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 Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)

Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed

Cast: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Evelyn Varden, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper, Henry Jones, Paul Fix, Joan Croydon, Gage Clarke, Jesse White, Frank Cady. Screenplay: John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson and a novel by William March. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Alex North. 

The Bad Seed stands out today as one of the more muddle-headed products of Production Code censorship. In the play and novel on which the movie was based, Christine Penmark, the unwitting carrier of the gene that turns her daughter, Rhoda, into a serial killer, commits suicide after giving the child an overdose of sleeping pills. One of the shocks of the novel and play is that Rhoda survives to kill again. But suicide as a positive plot resolution and crimes that go unpunished were taboo under the Code, so John Lee Mahin's adaptation blunts the ending for both characters. And then, to add farce to bathos, someone thought it a good idea to add a "curtain call" sequence in which the actress playing Christine, Nancy Kelly, gives the actress playing Rhoda, Patty McCormack, a spanking. Since spanking is hardly a punishment for murder, you have to wonder if Kelly is punishing McCormack for upstaging her. (In any case, McCormack seems to be enjoying it a little too much.) Still, if you take the movie on its own terms, it has its creepy moments, most of them involving McCormack, whom we spot as a bad kid from the moment she shows up with her braids so tight it looks like they hurt and wearing a starchy, spotless outfit that no decent child would have tolerated for a moment. There's some entertaining overplaying by Evelyn Varden as the psychologizing landlady and Henry Jones as the nosy hired man. The production is stagy and the performances often overblown, with the exception of Kelly, who strives to make her character -- and the ridiculous premise that evil is inherited -- credible. It's a role that could easily have tipped over into camp -- as the rest of the film often does -- but Kelly balances right on the edge.