Black Sheep ( 1935 )

During the 1930s, there were a number of "quickie" films made that had runtimes of anywhere from 50-75 minutes. These pictures were made by all the studios and were dubbed quickies because they were quick to make ( they're also quick to watch ). Some studios, like MGM and Fox, allocated larger budgets to the production of these films than their competitors. They used feature players and some of their top writers and directors, making these movies much more entertaining than the "B" fare that RKO and Columbia produced.

Black Sheep ( 1935 ) was one such quickie, released through Fox studios. It is only 75-minutes long but is surprisingly entertaining.....much like many of the Charlie Chan films, also released through Fox.

Black Sheep stars Edmund Lowe as a professional gambler who befriends a young man ( Tom Brown ) onboard an ocean liner and saves him from the snare of a fashionable jewel thief ( Adrienne Ames ) who is attempting to blackmail him into smuggling her theft through customs. 

He also meets Janette Foster ( Claire Trevor ), a spunky young woman who is bent on having a good time. They enjoy a shipboard romance and join forces in winning back money from two playful poker champs ( Eugene Pallette, Jed Prouty ). Herbert Mundin and Billy Bevans are also onboard but only in brief comedic parts. 

Edmund Lowe was just past the peak in his long career but was still earning top billing in lesser Fox films like this one. He was such a debonair actor and added prestige to any film he appeared in. In 1935 alone he starred in nine pictures, including two other entertaining mysteries: Thunder in the Night and The Great Hotel Murder. If you want a change from watching Charlie Chan or Sherlock Holmes on a Friday night, then any Edmund Lowe mystery like this one is well worth checking out. 

The Desperadoes ( 1943 )

Columbia Pictures, being a poverty-row film studio for many years, was a little bit behind its rival studios throughout the 1930s and 1940s. They did not really make it into the big league until the mid-1930s when they began outputting some truly entertaining screwballs such as It Happened One Night ( 1934 ) and Frank Capra pictures like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ( 1939 ). Technicolor was still a relatively new medium in the late 1930s, but studios like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers and Paramount jumped on the color bandwagon, quickly hiring experts in the field of Technicolor to help them launch their upcoming blockbuster films like Gone With the Wind, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Wizard of Oz. Columbia Pictures didn't  release their first Technicolor picture until 1943....but when they did they made it a doozy.

It was a western entitled The Desperadoes, and it featured one of the newest contract players at Columbia - Glenn Ford - as well as that charismatic warhorse of the westerns - Randolph Scott. Ford portrayed a wanted criminal who came out of hiding to do a bank job in a small western outpost, but instead falls in love with a local girl ( Evelyn Keyes ) and decides to reform. 

A truly good western features colorful characters, plenty of adventure, a gentle romance, beautiful locales, and an interesting protagonist, and The Desperadoes featured all of this. Plus, it was packaged within a sprightly 87 minutes. Columbia really hit the bullseye with this film.

Randolph Scott, always a "good guy", was often cast in the part of a just sheriff in westerns before he became a leading player in the Budd Boetticher films of the 1950s. In The Desperadoes, his character is not unlike Sheriff Will Wright from Jesse James ( 1939 ). In both films, Scott portrayed a sheriff who was willing to pull off his tin star long enough to let a criminal he has faith in escape.....even though this same criminal heads off into the sunset with his gal! The gal, in this case, being Evelyn Keyes, a sweet-natured filly who works in her father's ( Edgar "Uncle Joe" Buchanan ) stable. Her faith in Glenn Ford makes him willing to risk his life exposing the real criminals who pulled the bank heist in town....one of whom happens to be Evelyn's father. 

Also in the cast was Claire Trevor as a sympathetic saloon gal, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams as Ford's pal "Nitro", Raymond Walburn, Porter Hall and Joan Woodbury.