I've seen some, but not many and am not a fan of old B-westerns, but this one, "Scarlet River," is clever. Besides being a B-western, it's a film about film, a type of movie I tend to enjoy.After their filming is repeatedly interrupted by civilization, a film crew rents a ranch for filming their western. Real-life B-western star Tom Keene plays B-western star Tom Baxter, the film-within-the-film's star who is as much of a cowboy on screen as off. In the fictional reality, he kisses the ranch owner and protects her interests against the baddies trying to steal her property and helps her raise her younger brother (including by spanking him for smoking) in between his acting. The ranch owner watches him filming scenes, including him kissing his on-screen romantic interest, and wants to be with him, while her younger brother watches his stunt work and wants to be like him. To save the day, the actor playing an actor acts once more over by donning makeup to pretend to be one of the baddies.Really, Yakima Canutt, who also has a bit part in the film, did the stunts for "Scarlet River," but, for the film-within-the-film, Tom Baxter does his own stunts, except for one. For that one, one of the baddies (played by Lon Chaney Jr., before he turned to monster movies) tries to do a stunt for the absent Baxter, but fails. Really, Canutt did that one, too--a famous stunt he repeated in "Stagecoach" (1939).Another interesting character is Ulysses, who has the part of the stuttering comic relief, a common, if bigoted, trope of these types of films. Ulysses is a ranch hand and wannabe screenwriter who writes a script that mirrors the "real" drama of the baddies trying to steal the woman's ranch. Rather than employ him for his writing, the filmmakers use him as comic relief, too. The director also tells Ulysses that if he figures out a trick, he'll hire him. The surrogate author of "Scarlet River" within the film, Ulysses, in the end, solves the trick.

An inexpensive Western starring Tom Keene in a ten-gallon corker and directed by nobody you ever heard of, but it's enjoyable in its own quiet way, a playful descent into the vulgate.The story has Edgar Buchanan trying to direct an old-fashioned Western in the Hollywood area and being unable to find a suitably remote location. He accepts an invitation to shoot the movie on a real cattle ranch. El Patrón is more than happy to have the cast and crew because the ranch is in trouble.Okay so far. Now you must hold on because the time line gets a little tortured. This is a modern ranch we're talking about. Yet there are cattle rustlers, the ranchers wear real cowboy outfits, including real old-fashioned pistol belts with real pistols and real bullets, and the villains wear black hats while the actor/hero, Tom Keene, wears a large white hat. And although Keene is a popular movie star, he too carries a real chrome-plated Peacemaker. Things get all mixed up. A galloping horse pursues another galloping horse, or a 1933 bus pursues a galloping horse, or -- well, it doesn't matter. There's a lot of action.These old Westerns look rudimentary but sometimes they have to be admired, if only for having overcome the difficulties of shooting an action picture on location. The equipment was bulky and stolid. An earlier reviewer claimed that the cameras were encased in containers as big as dog house. This is nonsense. They were bigger than that. They were bigger than blimps. They were bigger than the Hindenburg.Yakima Canutt is the stunt man who "does all of Tom's tricks himself." It's fascinating to have your attention deliberately drawn to the effort and skill of what was called a simple "pickup." That is, a girl is injured on a path, a cowboy gallops up and swings her to the saddle behind him. We've seen it dozens of times without really thinking about what would happen to our own spines if we were to try such a simple trick. Stunt men are a clubby lot, and Canutt has always been considered one of the most accomplished. He worked in Hollywood Westerns for years. With Canutt in the saddle, man and horse seemed to be the same animal, just as the Aztecs are said to have believed of Cortez's horsemen.Other notables in the cast include Betty Furness who went on to a successful career as a spokesman for Westinghouse and a consumer advocate in Washington. Also present is Lon Chaney, Jr., who went on to a career as the Wolf Man and ultimately an alcoholic.

Viewers of this little Western get some interesting surprises near its beginning when Tom Keene visits the studio commissary. Brief bits from a very young Joel McCrea, Myrna Loy, Bruce Cabot, Rochelle Hudson, and other stars of the 1930s add an extra dimension to the picture. Note also Yakima Canutt's famous jump to the horses, this time pulling a wagon instead of a stagecoach. Location shooting was done at Vasquez Rocks, so film fans watching this film will see the same terrain that you can find in "The Flintstones" and episodes of "Star Trek." This is a Western that wasn't afraid to kid the genre, so if you take the opening scene very seriously, you're in for a big surprise.

That's my favorite line from this adorable comedy-western. I liked the premise (cowboy movie people helping real ranchers with their problems) but wasn't expecting anything special...this was a surprise. The story is lively, the script is sharp, and Tom Keene is a hoot as the dumb-looking pretty-boy hero. I've seen few westerns (except post-"Support Your Local Sheriff" parodies) that acknowledge the too-good-looking ultra-wholesome hero but this one does it well.From now on I'm going to keep an eye out for screenwriter Harold Shumate, whose script delivers exactly what western-watchers of the time wanted, but adds plenty of funny lines and charming situations. I'm also going to take a little more care seeking out movies with Tom Keene, whose performance succeeds as a strong hero performance, but also self-parody as well. I hadn't recognized him as another goofball hero, Col. Tom Edwards in the classic badfilm "Plan 9 from Outer Space." I'm eager to find out if he played such quotably strange characters in other pics.