Frontier Marshal (Allan Dwan, 1939)

Cesar Romero and Nancy Kelly in Frontier Marshal

Cast: Randolph Scott, Nancy Kelly, Cesar Romero, Binnie Barnes, John Carradine, Edward Norris, Eddie Foy Jr., Ward Bond, Lon Chaney Jr., Chris-Pin Martin, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay: Sam Hellman, based on a book by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke. Art direction: Lewis H. Creber, Richard Day. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin, Charles Maxwell, David Raksin, Walter Scharf.

The title Frontier Marshal sounds like a generic Western, and it doesn't lie. It's about a stranger who comes to a lawless mining town and cleans it up with his fists and his guns. The stranger, played by Randolph Scott, is Wyatt Earp, and the movie is based on Stuart N. Lake's heavily fictionalized 1931 biography of Earp that established his legend as the man who cleaned up Tombstone by fighting it out with the bad guys at the OK Corral. So yes, you've seen it all before, in later and more celebrated films like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and John Sturges's Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). Allan Dwan's film (from which Ford borrowed liberally) is a more modest affair. The famous gunfight in the movie  is almost over before it starts. Nor is Scott's Earp a particularly mythic figure; he even gets seriously beat up before he's able to seize authority in the town. If there's a mythic figure in Frontier Marshal it's Doc Halliday*, played with surprising charm and finesse by Cesar Romero. The character of Earp is also overshadowed by two women: Jerry (Binnie Barnes), a tough-as-nails dance hall hostess, and Sarah (Nancy Kelly), a nurse who has followed her former lover, Doc, to Tombstone, trying to save him from himself. Refreshingly, the two women are given significant agency in the movie, beyond just battling for Doc's affections. What distinguishes Dwan as a director is that he never seems to take for granted the material he's given to work with. Yes, Frontier Marshal is generic and predictable, but Dwan doesn't condescend to it: He gives the scenes snap and vigor, and he gets performances that are in some ways better than they're written. Barnes, for example, turns Jerry into a force to be reckoned with. It took me a moment to recognize her as the same actress who played the snooty Linda Cram in Holiday (George Cukor, 1938). Kelly's Sarah isn't the pallid schoolmarm played by Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, but a woman out to get her man. And if Romero, usually a lounge lizard type, ever gave a better performance I haven't seen it. I could have done with less of Eddie Foy Jr., clownishly playing his own father, and Chris-Pin Martin's milking of the stereotypical Chicano bartender role, but they keep the film lively. Scott is less memorable than the other players, but he provides a quiet stability to the film. 

Usually spelled "Holliday," but the alternate spelling was used, reportedly because of concern about litigation from the Holliday family. 

The Divorce of Lady X (Tim Whelan, 1938)

Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X

Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Binnie Barnes, Ralph Richardson, Morton Selten, J.H. Roberts, Gertrude Musgrove, Gus McNaughton, H.B. Hallam, Eileen Peel. Screenplay: Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, Arthur Wimperis, based on a play by Gilbert Wakefield. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Film editing: Walter Stovkis. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Screwball comedy movies, in which an otherwise sober and respectable male, usually a lawyer, a professor, or a businessman, is prodded into absurd behavior and outlandish situations by a giddy, beautiful, and usually rich female, seem to be a particularly American genre. They may have their antecedents in the French farces of Feydeau and Labiche, but they need that American sense, particularly common in the Great Depression, that the rich are idle triflers, not to be trusted by everyday hard-working folk. Which may be why the British attempt at screwball seen in The Divorce of Lady X is a bit of a misfire. Merle Oberon plays the madcap lady in the film, who delights in deceiving and annoying the barrister played by Laurence Olivier until he inevitably falls in love with her. One problem with the film lies in the casting: Olivier's vulpine mien is not one that easily expresses naïveté, which the barrister Everard Logan must possess in order to fall for Leslie Steele's wiles, when she allows him to believe that she's really the scandalous Lady Mere. The real Lady Mere is played by Binnie Barnes, and the subplot revolves around the desire of her husband, played by Ralph Richardson, to divorce her, with the aid of Logan in the dual role of both barrister and corespondent -- how he got into that predicament is the rather clumsy setup for the film. Barnes and Richardson are far better suited to this kind of comedy than Oberon and Olivier, and they contribute some of the more amusing moments in the movie. It's filmed in the rather wan hues of early Technicolor, which only contribute to the general sense of underachievement.