Un rôle imprévu

Tox Baxter (Tom Keene) is an actor who wants to film a movie at Judy Blake's ranch. Tom discovers that men on the ranch are killing the cattle and blaming it on a variety of things...and dopey Judy doesn't believe Tom when he tells her. Later, because she is so trusting, Judy is kidnapped and Tom uses his expert acting skills to try to rescue her.

This is a well made film for an old B-western. This, combined with a rather unusual plot make it well worth seeing. It also shows that while Keene is no longer a household name, his westerns could be most enjoyable and worth your time. Good harmless fun.

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.

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.

I've seen some, although not many and am not a fan of, old B-Westerns, but this one, "Scarlet River," is clever. Besides being a B-Western, it's a film about film, a type of movie I tend to enjoy.

After their filming is repeatedly interrupted by civilization, a film crew rents a ranch for filming their Western. Real-life B-Western star Tom Keene plays B-Western star Tom Baxter, the film-within-the-film's star who is as much of a cowboy on screen as off. In the fictional reality, he kisses the ranch owner and protects her interests against the baddies trying to steal her property and helps her raise her younger brother (including by spanking him for smoking) in between his acting. The ranch owner watches him filming scenes, including him kissing his on-screen romantic interest, and wants to be with him, while her younger brother watches his stunt work and wants to be like him. To save the day, the actor playing an actor acts once more over by donning makeup to pretend to be one of the baddies.

Really, Yakima Canutt, who also has a bit part in the film, did the stunts for "Scarlet River," but, for the film-within-the-film, Tom Baxter does his own stunts, except for one. For that one, one of the baddies (played by Lon Chaney Jr., before he turned to monster movies) tries to do a stunt for the absent Baxter, but fails. Really, Canutt did that one, too--a famous stunt he repeated in "Stagecoach" (1939).

Another interesting character is Ulysses, who has the part of the stuttering comic relief, a common, if bigoted, trope of these types of films. Ulysses is a ranch hand and wannabe screenwriter who writes a script that mirrors the "real" drama of the baddies trying to steal the woman's ranch. Rather than employ him for his writing, the filmmakers use him as comic relief, too. The director also tells Ulysses that if he figures out a trick, he'll hire him. The surrogate author of "Scarlet River" within the film, Ulysses, in the end, solves the trick.