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In his final case Dr. Ordway (Warner Baxter) attempts to solve a murder in a highly interesting place: a sort of call-in jukebox where bar customers may request a particular record to be played. (The same gimmick, incidentally, used in the 1945 Republic serial "Federal Operator 99.") Although Baxter looks near exhausted (the veteran actor died less than 2 years later), the whodunit zips along nicely and the solution to the puzzle is not telegraphed too far in advance. Acting honors this time go to Whit Bissell as a slightly demented song-writer and, especially, future Miss Moneypenny of 007 fame, Lois Maxwell, as the decidedly active ingénue. Based on a popular radio show by Max Marcin, the 1943-1949 "Crime Doctor" thrillers were typical of series-happy Columbia, produced with economy but generally well-written and peopled by the studio's great (and very busy) stock company.

If nothing else, "Law of the Rio Grande" demonstrates what you could buy for a couple of bucks and a box lunch back in 1931. There is certainly no lack of saloon extras or henchmen in this low budget affair from Syndicate Pictures, a forerunner of sorts of Monogram, niceties that would become prohibitive later in the decade. The cast is familiar and mostly made up of silent screen actors now down on their luck. It is not that Bob Custer and the others were necessarily terrible performers, but they were audibly unfamiliar with dialog and obviously received no help from a direction steeped in silent era film-making. The surviving print of "Law of the Rio Grande" is rather grim in places, a fact that adds to the overall ennui of the too-familiar story. Mark this down as an interesting piece of independent film-making in an era of transition.

Produced by E.B. Derr, a former adviser to Joseph P. Kennedy, the Low-budget Crescent Pictures productions starring Tom Keene were not advertised so much as Westerns but as historical adventure yarns. "The Law Commands," however, is the usually sagebrush tale of an upstanding citizen battling a criminal protection syndicate in Iowa at the time of statehood. As such, it isn't half bad and the surviving print remains watchable if slightly on the scratchy side. Of interest to B-Western fans is a large role for good old Horace B. Carpenter, a character star for Cecil DeMille in the 1910s who was offered mostly one-line bits in the talkie era. Always a bit of a ham, Horace chews the scenery with abandon here as well as the head of the local farmers cheated out of their land by greedy Robert Fiske. Budd Buster plays the comic sidekick role in ersatz Gabby Hayes style and Tom Keene is his usual stoic self. The leading lady, Lorraine Hayes, was the sister of B-Movie femme fatale Bernadene Hayes and not, as some sources suggest, the future Laraine Day.