Frontier Marshal

Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero in Frontier Marshal

Alan Dwan's Frontier Marshal, from 1939, is one of the many Hollywood renditions of Wyatt Earp coming to Tombstone, becoming a lawman, and participating in the gunfight at the OK Corral. A good B picture that clock in at a brisk 71 minutes, Frontier Marshal is a testament to Dwan's solid craftmanship.

Taken from the book that inspired the 1934 film of the same name and John Ford's My Darling Clementine, Frontier Marshal drops many of the familiar elements of the saga. Ike Clanton and his brood are absent as are Earp's brothers. The dichotomy between the two main female characters, a virtuous maiden from the East versus a vampish dancehall girl, found in My Darling Clementine is also present in Frontier Marshal. Nancy Kelly, as the lady, and Binnie Barnes, as the tramp, are both pretty good at enlivening rote roles. 

Randolph Scott is adequate as Earp. He is called upon to do little more than embody moral rectitude with his ramrod posture. It was only later in his career, working with such directors as Budd Boetticher and Sam Peckinpah, that Scott was able to add additional shades to his portrayals of chivalric heroism. One of my favorite reaction shots in all of cinema is that of Scott at the conclusion of Boetticher's Comanche Station. Part of the reason for the potency of the shot is that Boetticher is playing off Scott's usual stoicism. 

Best of all is Cesar Romero as Doc Holliday. To viewers who know him primarily as the Cisco Kid,  umpteen Latin lovers or the Joker on television's Batman, this might seem to be strange casting, but Romero is good at expressing the romantic fatalism of the character. His effective turns in such films as disparate as Frontier Marshal, The Devil is a Woman, and Wee Willie Winkie display that he was not fully utilized by Hollywood.

Eddie Foy Jr. appears, as he often did, as his father, a noted vaudevillian. His antics and Barnes' dancehall number add to the period flavor of the film. Foy Sr.'s life story was turned into a film in 1955, the mediocre Bob Hope vehicle, The Seven Little Foys.

Frontier Marshal is nothing earth shaking, but it will appeal to film aficionados and Western fans. I was knocked out by the film's opening montage which shows the finding of silver near Tombstone and its subsequent growth into a boom town. Fred Allen or Robert Bischoff's efforts, the credit for this is unclear, rivals that of Don Siegel's concurrent and justly lauded montage sequences that he concocted for Warner Brothers.