Of historical interest only
Randolph
Scott made a series of eight quick talkie Westerns for Paramount in the early
1930s, often remakes of silent movies, based on Zane Grey novels, to which Paramount had bought the rights. They were
directed by a young Henry Hathaway, had a good stock company and were, some of
them, quite good. To The Last Man or The Thundering Herd, for example, were well-made
and enjoyable little movies according to their lights.
However,
Paramount persisted, churning the motion pictures out at a rate of knots (they
were onto a good thing with low-cost movies filling the theaters) and the films
weakened in quality. Rocky Mountain
Mystery aka The Fighting Westerner,
a remake of the silent Golden Dreams (1922), was
not directed by Hathaway but by Charles Barton, whose second Western this was –
the first being another Scott movie, Wagon Wheels, the year before. Nor did it have Western actors of the quality of
Harry Carey Sr. or Noah Beery Sr., as the early ones did, but only very
old-fashioned stage or silent movie actors who hadn’t really got a clue.
Eminently missable
The very
free adaptation by Ethel Doherty of the Zane Grey novel Golden Dreams resulted in a clunky, plodding dialogue of the
corniest kind but it’s unfair to blame Grey for its quality.
Rocky Mountain Mystery is actually a better title than The Fighting Westerner because the movie
is really a murder mystery that happens to be set in the West. Randy is a
mining engineer (he says) come to find out what happened to his predecessor at
a mine and stamp mill in Nevada or Colorado. Skullduggery has been going on and
of course Randy uncovers it. It’s quite a modern Western, with automobiles and
telephones.
Charles 'Chic' Sale in the old timer part
The
acting is shockingly bad, even for the time. Curiously, although Scott is
certainly the star and is in almost every scene, he is only billed tenth. The
cast is led by Charles ‘Chic’ Sale as a crusty old-timer deputy out to solve
the mystery. He was not a Western actor (he only did three) and is painfully
bad in the Gabby Hayes-type part.
Randy dutifully recites his lines
The roles of the no-good Ballard family are
taken by the elderly Mrs. Leslie Carter, a well-known nineteenth-century stage
actress; Florence Roberts, ditto; and George F Marion, 74, who had been in
eight silent Westerns. These stage actors had a then-expected accent so clipped
that it is almost English. Where Paramount dug them up is a mystery but doubtless
they were soon re-interred. Ann Sheridan, later to do Dodge City with Errol Flynn and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart, was a breath of fresh air (being under 70) as Rita
Ballard, in her third Western.
At least Ann Sheridan was in it
Randolph
Scott fans will want to see this one, once. For the rest it is of historical
interest only and there’s not even a great deal of that.
Skip it
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