Review of The Painted Desert

An inferior, low-budget western, whose only distinction is a very early part played by Clark Gable—he's not a good guy. This small villainy he carries of fairly well, but the movie's really not about him. The main star is the incredibly wooden William Boyd in his pre-Hopalong Cassidy days. What can I say about him? He occupies space. He makes John Wayne look hyperactive. I saw him once when I was a boy; he was impressive, wearing his black outfit and white-haired and riding a white horse in a parade, brought to Kansas, I think, by the dairy that sponsored his television show, which I never saw. Anyway, the story starts out amusingly, with two grizzled cowpokes arguing over who gets to keep an orphan boy they discover, but then the story lapses into a feud between the two men, and Bill falls for the pretty daughter (Helen Twelvetrees) of the cowpoke who didn't raise him. The Gable character, also attracted to the girl, tries to accelerate the feud and destroys Bill's tungsten mine, but to no avail—he doesn't get the girl. The dialogue is stilted, the continuity bumpy, and only the repeated shot of the street outside the barn-sized door of the tavern is really effective.