Painted Desert

This is another of the solid B westerns that George O'Brien starred in for RKO in the 1930s. A good cast, including Laraine Day, so young she can't read her lines convincingly, and Stanley Fields doing his Wallace Beery imitation, help to fill out this story about mining in the old west.

The real standout in this picture, though, is Harry Wild's photography. The cinematography is fluid and graceful in its compositions, unusually so for a B western -- the interiors are darker than usual, which makes for better contrast. And as the outdoor sequences are shot against the backdrop of Red Rock Canyon State Park, you have some awfully pretty country to look at.

Laraine Day (Carol Banning) "Dr. Kildare's Crisis"'40 was in full bloom as a very beautiful young actress in this great Western Classic in 1938, it was a story about the miners and the cattle ranchers playing their good and bad roles, with crooks wearing black hats always waiting to capitalize and rob the innocent town folk of their property. If you were a fan of Laraine Day, this picture shows why she became a great star in the Dr. Kildare films and was loved by the film audiences of the 1940's. Laraine Day later married a famous Brooklyn Dodgers Manager by the name of LEO "D"! Guess his name?

You know the stories of these programmer westerns, also called "juveniles" were trite. There's the "good guy", here George O'Brien, and there's the villain, always scheming to grab all the money, and who seems to be winning in the struggle right up until the very end. And there's "the Girl" who hates the hero until the very end when they decide to get married. But these pictures succeeded or failed with their audiences by their ability to deliver ACTION. The Painted Desert has plenty of action packed into less than a hour. First of all there is the beautiful scenery of just riding across the undulating desert with its scrub vegetation of Red Rock Canyon. Then there's a stamped and a perilous run of ore loaded wagons along a vertiginous cliff and lastly a great mine explosion. I note that IMDb informs us that much footage was lifted from an earlier, 1931, version. Even excepting that the cinematography from Harry Wild, later a master of noir cinema, is remarkable. There is a scene inside the mine that's drop dead gorgeous. I don't want to make a big deal about what is just an hour's entertainment, but its pleasant to report on a film which maintains a dignity and integrity when far more prestigious productions have strayed into inarticulate spectacle.

This George O'Brien western for RKO has O'Brien as a cattleman and Laraine Day as a miner's daughter who are both on the same government land where he's got grazing rights and she's got mineral rights through her father. Perennial western villain Fred Kohler is out to do both of them out of their rights and in fact has Day's father killed as part of his scheme.

O'Brien and Day don't hit it off at first but realize they have a commonality of rational self interest in fighting Kohler. In fact O'Brien saves her in ways she doesn't know about until the end of the film. It's nothing but love.

Painted Desert will satisfy most western fans though it surely sets no new ground.