The Baron of Arizona (Samuel Fuller, 1950)

Vincent Price and Ellen Drew in The Baron of Arizona

Cast: Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Robin Short, Tina Pine, Karen Kester, Margia Dean, Jonathan Hale, Edward Keane, Barbara Woddell. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, Homer Croy. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Arthur Hilton. Music: Paul Dunlap.

"An occasionally true story" goes the tag line to Tony McNamara's delicious The Great, a miniseries about Catherine the Great. It's certainly a phrase that applies to almost every biopic ever made, but especially to Samuel Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, the second of his feature films as director, sandwiched between two better-known movies, I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Steel Helmet (1951). The film purports to tell the story of James Addison Reavis, a fraudster par excellence who tried in 1880 to lay claim to virtually the entire United States territory of Arizona. The real story of Reavis's scheme is far more complex and far less romantic than the one Fuller carved out of it. Fuller's version is full of shady doings in a monastery, a hair-breadth escape abetted by Spanish gypsies, high-rolling arrogance, near death by lynch mob, and sentimental true love, everything that could allow Vincent Price to play both dashing and disreputable. You can probably sense Fuller feeling his way as a director in the movie -- it's not quite as solidly grounded as either of the ones that flank it in his filmography -- and its budgetary shortcomings are evident. But few directors could do as much with so little.