Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Allissa .Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

calvinnme The star of this film is William Boyd, who made a bunch of westerns for Pathe in his time. As a matter of fact, on the opening credits,Clark Gable isn't even listed. Later, when they name the entire cast he is mentioned, but he comes way behind top rated Boyd and even now largely forgotten Helen Twelvetrees.Two pioneers, Cash Holbrook and Jeff Cameron, are trekking across the desert when they find a deserted encampment with one survivor, a baby boy. The two fight over where to go next. Jeff Cameron wants to stay at the waterhole because "it is a grub stake" - all people driving cattle through will need this waterhole. Cash Holbrook wants to continue on to grazing land so he can raise cattle. He calls Jeff stubborn, and takes the baby too, daring Jeff to shoot because if he does, the baby will fall from Cash's arms and break his neck.About twenty years pass and Cash has become a wealthy cattleman. Not being ambitious in the old west has cost Jeff. He married, but his wife died in this harsh environment, and all he has left is his daughter, Mary Ellen (Helen Twelvetrees). In all of this time Cash and Jeff have agitated one another - Jeff is still angry at Cash for stealing the baby boy that is now a man, refusing to let Cash's herd use his watering hold for any price and makes him go 27 miles around. One night it is coming to a showdown. Cash is going to stampede his cattle to Jeff's watering hole and show him who is boss. Jeff and his daughter are prepared to shoot it out to stop him. Along comes a stranger - Gable as Rance Brent, and with him instantly taken with Mary Ellen, Rance decides to back them up in the shootout.Cash's adopted son comes out and stampedes the cattle away from the watering hole to prevent the deadly shootout. Cash is angry, and throws Bill (Bill Boyd) out. Bill went to mining school, discovers tungsten on Jeff's land, and enters into a mining partnership with his dad's sworn enemy.Now this is where the movie is weird. Bill is acting Gandhi-like saying that he takes neither side, he just wants Cash and Jeff to be friends again and that neither is bad or wrong. I beg to disagree, because to me Cash IS a bad man up to this point. First he uses Bill the infant as a human shield, and when Bill keeps something from escalating into bloodshed, Cash throws that son out of his life.In the meantime, Jeff and Bill's mine is yielding lots of ore, and out of nowhere - certainly not out of any dialogue that I could perceive - Bill and Mary Ellen are in love. Meanwhile somebody is sniping at the drivers who are taking the ore into town to the railroad, and then some dynamite disappears and the mine is blown to smithereens. Everybody on Jeff's place blames Cash, and it is up to Bill to stop another potential showdown and shootout. I'll let you watch and find out what happens.This film has absolutely no background music, which was common in early films, and much of the dialogue is very pedestrian. However, it is a good chance to see Gable in his first sound film, and although he hardly utters a word, you can see the beginning of "that Gable style".

oldblackandwhite The Painted Desert is best remembered as Clark Gable's first substantial role for good reason. The future King of Hollywood's natural, dynamic style of acting stands out in this extremely creaky early talkie Western. In an unrewarding heavy role Gable speaks in his trademark relaxed, cocky manner, while other, more experienced actors such as J. Farrell MacDonald, early silent era star William Farnum, and a stiff-as-a-board Bill Boyd deliver their lines one distinctly enunciated word at a time as if speaking toward a microphone hidden in a cactus. Admittedly Boyd wasn't much of an actor in spite of his good looks and sunny disposition, but MacDonald and Farnum were. Blame an under-financed sound department and uninspired direction by Howard Higgins, who also co-wrote the murky script for this lumbering oater. Those who would excuse the stiff direction and acting as caused by unavoidable problems with early sound equipment should first take a look at Joseph Von Sternberg's Morocco (1930), released the year before The Painted Desert, but showing a marvelously sophisticated and artistically pleasing use of sound. Other than Gable, the only other actors who managed to rise above the restraints of the over-compensating sound technicians and Higgin's stodgy direction were gorgeous leading lady Helen Twelvetrees and Boyd's beautiful white horse.That's not to say that The Painted Desert doesn't have some good points -- especially for die-hard Western fans. Most of the low, low budget must have been spent carting the actors, crew, and equipment around several scenic Arizona locations, including the sure-enough Painted Desert. Sets by art director Carrol Clark and costumes by Gwen Wakeling were well turned out and authentic looking. Oldblackandwhite, who is one of the vanishing breed of Texans still preferring the Stetson style to the ubiquitous Beaver Cleaver ball cap, wishes he could find the hatter Ms. Wakeling used for this picture. The sets and costumes, along with a folksy, real-to-life dialog, as plodding as the delivery was, gave the movie an authentically quaint, rustic 19th century ambiance missing in many a better produced Western.Best of all, and almost worth the price of a DVD -- a cheap one anyway -- was having a tense, climactic, sixgun showdown between two elderly gentlemen! But there wasn't much else to get excited about in The Painted Desert. Mainly for curiosity seekers, dedicated Clark Gable fans, fanatical Western aficionados, and the usual desperate insomniacs. Neither the best nor the worst from Old Hollywood's Classic Era.

netwallah 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.

Jack Tillmany The Painted Desert was one of the last features to be produced by Pathé in 1930 before being taken over by RKO, and one of the first to be released by the emerging RKO-Pathé Distributing Corporation. After its initial release it was put back on the shelf, supposedly never to be seen again. During this time four key action sequences were removed to be used as stock footage in later RKO films, among them the 1938 re-make also titled The Painted Desert. In 1955 the RKO library was sold to C&C Television Corporation for TV syndication, primarily on CBS affiliated stations, and both versions of The Painted Desert were in the package. 35MM source material for these 16mm television prints was missing all of the deleted footage, so that what remained, and all that viewers have been able to see for the last fifty years, was a lot of talk, and practically no action. The sequences which are missing are most of the cattle stampede at the beginning of the film, a wagon hi-jacking and subsequent stampede into the canyon mid-way into the film, an attempted, but unsuccessful wagon hi-jacking soon afterwards, and the big mine explosion and resultant landslide that destroys the mining camp further on. (Two very impressive shots from this last sequence can be found in Republic's Red River Valley (1936).) Frustratingly, the results of these events are shown, and much talked about, but the events themselves are nowhere to be seen. The version shown on Turner Classic Movies, though of superior visual quality, having been derived from the surviving original 35MM material, is still missing these key sequences, though no mention is made of it on the air.Even with what must have been some well executed and nicely photographed action sequences, The Painted Desert would still suffer from many of the same problems that make it so hard to take today, only less so. The direction by Howard Higgin is of the burdensome, slow moving style that typifies so many early sound films, best and most often described as "creaky." But William (billed as Bill) Boyd displays all the positive and natural characteristics that made him popular with audiences five years later as Hopalong Cassidy. We hear too often about the handful of silent players who did not make the transition into sound; Boyd was one of the greater number who did. As for Gable, in his first speaking role, it's all there. When he's on the screen, you know you've got something, and, as they say, the rest was history. Helen Twelvetrees was a competent actress who found her niche in big city melodramas, often as the victim of her environment, or the bad, bad people inhabiting it. She suffered a lot, but she suffered well. The only conceivable reason why she was so badly mis-cast in this film must have been that she was under contract to Pathé, and owed them a picture, or was being punished for not playing ball with the front office, or something like that. Charles Sellon as a tipsy miner is just plain tiresome. Farnum and MacDonald give just exactly what we've learned to expect from them, on target performances of the old school.Under ordinary circumstances, such a film would be of little value today, and probably rarely, if ever shown. But The Painted Desert is Clark Gable's first prominent role, and his first sound film, granting it a permanent place in film history, as well as an object of interest. Copyrighted by the soon-to-be-defunct Pathé Exchange in January 1931, this film fell into public domain when the copyright was not renewed in 1958, and during the ensuing years has become a staple of videotape distributors who specialize in titles over which there are no longer any legal restrictions, but which have some modicum of popular appeal. Promoting Clark Gable's presence, usually with latter day publicity photos in which he appears older, and hence, the film younger, a lot of usually inferior copies of the truncated version have found their way into a lot of videotape collections and/or thrift shops. It would be nice to think that the film might be restored to its original length by re-inserting the missing sequences, if and when they could be identified and found, but this is highly unlikely. If a complete, original print could be located somewhere, at least Turner Classic Movies could be alerted to upgrade their version; in the meantime, at least an awareness of what we've got, and what's missing, might make The Painted Desert a little more tolerable for Clark Gable completests if no one else.