The Painted Desert

This afternoon I watched Howard Higgin's 1931 western "The Painted Desert." To be honest, I'm not quite sure how this movie got on my Netflix queue. Nor am I quite sure how it made it to the top of the queue. But, sure enough, it was mailed to me and I managed to ignore it for quite a while. Until this afternoon...

The movie begins with two cowboys - Cash Holbrook (played by William Farnum) and Jeff Cameron (played by J. Farrell MacDonald) - finding a baby at an abandoned wagon camp near their well. The two men agree that they will take care of the baby together.

Then, the film flashes forward about 20 years, and apparently Holbrook and Cameron have become mortal enemies for reasons unexplained (although there is reference to Holbrook taking the baby and some sort of dispute about the well). The baby has grown up into Bill Holbrook (played by William Boyd before he became Hopalong Cassidy) and has his sites set on marrying Cameron's daughter Mary Ellen. But to marry her he needs to mend the wound between the two old men, and so hatches some sort of plan involving tungsten mining.

Of course, the malicious cowboy Rance Brett (played by Clark Gable in his first speaking role) has recently stumbled into town and also set his sights on Mary Ellen, it seems. Brett sets about sabotaging Bill's plans and generally causing spite and anger between the two old men. Bill realizes Brett's plan, but not before the two old men wander through town - somehow building tension - looking to duel each other. At the last moment, Bill jumps between the dueling old men and ends up shot, although not mortally, and the two men see the error of their feud.

This movie had a lot of heart, and showed a lot of promise. Somehow, the promise never quite paid off. The characters fell flat, and there were quite a few plot holes and leaps of logic taken in the 75 minute film. The movie never explains what drove the two men apart, except that they both wanted to raise the boy as their own. There is little to no action, and the most exciting scene merely consists of the two old men wandering around the shanty town trying to find each other so they can duel. In the context of a very early western, it succeeded at presenting a genre film with genre tropes and elements. But by modern standards, it does not hold up.