Run of the Arrow

In addition to foreign films, I feel like I've got a somewhat disproportionate number of westerns sitting on my DVR waiting for me to watch and review them before they expire. One of those movies that I hadn't heard of before the last time it showed up on TCM was Run of the Arrow.

The movie opens with something that's a looming theme in quite a few Hollywood westerns, the US Civil War. Specifically, the movie informs us it's the last day of the war. Virginian O'Meara (Rod Steiger) shoots Union Army lieutenant Driscoll (Ralph Meeker), although Driscoll survives. O'Meara takes Driscoll to where General Lee is, although he learns that Lee is in the process of surrendering, thereby ending the war. O'Meara had been a farmer on one of those hardscrabble farms, so on returning home to his mother, there's not much of a life for such a defeated Confederate soldier to return home to. There's that frontier out west, of course, where a man can start life fresh, so O'Meara decides he's going to do just that.

Some time later, in a part of the west that still has more natives than Americans, O'Meara meets one of the natives, an elderly and dying Sioux, Walking Coyote (Jay C. Flippen, yes, playing a native American). The two, however, meet a band from a different sub-tribe of the Sioux, who threaten to kill the two men. Walking Coyote, being Sioux, knows the "Run of the Arrow", which involves running a gauntlet of men trying to shoot arrows at you. If you survive the gauntlet, you're basically free, or some such.

O'Meara survives and winds up with yet another sub-tribe of the Sioux, the Lakota, headed by Blue Buffalo (Charles Bronson). O'Meara falls in love with one of the women who tends to the wounds, and decides he wants to become a member of the tribe, largely because the Lakota also understand that the Americans are moving west and destroying another people's way of life much the same way that O'Meara thinks the northerners destroyed the southern way of life in the recently ended civil war.

Soon enough, the Americans do come, in the form of Capt. Clark (Brian Keith) and his cavalry who have been given the task of finding a suitable location to build their new fort. The Sioux have negotiated that it be built on land that's going to interfere less with their traditional hunting grounds, and give O'Meara the job of playing scout to the cavalry since he's got such a good command of English. And wouldn't you know it, but serving under Capt. Clark is... Lt. Driscoll!

O'Meara sees all of this as his chance to get back at the Americans for what they did to Virginia, while there are also a lot of US Army men who don't care for the Indians. As is usually the case in these movies, the treaty gets violated, and there's a decisive battle between the US Army and the Indians.

Run of the Arrow was made at RKO near the end of the studio's existence, so it has the feel of a movie that doesn't really have the budget it should have had. (At least the print TCM ran is much better looking than the one they run for Glory which is from a similar point in RKO's death throes.) The movie has an interesting premise, although it feels to me like it suffers from quite a bit of implausibility. Then again, it was directed by Sam Fuller, so one should expect it to rebel against the traditional constraints of Hollywood's view of what America should become: the idea of O'Meara's redemption feels like it's a metaphor for the post-Red Scare era of the 1950s.

Ultimately, while I find Run of the Arrow a bit uneven, I think it's got more pluses than minuses.

Sing and Like It

Some time back TCM ran a morning with several of the films of 1930s comic actress Pert Kelton. Another one that I hadn't heard of was Sing and Like It. Since the synopsis sounded interesting enough, I as always decided to record it so I could eventually watch it and put up this post on the movie.

ZaSu Pitts plays Annie Snodgrass, a housewife married to Oswald (John Qualen, credited including his middle initial although it's unmistakeably his voice) who has a thing for amateur theater. And I definitely mean amateur, as these people are definitely not ready for the big time. Annie sings one of those sappy songs of the era about being thankful for your mother, and it's not just the insipid lyrics, but Annie's lousy vocal stylings that make the song truly a disaster.

However, passing by the theater where they're practicing, and hearing the voice, is Fenny Sylvester (Nat Pendleton). He's a gangster, meaning that he's got a fair amount of money, along with a lack of scruples about threatening violence to get his way. He hears the song, and for whatever odd reason -- the movie is a comedy, after all -- decides that he loves this song. Never mind that everybody around him like his second-in-command Toots McGuire (Ned Sparks) thinks Annie is terrible. Fenny is the boss, so he gets his way. And having heard Annie, he wants to do his good duty by putting her in a show.

Nothing less than the best will do for Fenny, and he's able to use those threats to get people like theater producer Frink (Edward Everett Horton) to help mount the stage show, despite Frink's obvious horror at hearing Annie's voice. There's also Fenny's girlfriend Ruby (that's Pert Kelton), who gets tasked with making Annie come across as a higher-class stage lady. But there's not all that much they can do to make this nice but thoroughly untalented woman a success.

So it's decided that the thing to do to give the show some oomph is to stage a publicity campaign involving Annie going missing, except that she won't really go missing because everybody who matters will know exactly where she is until she shows up in time for the big premiere. The only thing is, Annie gets kidnapped for real.

Sing and Like It was, I think, not conceived as anything more than a B movie. But considering the cast of very good supporting actors, they all take the material and run with it for all it's worth, making it surprisingly funny. Then again, considering the cast, it shouldn't be surprising that they're all adept at this sort of comedy. They'd all played the sorts of roles they've got here enough.

Tragic Russ Columbo

One of the shorts that I had on my DVR waiting for me to post on a day when I had another post for something else to write up. This time, the short is musical two-reeler called That Goes Double.

The short opens up at an office where a young man and woman are both big fans of a radio singer named Russ Columbo, who is in the running to become the King of Radioland. There's an older-looking bookkeper in the office, however, who hates Columbo, because he looks a lot like Columbo and gets stopped by people and asked about it. This character is of course also played by Russ Columbo, who was about 25 at the time the short was made although the bookkeeper looks older.

For some reason this bookkeeper goes to the event where the King of Radioland is going to be named, which you don't think he'd do considering he doesn't like Columbo. There's enough of a crowd that the real Columbo can't make it through to get to the stage, at which point one of the hosts recognizes the lookalike bookeeper and brings him up on stage, thinking it's the real Columbo. The real Columbo shows up and proves who he is by singing one of his songs.

But the real Columbo realizes that having a lookalike can prove useful. There are a lot of PR appearances a celebrity has to make, but doesn't necessarily want to. The real Russ offers to triple the lookalike's salary in exchange for doing some of those appearances. Of course, there's bound to be an issue that the lookalike isn't much of a singer.

Soon enough, a socialite named Gloria, who is an admirer of Russ', wants to host a party with Russ singing one of his songs. This second half of the short is an excuse for a couple of talent agents to bring in various novelty acts, such as ukulele player Roy Smeck, or a trio of dancing roller skaters. The lookalike shows up on the night of the party, but the ruse is found out. There's more to the ruse than meets the eye, however....

That Goes Double is the sort of short that shows a good variety of what Hollywood studios were putting into their musical shorts to try to bring audiences into the theaters. At this time, of course, there was no television to showcase these talents, who are interesting albeit of varying talent levels. Some people may like Columbo's vocal stylings more than other people do.

Warner Bros. was presumably trying to groom Columbo for stardom as an actor, the way crooners at various studios started acting such as Bing Crosby over at Paramount or Dick Powell in a movie like 42nd. Street the same year as this one. Sadly, a freak accident on set a year later saw Columbo get shot by a prop gun but the projectile entered his head with enough force to kill him instantly, or at least that's how the story goes.

Briefs for April 7-9, 2026

TCM likes to advertise the wine club that puports to pair various wines with classic movies, in part because it's become a thing for famous people to lend their name to a winery, I'm guessing for tax purposes. On a similar vein, Leonard Maltin and his daughter Jessie have co-written a book Family Movie Night Menus which is the subject of tonight's TCM lineup. It's only a one night thing, and not every Tuesday in April as there are already spotlights on Texas and on Roger Corman. Of tonight's movies, I happen to have Meet Me in St. Louis (10:15 PM) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on my DVR, but of course I've already blogged about both of them.

A lesser-seen movie that's on my DVR and I've already blogged about, is Blonde Ice, which if memory serves was part of a Noir Alley presentation. It's getting another airing tomorrow, April 8, at 10:45 AM on TCM, and since it's one of those more obscure movies that doesn't show up so often, it's definitely worth mentioning compared to some other movies.

As for FXM, there's not much that I haven't seen before. But the Tyrone Power version of Nightmare Alley is on the schedule tomorrow, April 8, at 6:00 AM. Carmen Jones, meanwhile, will be on FXM at 8:50 AM on April 9.

Today is James Garner's birthday, as I mentioned yesterday in my post on How Sweet It Is!. Tomorrow marks the birth anniversary of Mary Pickford, not that TCM is honoring it. It's also the birth anniversary of songwriter E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, who wrote a whole bunch of stuff used in MGM movies, notably "Over the Rainbow" in The Wizard of Oz. He also wrote Finian's Rainbow, which is one of the rare movies I gave up on largely because I found it such a phony musical and the characters unappealing. Maybe I'll finally get through it some time, but I don't know.

For some values of sweet

I didn't intend to do posts on two of what I refer to as the 1960s "generation gap" movies in fairly close succession, after last week's post on Don't Make Waves. I also didn't intend to do posts on two Debbie Reynolds movies a few weeks apart, after I Love Melvin. But it turns out there's a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM tomorrow, April 7, that relates to both of those films. That movie is How Sweet It Is! at 8:00 AM as part of a birthdy salute to actor James Garner.

After wannabe groovy opening titles and one of those awful 1960s MOR songs, the action shifts to a bedroom in an upper-middle-class suburban house in New Rochelle, NY, where a man and a woman are in bed together making mad passionate love -- or least as mad and passionate as you could get on screen in 1968 -- in the middle of the day. The woman, Jenny Henderson (Debbie Reynolds), is worried about Davey (Donald Losby) returning home from work and catching the two in bed together. Davey does show up, but in a twist it turns out that Davey is Jenny's teenaged son, and the man in bed is Grif Henderson (James Garner), who is Jenny's wife and Davey's father.

Grif is a photojournalist, and the magazine he works for sends him on foreign assignments often enough that he doesn't get to see Jenny so often. Worse is that he doesn't get to see Davey, which worries Mom since she knows Davey needs a father figure. So when Grif goes to have a father/son chat, he learns that Davey is dating Bootsie (Hilary Thompson), the daughter of Grif's boss at the magazine. Bootsie is going to be spending the summer on one of those guided student tours of Europe, and Davey wants to use the money from his job to go over to Europe and follow Bootsie around. Dad kind of likes the idea -- it's a good way to learn about girls -- but Mom isn't so certain.

So what Jenny's Mom does is get Bootsie's mom to put pressure on Bootsie's dad. He, as the editor of the magazine, is planning to send a photographer along to document the trip for the magazine -- American student life on the European grand tour or some such. Perhaps it can be arranged so that Grif is the photographer, and Davey his assistant, so Dad can watch to see that Davey doesn't get into too much hijinks. Jenny, for her part, will rent a house on the Riviera for the family to stay in after the tour.

Except that Jenny is a bit naïve and gets taken in by an obvious con artist (Terry-Thomas in a brief role) and the transatlantic voyage offers no prospects of rekindling the romance. When everybody gets to France, Jenny goes south to the house they've rented for the summer, only to find out that the owner, Philippe Maspere (Maurice Ronet), a prominent lawyer, is living there as his summer house. But since there's no place else for Jenny to go and he's obviously attracted to her, he lets her rent the place for the second half of what she was going to pay the agent.

The standard love triangle hijinks ensue, with Philippe kinda-sorta pursuing Jenny, who for her part seems flattered although she really does love Grif. Grif, meanwhile, is being pursued by the guide Nancy, who is thrilled to have an adult male with her after having to spend so much time with teenagers. One coincidence leads to another, and the movie climaxes with Grif and Jenny getting arrested; Jenny getting bailed out by a bordello owner (she's in a holding pen with the owner's stable of prostitutes); and Grif and Davey showing up at the bordello.

From what I've read, James Garner hated How Sweet It Is!, although he enjoyed the people he worked with on the movie. I can't say I disagree with him. The premise, beyond a middle-aged couple still having a sex drive but mostly unable by circumstance to act upon it, is forced, and the budget doesn't even allow for the sort of establishing shots or location shooting other "Hollywood goes to Europe" movies of the era had. Worse, a lot of the movie feels like it's trying to appeal to a younger crowd but failing badly. The movie also has any number of plot holes. The ocean voyage wouldn't give a husband and wife a cabin together? The teenagers' given ages are also much too young.

If you want to watch another example of Hollywood's difficulty in adjusting to changing social values in the 1960s, How Sweet It Is! fits the bill. But it's not a particuarly good movie.

TCM Star of the Month Apirl 2026: Sophia Loren

Sophia Loren in Two Women (Apr. 6, 9:15 PM)

Now that we're into the first full week of a new month and past the Easter holiday, it's time for some of the traditional programming features to show up again on TCM. Most notably, this means the Star of the Month goes from three nights of George Brent to four nights of Sophia Loren, whose movies will be appearing every Monday night in April in prime time. The salute actually kicks of at 8:00 PM tonight not with a movie, but with an interview she did at the TCM Film Festival a decade or so ago. Tonight includes her Oscar-winning performance in Two Women at 9:15 PM, followed at 11:00 PM by Legend of the Lost, a title that I saw showing up in the on-demand section of one or another of the free streaming services only to discover that it was an aggregator for the paid portion. So I'm recording that one tonight.

Sophia Loren and David Niven in Lady L (Apr. 14, 2:15 AM)

The second week of the salute brings another of Loren's movies that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Lady L, which is a bit of a surprise since I think this is one released in the US by MGM. I'm pretty certain I've seen the trailer show up enough. Anyhow, time to get this one on and then off the ever-growing watch list.

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in A Special Day (Apr. 21, 3:30 AM)

The last two Monday nights bring a rather more eclectic line-up of movies, including Man of La Mancha (another one I haven't seen) on April 27, but I'd like to mention the fine performances of A Special Day in the wee hours of April 21, since it's mostly a two-character play with fine performances from Loren and frequent Italian co-star Marcello Mastroianni. Surprisingly, I don't see Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow on the TCM schedule this month.

Warner Bros. B Urban Corruption Drama #23489567826

I've mentioned a lot how I like the Warner Bros. B movies, and this is often the case even when the plots turn out to be implausible. Another good example of this is Strange Alibi. I presume it turns up often enough on TCM, but I don't think I had noticed it until the last time it showed up several months back.

The backdrop is one that's not uncommon for B movies in the pre-World War II era: a big city where there's a crime syndicate, and they've been able to infiltrate various parts of the administration, leaving them free to act with impunity. When somebody does threaten to turn state's witness, that person is immediately shot. The police are quick to find the killer but wouldn't you know it the killer "commits suicide" by hanging.

The police chief, Sprague (Jonathan Hale), brings in a bunch of his detectives to have a long talk about the matter. The chief immediately gets into it with one of the men, Sgt. Joe Geary (a very young Arthur Kennedy), who proceeds to deal with his temporary suspension by getting into a fight with the police chief, which makes the suspension permanent. Wait until Joe's poor fiancée Alice (Joan Perry) finds out.

Except that all of this was a ruse. Sprague knows the syndicate has dirty cops working for it, although he can't figure out who. He wants Geary to figure that out, except that having Geary do it in uniform is going to present a problem for various reasons, hence the nonsense about getting Geary fired. This mission is so super-secret that only Geary and Sprague know about it. Sprague hasn't even bothered to tell anybody like the state Attorney General or governor or anyone in the feds.

So you can probably guess what happens next. Geary goes to an establishment known to be a hangout for syndicate types, run by Katie (Florence Bates), who isn't exactly law-abiding but also has a heart of gold which is going to come into play for the climax. Joe works from there, getting into the good graces of the syndicate by shooting some high-priced liquor bottles from a bar owner who's shorting the syndicate. Geary finds a guy named McKaye who can provide key evidence, only to discover too late that they're being watched. When Geary takes McKaye to Sprague's house (really, they're meeting there despite the code to communicate?), the bad guys follow along and kill Sprague in a way that clearly implicates Geary and only Geary, getting him sent up the river as it were to a nasty prison. The only way Joe is going to be able to clear his name is to find McKaye. After all, nobody else knows that Geary was working with Sprague to weed out corruption.

Geary is eventually able to escape, but has very few places to go. Worse, McKaye is found, but he's found rather dead. Still, Geary has some luck in that the governor is working on weeding out corruption and might just be able to help Geary out....

The whole plot of Strange Alibi feels like a mish-mash of tropes that had all been done before. But this being Warner Bros., they do it well even if the plot as a whole bears little resemblance to reality. They're also helped out by a fine stable of mostly supporting character-type actors. Arthur Kennedy, of course, would go on to much bigger things (and five Oscar nominations), but at this point nobody knew what they had in him. And Strange Alibi is also, like all of the good Warner B movies, breezily fast, clocking in at a sprightly 63 minutes. Definitely another one worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM.

A family friendly movie for Easter

Another of the movies that's on my DVR and getting another airing on TCM soon is the animated Watership Down. You can see it tomorrow, April 5, at 8:00 AM.

The movie opens with an origin story, about how the Sun god, named Frith and voiced by Michael Hordern, created all the animals and plants and how the animals lived harmoniously as herbivores and mostly alike. The rabbits, however do what rabbits do and multiply, eating too much of the grass. This causes Frith to turn a bunch of animals into carnivores who will be more than happy to eat rabbits, although rabbits do get the gifts of speed and cleverness.

Cut to the present day, in a bucolic part of Britain. Fiver (Richard Briers) is a rabbit living in a warren run by a chief (Ralph Richardson) and his deputy Capt. Holly (John Bennett), where everybody lives happil, eating, sleeping, and creating new little bunnies. Except one day Fiver, who is a bit timid by nature, has a vision in which the field suddenly becomes covered with blood. (It's later explained that developers turn the field into a new housing estate, severely disrupting the warren.) Fiver and his brother Hazel (John Hurt) go to the chief with the suggestion that the rabbits are going to need to move somewhere safer, although understandably a lot of the rabbits aren't so certain they agree, thus splitting the warren in two.

Fiver, Hazel, and a handful of other rabbits leave even though the chief and Capt. Holly try to stop them. The smaller group are successful in getting away, although trying to find a new place to start a new warren that's safe isn't going to be easy, since these rabbits have no idea where they're going and little idea of the big bad world that's out there. They have various misadventures in the forest and at a farm where a man breeds rabbits for food, before coming to the conclusion that they have to go someplace like the top of a hill that has a commanding view of the surrounding area in order to be safe.

They get there and live happily ever after, with one small problem. They don't have any doe rabbits. How are they going to procreate and make the new rabbits necessary to keep the warren going? Fortunately, they also save a seagull named Kehaar (Zero Mostel) who has lost his way and is somewhat injured. Kehaar offers to fly around looking for doe rabbits. They eventually learn of another warren called Efrara where the leader, General Woundwort (Harry Andrews) is such a nasty dictator with underlings who keep the regular rabbits in a state of terror that some of them would like to leave if only they could get the courage to do so. Hazel infiltrates the warren, becoming one of Woundwort's camp commandants if you will, in a move that seems like it would have been a strategic blunder. Of course Hazel leads a break to safety, and Woundwort is pissed, going after the escapees.

Watership Down is a surprisingly dark movie for something that sounds on the surface like it's going to have the trappings of a children's book. And since animation is -- and was even more so in the 1970s -- thought of as a medium for children's stories, Watership Down's open look at the violence of death is not what you might expect. Then again, Bambi many years earlier also did so. Unsurprisingly, since Disney was really the only quality animation studio in the 1970s -- compare them to the animation of a movie like Treasure Island that I reviewed not too long ago -- it stands to reason that people are going to compare Watership Down to Disney. It's a comparison that doesn't always come off well, particularly in the case of Kehaar the gull who to me is a rather obnoxious character.

The animation is better than what Hanna-Barbera or Filmways were doing on TV, but not as good as the Disney classics. The story is good, although from what I've read one might get more out of the movie if one is already more familiar with the book, which I never read. A plus however is that this, being a British production, is also rather different from what one would expect from a Hollywood movie. Definitely, Watership Down is one that's worth watching, warts and all.

Certainly not the middle

A movie that I wasn't certain whether or not I'd seen before showed up on TCM some time back, so I recorded it: The Beginning or the End. Eventually I got around to watching it, and as far as I could tell I hadn't seen it before. A search of the blog claims that I certainly hadn't blogged about it anyway, so now that it's coming up again on TCM. it's time to rectify that oversight with this post. That airing is early tomorrow, April 4, at 4:00 AM.

The movie starts off with one of the more unique framing scenes I can think of. A time capsule is being prepared, only to be opened in the year 2446 which would from the point of the movie be 500 years in the future. A spokesman on the film in the time capsule talks about the development of the atomic bomb, and that the movie the people of 2446 would be about to watch is the documentation of that effort, how it ended that war in the distant past, and the hope that the atom could be used for peaceful purposes....

Back in the late 1930s, Matt Cochran (Tom Drake playing one of the fictional characters in the movie) is a graduate student who with some professors is working on the idea of nuclear fission. This of course results in energy being released, along with the realization that the energy could be used to make a bomb. Several of the professors of the day, like Robert Oppenheimer (Hume Cronyn) and Enrico Fermi (Joseph Calleia) feel that President Roosevelt should be informed of this. After all, war was coming to Europe, and it was pretty obvious that if scientists in America could figure all this out, certainly scientists in Nazi Germany would figure it out too.

Research continues on a small scale until December 1941, which is of course when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sending the Americans into the war. President Roosevelt authorizes a covert spending of some billions of dollars for Oppenheim and the other scientists to figure out a way to weaponize the splitting of the atom, which of course has to be a controlled reaction since, if it can't be stopped during development, it's the places where the research is being done that will get blown up.

The military point man for all this is Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves (Brian Donlevy), with his second in command being Lt. Col. Jeff Nixon (Robert Walker; and again as far as I'm aware another of the fictional characters). Sites are set up in Illinois where Fermi was based; in Oak Ridge, TN; and in out-of-the way Alamagordo, NM. With a war being on, Americans are portrayed as happy to move out to help the government's war effort, although they have no knowledge of what the government is trying to do.

Now, since this is all based on history, we know that that first controlled nuclear bomb is detonated at Trinity in July, 1945. Harry Truman is at the Potsdam Conference, and it's his job to make the decision to actually use the bomb against Japan in Hiroshima and then Nagaski. Cochran is one of the civilians sent out to make certain the US bombers who have been running the mission will know how to deal with this special new kind of bomb.

The Beginning or the End is of course based on real historical events. However, liberties had to be taken with the story for a bunch of reasons. One is of course security; the movie was made only about a year after the end of World War II, and there was still a large amount that was classified and couldn't be revealed. There's also the fact that apparently, real people still alive had veto power over their portrayal in movies at the time. Several of the real scientists, notably Niels Bohr, didn't want to be used, necessitating more changes. The biggest reason, however, was the dramatic one for the perceived benefit of the audience. That's why the love story between Cochran and his wife (Beverly Tyler), as well as a secondary romance between Nixon and his girlfriend (Audrey Totter), are shoehorned into the movie.

It's these sops to the moviegoing public that make the movie one that's not so well remembered today, due to their lessening the dramatic power of the movie. It was only a few years later that Above and Beyond about the Enola Gay was released, with more realistic stuff coming out as the Cold War was winding down and culminating with the movie Oppenheimer a few years back. The Beginning or the End is competently enough made, but it does have the marks of MGM and the Hollywood studio system all over it, both for good and bad.

Strange Western on TCM

TCM's lineup tomorrow (Apr. 3) morning and afternoon is a bunch of mid-1950s widescreen stuff that I think is all from Warner Bros. One of the movies is one that I hadn't blogged about before and was on my DVR from the last time TCM ran it. That movie is Strange Lady in Town, airing at 4:00 PM, so as is my way around here I watched the movie in order to be able to put up this post for the upcoming showing.

After the credits, a title card informs us that the scene is the New Mexico territory in 1880, not far from Santa Fe. A wagon is going over the landscape, only to crash, fortunately near a bunch of ranchers. The lady passenger on the wagon is Julia Garth (Greer Garson) from Boston. She's a doctor in an era when lady doctors were uncommon, and out west even less common. But one of the ranchers has some pains so she treats the guy much to their surprise.

The military adjutant coming to pick her up arrives, but the two get waylaid on the way to what's going to be Julia's new house. Several bandit types ask about the military court of inquiry being held, although the adjutant knows knowing, not having been there. The adjutant in question, Martinez-Martinez, is working for Lt. David Garth (Cameron Mitchell), who happens to be Julia's brother, and one of the reasons Julia is coming out to New Mexico. His is also one of the two main plot strands going through the movie.

The other plot strand includes the doctor currently in town, Dr. O'Brien (Dana Andrews). He's got an adolescent niece Spurs (Lois Smith) who is quite the tomboy, and who has a thing for Lt. Garth even though he isn't right for Spurs. Getting back to Dr. O'Brien, he's one of those old-fashioned people who thinks it's not proper for ladies to be doctors, which is going to be an even bigger problem considering that she knows the latest advances in medicine from back east which are going to show her to be right in a bunch of situations Dr. O'Brien wrong. But at some point along the way Dr. O'Brien is going to fall in love with Julia.

As for Lt. Garth, I mentioned that he's not quite right for Spurs, even though she doesn't get that yet. He likes to gamble and is quick-tempered, which are traits liable to get an officer in trouble. There's also that court of inquiry mentioned in the opening. Lt. Garth tells his sister that the court of inquiry is being held because somebody sold the army a bunch of cattle that turned out not to have been owned by the person doing the selling, which equates to cattle rustling and a serious crime. As you can guess, especially considering a comment when Julia mentions not being able to buy a place for her on an officer's salary, Lt. Garth might know more about the rustling than he's letting on.

Finally, for a movie set in 1880 New Mexico, the studio had to insert a couple of historial tropes: Dr. Garth meets Billy the Kid (Nick Adams) when he and another man come in because of a toothache. Later in the movie, Garth treats Civil War general, and by this time territorial governor, Lew Wallace.

Strange Lady in Town combines a lot of different plot stuff into what is in many ways a pastiche of the Old West. It's a movie that's definitely competently made, although it's also one that's rather old-fashioned, in a way that reminds me of another Garson movie Blossoms in the Dust. It's certainly not the first film I'd think to recommend regarding any of the people in the movie, but it's also one that there's not anything particularly wrong with. It just doesn't do anything new. In the days before TV, this would have been enough, but having been made later, it's easy to see why this one has become little remembered.