Jusqu'au dernier homme

The Haydens and Colbys are two mountain families who've had such a long term feud, everyone's forgotten what it started over. Never mind when Pop Colby (Noah Beery, Sr.) shoots Grandpa down in cold blood, Dad Hayden takes an unorthodox and cowardly approach in some eyes, he calls in the law.

The Haydens move west and Colby when he gets out of the joint takes the family and moves to where the Haydens are to take up where they left off. Along the way he has an ally, Jack LaRue, who has an agenda all his own.

Of course in Romeo&Juliet fashion, the Hayden son (Randolph Scott) and the Colby daughter(Esther Ralston} meet and flip for each other. If anything that throws gasoline on the feud fire.

This is one of the weakest of Randolph Scott's earlier westerns. I'm not sure if I'm seeing the complete film as a budget video company put out a re-release that looks like it was choppily edited. There are a lot of plot gaps and things that don't make sense.

This is also one of the earliest films of Shirley Temple who's big scene is when one of the Colbys shoots the head off of her doll. It wasn't for sadistic purposes but to get the Haydens to chase them. Still it's an earlier weepy for Shirley. She later did two more films with

Randolph Scott, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Susannah of the Mounties and with her name above his at that point.

Also at the very end, the fadeout is Esther and Randy in what looks like a photograph of later domestic bliss. And the soundtrack was blaring the Bing Crosby hit Please. Kind of out of place, but since Paramount had the rights to it, they figured they had to use it.

The transfer of this film is horrible. It has been released by Alpha Video under the title of Law of Vengeance. THe movie starts off slow and is something of an oddity in the beginning. Law of Vengeance is the only film that I have seen that shows the actors credit on the screen when they enter the picture. For example, Randoplh Scott's character makes his entrance at 20 minutes into the picture. It is then that the screen credit "Randolph Scott as Lynn Hayden" rolls across the screen. I thought this was interesting.

About 30 minutes into this western the story starts to get good. Mostly due to Scott and the female character known as Ellen Colby. The dialogue is very good in places.

This western is of importance for a film historian. Not only was it directed by Henry Hathaway, it also stars Buster Crabbe, Barton Mclane, Jake Larue and two uncredited performances by a very young Shirley Temple and a young John Carradine. This film was important in the career of Randoplh Scott and if you are a fan of his, you definitely want to own this movie. At a price less that 5 dollars, it is surely worth it.

After spending fifteen years in prison for killing the patriarch of a rival clan, Noah Beery heads west to continue the family feud that turned him into a murderer. While he attempts to goad his rivals into another round of killing, Beery's daughter falls for Randolph Scott, who as a boy watched him murder his grandfather.

Another decent entry in Paramount's Zane Grey series, this features early performances from Scott and Buster Crabbe, as well as an early directing job for the great Henry Hathaway.

It's also fairly interesting in it's use of the old silent film trick of introducing each cast member as they appear, via a subtitle and a little bit of precode skinny dipping.

Speaking of precode, this appears to be pre-common-sense as well, when in one scene a young Shirley Temple is sitting outside and a hidden bad guy shoots her doll in the head, which is only a few feet away. This might not seem very alarming today, but this was before the invention of modern special effects, when film studios employed actual sharpshooters for these types of scenes, a practice that was abandoned when James Cagney refused to do another film that involved him being shot at.

In other words, A LIVE ROUND WAS FIRED PAST SHIRLEY'S HEAD!!

This is a standout early-30's western because of the extraordinary talent that participated in it: director Henry Hathaway, writer Jack Cunningham (who collaborated with Hathaway on six pictures in 1933-34), original novelist Zane Gray, and a cast of stars and future stars who were in Hathaway's stock company at the time: Randolph Scott, Barton McLane, Buster Crabbe (who in two-shot close-ups looks as though he were born to play Scott's brother), Noah Berry, and Jack LaRue. Even in brief and minor roles, Hathaway gets memorable performances, such as a shaved Fuzzy Knight in a serious rather than comic-relief role and Eugenie Besserer as a fierce grandmother crying out for Biblical vengeance. Esther Ralston is a revelation in the lead female role, as an unpolished and touchy backwoods girl who yearns to be a lady but who is fully capable in the climatic scene of fighting desperately to save her man's life.

The plot mixes returning Civil War veterans, hill country family feuds, and Western rustling action, and ties these threads neatly together. The film is only a little over an hour long, but it packs a lot of action and plot into that short running time.

It would be a shame if no strong print of Hathaway's "To The Last Man" survives, because it is far from a typical western-it could fairly be called "pre-code"- and it stands with Walsh's failed "The Big Trail" as an attempt to make a "grown up" adult Western.

Like "The Big Trail" , "Last Man" has one for in the formal styles of Silent Film. What sets it apart is it's theme of decency finally caving in to humanities thirst for revenge and violence. The brutality of the film, both in terms of violence and emotional cruelty, is formidable. It all leads to an ending that, despite the upbeat coda, is truly apocalyptic.

Worth going out of your way to see; but it is too bad there is no quality print.