Robin Hood of El Dorado

Another of my recent movie watches that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection is Robin Hood of El Dorado.

The movie is based on Joaquin Murrieta (played here by Warner Baxter), a legendary figure from around the time California became a US territory. Anglos are going to be coming west, a trend that's only exacerbated when gold is discovered and that gold rush is set off. A lot of the newcomers have no concern for the Mexicans and their land claims, and so it is with Joaquin. Some Anglos kill his wife, and then when he and his brother come into town, they accuse the brother of rustling and kill him!

Despite there being one good American in the form of Bill Warren (Bruce Cabot), who tries to stop all this. But he's powerless to do so. When Joaquin meets Three-Fingered Jack (J. Carrol Naish), an outlaw gangster, Joaquin decides to fall in with the gang. Joaquin's plan is to go after the Anglo newcomers and try to help the Mexicans, but the law and the Production Code aren't going to look too kindly on it all.

Robin Hood of El Dorado is an interesting little movie. In many ways it's little more than a B western, but William Wellman directed and he had already made a whole bunch of zippy social commentary movies at MGM, so he tried to make as much as he could out of this story, turning Murrieta's struggle into a question of nationalism, something which certainly enhances the movie even if we know where it's going.

Warner Baxter was past his peak when he made this but still does his best with the material, as do Cabot, Naish, and the rest of the cast. Interestingly enough, a couple of years after this movie was made, MGM enlisted Carey Wilson (of those awful Nostradamus shorts) to narrate an MGM historical short about Murrieta, and that showed up on TCM not long after the most recent airing of Robin Hood of El Dorado. I didn't get to see the short, but the feature is certainly worth a watch as a good example of Warner Bros.' B movies.