Review of Three Godfathers

Three desperados on the run after a deadly bank robbery stumble across a dying women and her baby left alone in the desert when her husband wandered off in a futile attempt to find water. This is the second sound version of Peter B. Kyne's tale quasi-biblical fable of infants and salvation in the cruel (and beautifully filmed) desert. Unlike the bare-bones 1929 version, this retelling opens with a lengthy and somewhat uninteresting preamble about tough-guy Bob Sangster (Chester Morris) returning to the town of New Jerusalem before the murderous robber unites with his crew to rob the local bank. The titular three are well portrayed but are somewhat clichéd (Sangster is in classic bad-guy head-to-toe black), Doc (Lewis Stone, who is very good in the role) is an erudite scholar from out East 'gone bad', and Gus (Walter Brennan) is a borderline comic sidekick (Brennen also very good)). Like the 1929 version, this telling is more bleak and powerful than the somewhat softened and sentimental John Wayne version (1948), but it has much more of a 'Hollywood Western' look than the gritty vérité of the earlier version. That said, they are all good and if you want to spend some Christmas time in a desert far from Bethlehem, with three men bearing Colts, not gifts, and an infant who can lead to salvation if not first bitten by a Gila monster, you can't go wrong with any version of Kyne's hot and dusty parable (sadly, the silent versions starring Harry Carey are lost).