Un rôle imprévu

A film crew gets mixed up with a ranch's dishonest foreman and his conniving mastermind.

This oater has one of the darndest scenes of any horse opera I've seen. A movie crew is out in the middle of nowhere shooting a cowboy scene. Except it's not out in the middle of nowhere when a sudden parade of cross-country runners run through the setup. They come out of nowhere, and abruptly the illusion is shattered. More tellingly, it shows how much of an illusion those old matinees were for front row kids like myself.

Minimize the boilerplate plot. Instead, it's really fun watching the film crew go through the movie-making motions. As others point out, it's a movie within a movie. And catch Miss Westinghouse herself, Betty Furness, as the actress. I almost thought I was watching one of those old 50's game shows. Also, there's Lon Chaney Jr. while he was still young and strapping. Anyway, it's a fun movie, at least in my little book. And if I'm not mistaken, those rock slabs are Vasquez Rocks just a few miles north of LA. So the crew didn't have to go far, after all.

A "7" on the matinée scale.

That's my favorite line from this adorable comedy-western. I liked the premise (cowboy movie people helping real ranchers with their problems) but wasn't expecting anything special...this was a surprise. The story is lively, the script is sharp, and Tom Keene is a hoot as the dumb-looking pretty-boy hero. I've seen few westerns (except post-"Support Your Local Sheriff" parodies) that acknowledge the too-good-looking ultra-wholesome hero but this one does it well.

From now on I'm going to keep an eye out for screenwriter Harold Shumate, whose script delivers exactly what western-watchers of the time wanted, but adds plenty of funny lines and charming situations. I'm also going to take a little more care seeking out movies with Tom Keene, whose performance succeeds as a strong hero performance, but also self-parody as well. I hadn't recognized him as another goofball hero, Col. Tom Edwards in the classic badfilm "Plan 9 from Outer Space." I'm eager to find out if he played such quotably strange characters in other pics.

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.

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.