Creighton acquits himself well, yet after one more opposite Tom Keene ("Son of the Border") left RKO to freelance.

An inexpensive Western starring Tom Keene in a ten-gallon corker and directed by nobody you ever heard of, but it's enjoyable in its own quiet way, a playful descent into the vulgate.The story has Edgar Buchanan trying to direct an old-fashioned Western in the Hollywood area and being unable to find a suitably remote location. He accepts an invitation to shoot the movie on a real cattle ranch. El Patrón is more than happy to have the cast and crew because the ranch is in trouble.Okay so far. Now you must hold on because the time line gets a little tortured. This is a modern ranch we're talking about. Yet there are cattle rustlers, the ranchers wear real cowboy outfits, including real old-fashioned pistol belts with real pistols and real bullets, and the villains wear black hats while the actor/hero, Tom Keene, wears a large white hat. And although Keene is a popular movie star, he too carries a real chrome-plated Peacemaker. Things get all mixed up. A galloping horse pursues another galloping horse, or a 1933 bus pursues a galloping horse, or -- well, it doesn't matter. There's a lot of action.These old Westerns look rudimentary but sometimes they have to be admired, if only for having overcome the difficulties of shooting an action picture on location. The equipment was bulky and stolid. An earlier reviewer claimed that the cameras were encased in containers as big as dog house. This is nonsense. They were bigger than that. They were bigger than blimps. They were bigger than the Hindenburg.Yakima Canutt is the stunt man who "does all of Tom's tricks himself." It's fascinating to have your attention deliberately drawn to the effort and skill of what was called a simple "pickup." That is, a girl is injured on a path, a cowboy gallops up and swings her to the saddle behind him. We've seen it dozens of times without really thinking about what would happen to our own spines if we were to try such a simple trick. Stunt men are a clubby lot, and Canutt has always been considered one of the most accomplished. He worked in Hollywood Westerns for years. With Canutt in the saddle, man and horse seemed to be the same animal, just as the Aztecs are said to have believed of Cortez's horsemen.Other notables in the cast include Betty Furness who went on to a successful career as a spokesman for Westinghouse and a consumer advocate in Washington. Also present is Lon Chaney, Jr., who went on to a career as the Wolf Man and ultimately an alcoholic.

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.

That's my favorite line from this adorable comedy-western. I liked the premise (cowboy movie people helping real ranchers with their problems) but wasn't expecting anything special...this was a surprise. The story is lively, the script is sharp, and Tom Keene is a hoot as the dumb-looking pretty-boy hero. I've seen few westerns (except post-"Support Your Local Sheriff" parodies) that acknowledge the too-good-looking ultra-wholesome hero but this one does it well.From now on I'm going to keep an eye out for screenwriter Harold Shumate, whose script delivers exactly what western-watchers of the time wanted, but adds plenty of funny lines and charming situations. I'm also going to take a little more care seeking out movies with Tom Keene, whose performance succeeds as a strong hero performance, but also self-parody as well. I hadn't recognized him as another goofball hero, Col. Tom Edwards in the classic badfilm "Plan 9 from Outer Space." I'm eager to find out if he played such quotably strange characters in other pics.