Edison, the Man

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR that was getting close to expiring was Edison, the Man. Once again, having seen it, now you get the blog post on it.

I did a post on Young Tom Edison at the end of 2024. At the end of that movie, MGM announced that there would soon be another movie telling the second chapter of Tom Edison's life, which is of course Edison, the Man. This second chapter opens in 1929, on the golden jubilee of light to commemorate 50 years of Edison having come up with incandescent lighting. As you might guess, this is where we're going to get Yet Another Flashback, going all the way back to the early 1870s, before the invention of the light bulb.

Edison has been working as a telegraph operator, but he's an inventor at heart, so he makes his way to New York where he's got a friend, Bunt Cavatt (Lynne Overman), who suggested he come because perhaps he can set Edison up with some research space. That space is in the basement of the business owned by Taggart (Gene Lockhart with a ridiculous beard), who runs a business showing gold prices.

Edison had already invented a stock ticker by this point, but the invention was a failure. In any case, it had given him some experience with electricity which was a new thing at that time. So when Taggart's ticker fails, Edison is able to fix it, getting him an in to Western Union and its research division, run by General Powell (Charles Coburn). Working in the same building is young Mary Stillwell (Rita Johnson). As you might guess, the two fall in love and get married. (In real life, Edison was married twice; Mary was Edison's first wife who died in the mid-1880s after the action of this movie ends.)

Edison comes up with another invention that he's able to sell to Powell and Taggart for a substantial sum, which enables him to build his own laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ and bring over many of the people he had worked with at Western Union. Edison's dream is to come up with an incandescent light to replace gas lighting, although it's an intractable problem. He comes up with some inventions, but eventually he gets to the point where he's heavily in debt and he might even lose the laboratory if he can't come up with another invention to pay off that debt.

That invention isn't the electric light yet; first is the recording of sound on the forerunner of the grammophone. But he's still working on electric lighting, and Bunt is stupid enough to tell reporters that Edison has more or less solved the problem of incandescent light. So we get a sequence in which Edison and his men go through a lot of unsuccessful tries before he finally comes up with a filament that allows for a workable light bulb. But then there's the problem of the creation of the large amounts of electricity necessary to run the bulbs that would light up a whole city. Taggart is still there to oppose Edison....

Edison, the Man is a dramatically interesting movie, although by all accounts it's more or less only tangentially related to the real Thomas Edison. Sure, Edison invented a sound recorder and an incandescent light bulb, but some of the other aspects of his life, such as his being fairly vicious in enforcing his patents, is completely overlooked. Spencer Tracy unsuprisingly does a good job with his role, as do the supporting characters, although the Bunt Cavatt character is a bit obnoxious and unlikable. Edison, the Man is very much a good example of the Hollywood biopic from the era before World War II. Despite its hagiolatrous inaccuracties, it's definitely worth a watch.

Vice Squad

Another Noir Alley entry that was sitting on my DVR about to expire was another one I hadn't heard of, largely because Eddie Muller has been picking a lot of B movies adjacent to noir having already presented the well-known ones from the major studios. This time, the movie in question was Vice Squad.

Jack Hartrampf (Porter Hall) is leaving the apartment of a young woman named Vickie. In the used car lot across the courtyard, a couple of criminals Pete (Lee Van Cleef) and Al (Edward Binns) are trying to steal a car, only to get caught in flagrante delicto by a cop. However, one of the car thieves shoots the patrolman, with Jack running over after the crooks flee, trying to help. The cop who arrives brings Jack down to the station in the hopes that he can give some information.

Meanwile, at the station, Capt. Barnaby (Edward G. Robinson) arrives for another day on the job. He's got a lot on his plate, and having to deal with the shooting of one of the cops serving under him only adds to his problems. And he's going to get another problem. Career criminal Frankie (Jay Adler), trying to get a charge thrown out, decides that he's going to do it by turning state's evidence. He's heard of a plot to rob a bank in the area. He fingers Al, although of course Barnaby doesn't know that Al was involved in the shooting of the patrolman.

Barnaby wants Jack to identify possible shooters in a line-up, but Jack has his own reasons for not wanting to do so, and claiming that it was too dark and his memory isn't so good and all that. The real reason is that Jack has a wife. He runs a mortuary, and claims that he has to go out of town overnights to pick up dead bodies for the funerals. If he cooperates with the police, then word will get out that he was really seeing another woman instead of going away on business.

Also getting involved in the intertwined plot is Mona Ross (Paulette Goddard). She run an "escort" service that provides the sort of women that people like Jack see. What none of them know is that one of the young women who works for her happens to be seeing one of the people who is involved in the bank robbery plot. Mona is also a useful source of information, which might be why Barnaby never really wants to arrest her and shut the whole operation down despite its skirting the edge of legality.

All of the sub-plots wind their way towards coming together, although because of the Production Code, you know that everything is going to be resolved with the bad guys getting what's coming to them. Crime, as they say, does not pay.

Vice Squad was made at a low point in Edward G. Robinson's career, but he still puts in a professional performance. Despite the B budget, the rest of the cast and the story are more than serviceable. The B status and not having been made at a major studio, I suppose it's not surprising that Vice Squad isn't so well known. It's the sort of movie that probably ought to be on some box set, certainly worth a watch if not anything spectacular.

Teddy the Rough Rider

Title card from Teddy the Rough Rider

Quite a few years back, I made mention of actor Sidney Blackmer playing US President Theodore Roosevelt on multiple occasions. One of these is in the Oscar-winning short Teddy the Rough Rider. This was part of a series of two-reelers that Warner Bros. made in Technicolor in the late 1930s and early 1940s about American history.

As the short opens, it's 1895, and Theodore Roosevelt has just been named police commissioner for New York City. There, he roots out corruption with his usual bluster, and starts setting his sight higher. He talks about the need for a strong national defense, which ultimately leads to his leading the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War of 1898. This makes him such a hero that he's catapulted into a run for Governor of New York state, which he wins.

But his aggressive policymaking doesn't exactly please the national Republican party. They respond by getting the incumbent president, William McKinley, to nominate Roosevelt for the vice-presidency in the presidential election of 1900. (McKinley's first vice-president had died in office and since this was before the 25th Amendment the office was vacant, necessitating the nomination of someone new anyway.) The plan is that the vice-presidency is the graveyard of politicians, while Roosevelt won't be able to refuse because of the clamor from America as a whole. Of course, McKinley is assassinated in office. Roosevelt then proceeds to act in ways that would theoretically make the "No Kings" people blanch in horror. Except that as we all know they want their own guy to be king and use the power of the presidency to punish the people they oppose politically. In any case, Roosevelt's actions are portrayed here as an unalloyed good.

Finally, Roosevelt leaves office. A few years later comes the Great War, and all of Roosevelt's sons go off to fight, with one losing his life in the war, something that according to the short was a mortal blow to Theodore Roosevelt too. All of this is compressed into the running-time of a two-reel short.

Teddy the Rough Rider is a hagiography that I suppose could serve as a jumping-off point for a deeper look into the life of Theodore Roosevelt, although the mythology around him and the praise for his imperial presidence means even the deeper looks would be superficial. Blackmer does well with the material he has.

One interesting thing is that although the short was released in 1940 and won the Academy Award for two-reel shorts that year, the print TCM ran was a re-release print as there's a clear copyright date of 1947 on it.

TCM Star of the Month November 2026: Burt Lancaster

Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones in their Oscar-winning performances in Elmer Gantry (Nov. 17, 10:45 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month, and that means that once again it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, that star is Burt Lancaster, since his birthday is in November; indeed, he was already Star of the Month back in November 2013 for his centenary. Lancaster's movies will be on TCM every Tuesday in November, starting in the afternoons and continuing through the prime time lineup. One good thing about this is that it gives me the chance to take a couple of the photos that I had posted back in the days when I was using Photobucket to host my pictures, and re-upload them to Blogger. Not that I care about Google having my classic Hollywood publicity stills and movie photos, since they're not really mine to begin with.

Burt Lancaster in The Killers (Nov. 3, 8:00 PM)

As far as I can tell, the tribute is roughly chronological, in the sense that the movies aren't strictly in chronological order, but each week is a later period in Lancaster's career than the preceding week. So today's first day is the 1940s and some 1950s; Nov. 10 is mostly 1950s; the 17th focuses on the 1960s; and the last week is the 1970s and the couple of 1980s films Lancaster made at the end of his career. This, as opposed to some tributes that group movies together by genre.

Burt Lancaster romping on the beach with Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (Nov. 10, 8:00 PM)

As an example, From Here to Eternity of course won Oscar's Best Picture for 1953, and it kicks off the prime time portion of the lineup at 8:00 PM on November 10. Immediately preceding that is Sweet Smell of Success, at 6:00 PM, although that movie was released a couple of years later.

Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success (Nov. 10, 6:00 PM)

Finally, I'd like to mention that I'm always thrilled to see another showing of Seven Days in May (Nov. 17, 2:00 PM), since the idea of the permanent bureaucracy and politicized officer corps of the military trying to do an end-around against a democractically elected president is something that's still relevant today.

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in Seven Days in May (Nov. 17, 2:00 PM)

Not a cartoon

Back in August, I did a post on the Charlton Heston movie 55 Days at Peking, I think for Ava Gardner's day in Summer Under the Stars. It's a movie that I couldn't help but think of as I was watching another Heston film, Khartoum.

Khartoum is the capital of modern-day Sudan, but a bit of a history lesson is in order. Back in the 1880s much of what is now Sudan was a sort of protectorate under Egypt since the two countries were both Muslim, although of different ethnicities, causing no end of friction. Meanwhile, Egypt wasn't particularly strong itself, being more or less a vassal to the Ottoman Empire. Egypt, however, was home to the Suez Canal, completed about a dozen years earlier and a vital transport link. So the British had troops stationed in Egypt to keep the Suez Canal open and the Egyptian government stable.

Further south in what is now Sudan, a man named Muhammed Ahmed (played in the movie by Laurence Olivier) claimed that he had been called upon by the original Muhammed to be the Mahdi (this is how I'll refer to the character for the rest of the post since that's also how he's referred to in the movie), which is a sort of Islamic version of the Messiah that to Christians is supposed to come in the end times. Further complicating matters is that other branches of Islam certainly weren't about to believe that this upstart from backwater Sudan was a Mahdi. So the Mahdi needed to assert absolute political power able to drive out the Egyptians to get the other Muslims to notice. As the movie opens, a former English soldier leads an Egyptian army south, only to get ambushed by the Mahdi's men.

This is a problem for the government of the day back in London, led by William Gladstone (Ralph Richardson). They can't really let the Mahdi overrun Sudan, or even worse get farther north. But there are a whole bunch of Egyptians stuck in Khartoum, and the British can't really let them get stranded to their fate. The fact that the ambushed Egyptians were led by a Briton makes action more necessary, at least for domestic political purposes. An envoy returned from Sudan, Col. Stewart (Richard Johnson), comes up with an idea which is to send Major-General Charles Gordon (Charlton Heston) back to Sudan. Gordon is known among the Sudanese people, and has a good reputation there as a more honest broker who helped destroy the slave trade. Perhaps Gen. Gordon can get the Egyptians out of Khartoum. If not, the British can wash their hands of the whole thing because Gordon's reputation means there's not a need to send the British army yet, which would provide its own set of political difficulties for the Gladstone government.

Gordon decides to accept the mission, but Gladstone, not trusting him, requires that Col. Stewart go along as an attaché. When the two finally get to Sudan, they realize that the Mahdist army has advanced farther north along the Nile than anybody knew, and that they threaten to surround Khartoum and besiege it. Gordon, with his reputation, is able to go to the Mahdi alone and unarmed, which creates a degree of trust between Gordon and the Mahdi to the point that the Mahdi reveals his true intentions.

So a war of waiting ensues, as the Mahdi waits for the right conditions to begin the final assault on Khartoum with Gordon figuring out a way to defend the city long enough for another way to get the Egyptians out besides sending them straight down the Nile which isn't an option. Political pressure mounts on Gladstone back in London, and he finally relents and allows the creation of a relief force under Maj. Kitchener, although he doesn't imbue the force with any urgency. Since all of this is based on real events, you can look up the history yourself to find out how it ended if you want to know going into the movie.

Khartoum is the sort of movie that I don't think could really be made today, at least certainly not in the form that it was made back in the mid-1960s. Modern sensibilities in the filmmaking community would probably insist on the portrayal of the British as unambiguously villanous. As for the film that we have, it's certainly competently made, and well acted, but the screenplay is the weak point here. It's slow, with a story that's more character driven than plot driven, and runs too long at over two hours (the exact running time will depend on whether the print includes the overture and exit music).

It could have been a Crime Does Not Pay subject

A short B movie that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some months that I recently got around to watching was the 1944 film The Last Ride. There's another film from 2011 with the same title about country singer Hank Williams, but this is a completely different film and story.

The movie's release date of 1944 puts it squarely in the middle of World War II. As you'll recall, there was a lot of rationing going on. No new automobiles were being made since all of the factories were converted to making vehicles for the military, and rubber for tires was in short supply too. So the young people who feel they're having their lives taken away from them through no fault of their own are not exactly thrilled. One group of youths finds that the tires on their car have been stolen, which is fact part of a tire racket. Joe, whose tires were stolen, learns from his friend Harry about the tire bootleggers, who are actually part of that racket by stealing the tires and then adulterating the rubber to turn one tire into more, and then charge through the nose for it. After getting his "new" tires, Joe goes for a drive, only for the tires to go bad, killing Joe and his girlfriend.

Virtuous policeman Pat Harrigan (Richard Travis) just knows that this is really a case of murder, but getting the goods on the people in the tire racket is going to be difficult. Indeed, he thinks he's got a couple of witnesses to Joe's being sold the illicit tires, but they get killed before they can testify. Pat's going to have to come up with another way to bring the gang to justice.

Worse, Pat's brother Mike (Charles Lang) sees to be making money on other people's misery, even though there's a war going on and a lot of propaganda about how everybody needs to do their part. Worse, a subplot has Mike as a romanti rival for Pat's girlfriend Kitty (a young Eleanor Parker). On the other hand, Mike's knowing a bunch of bad guys gives Pat an idea. He goes undercover with almost nobody other than the police chief (Wade Boteler) knowing. He takes a bribe in a way that's going to become very public and then punches the police chief to get himself "fired", which is quickly revealaed to be a ruse, not that you didn't know this before it's known.

If it's obvious to the viewer that Pat is going to be going undercover, it ought to be obvious to the bad guys too, although they seem to be surprisingly stupid for a gang that's been stealing people's tires for the rubber and making money hand over fist by doing it. They seem not to know that Pat is undercover, except for one guy who has the good sense to trail Pat to the otherwise deserted apartment house that serves as the rendezvous spot for Pat and the Chief. It puts Pat in danger, but since there's a Production Code and there's a war on anyway, you know that Pat is going to foil the gang at the end.

The Last Ride isn't a great movie, but it is a good example of what Warner Bros. could do with its B movies. It's also an interesting example of how the studios were contributing to the war effort in all sorts of ways, even to the propaganda of why we had to sacrifice our rubber for the war effort. For that reason alone the movie is worth one watch at least.

Madam Parton

Dolly Parton died back in September, and since the death was unexpected, I didn't really think about the movie of hers that I'd had sitting on my DVR since TCM ran it back in March or so. That movie is The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and recently I got around to watching it.

Jim Nabors plays Fred Wilkins, deputy sheriff of Lanville County, TX, under sheriff Ed Earl Dodd (Burt Reynolds). Linville County is famous for one thing: the Chicken Ranch, a brothel which had been open for decades. In an opening sequence, Fred informs us of the founding of the brothel at the beginning of the century, how it survived both the Depression as well as transfer in ownership from one madam to the next, and remained open until recent times, with the most recent proprietress being Mona Stangley (Dolly Parton).

Mona has some strict rules for her girls, but they're rules with a purpose, part of which is that the brothel not be hated by the people in town. In fact, thanks to those rules and Mona's charity work, the people in the county mostly like the brothel because it's fairly peaceful apart from the fact that it's selling sex. In short, they tolerate it, with even the sheriff not doing anything about it in part because he's in a fairly committed relationship with Mona, even if he doesn't plan to marry her.

But then big-city reporter Melvin Thorpe (Dom Deluise) comes onto the scene. He's a muckraker who plans to advance his career by, well, raking muck, so when he learns about the open secret of the Chicken Ranch, he decides he's going to whip up people in the rest of Texas against the Ranch. Somehow he does do this, with political pressure being put on Sheriff Dodd to close the place down. Dodd impresses upon Mona the fact that she should probably lay low for a while, at least until the political furor dies down, at which point she can quietly reopen the Ranch.

Except that the Ranch is also at the center of a tradition. Every year over Thanksgiving, the University of Texas and Texas A&M play the big in-state football game, and the alumni backers of both schools had a scheme whereby the team that won the game would be driven to the Chicken Ranch to have a night with the girls there. Unfortunately, the Ranch is supposed to be closed still over that Thanksgiving weekend, but the alumni don't care, and drive the winning team to the Ranch for a night of debauchery that really makes the news and pisses Thorpe off even more.

The plot of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a really good plot for a light comedy, the sort of thing that Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds excel at. Unfortunately, the movie is based on a Broadway musical, and naturally, the idea in producing the movie was to keep it a musical. The musical numbers mostly don't work here. The Melvin Thorpe numbers don't fit local TV news, with it making Thorpe come across as ridiculously obnoxious. And then the locker room number after the big football game absolutely brings the movie to a screeching halt. It's a bit of a shame becaus Parton and Reynolds are both likable here. Charles Durning, who plays the governor, earned an Oscar nomination and is qutie good too.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas really deserved a better fate than it got.

Briefs for Halloween 2026

We're up to Halloween for another year, which means a usual crop of horror movies on all the channels, including FXM. Granted, the schedule this morning started off with Black Widow which isn't exactly horror, but it's always nice to see something like The Innocents show up. As for TCM, they've got some Looney Tunes horror cartoons in the end-of-the-morning block. The first of them is Transylvania 6-5000, a short that I haven't seen. YouTube TV, unsurprisingly, lists it as the feature frilm from the 1980s that had the same title, which I also I have to admit that I've never gotten around to seeing. My memory is of Ed Begley Jr. being on The $25,000 Pyramid whichever summer the movie came out, promoting it to the hilt.

Tonight is also the night when the clocks go back one hour. Unfortunately, none of the schedules I've found mention what's going to be filling that extra hour. That hour comes during The Seventh Victim, which is listed as starting at the first 1:30 AM with the following movie starting at 3:00 AM. The Seventh Victim is only 71 movies, so there's clearly that extra hour there.

There are several deaths worth mentioning this week. Of course the first two that people are going to notice are the two Star Trek-related deaths. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov on the original series, died on Sunday at the age of 90. And then on Wednesday, Patrick Stewart died aged 86. He'll be best remembered for having taken his career in a completely different direction by playing Capt. Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but before that he was a Shakesperean actor.

Dying the same day as Patrick Stewart, and a death more likely to be overshadowed by Stewart's, is Elke Sommer, who was about a week shy of her 86th birthday. I first saw Sommer as part of the team doing the Miss Universe beauty pageants back when that was a a big thing on CBS and I think still hosted by Bob Barker. At the time I had no idea what she was famous for, but she was one of those European actresses that Hollywood brought over in the 1960s to try to turn into the next big European star. Sommer had the great good luck to be in A Shot in the Dark, but she was also in some stinkers.

The Bat

A movie that's suitable for Halloween although, as of the time I wrote of this post wasn't yet mentioned on the TCM schedule for October, is the Vincent Price movie The Bat. But since it was on my DVR about to expire, I made a point of watching it to be able to write up this post. And, sure enough, it wound up as part of the schedule since it is after all Halloween and this is a Vincent Price film. The Bat is showing early on Halloween at 5:30 AM.

Vincent Price plays Dr. Wells, the town doctor in one of those Hollywood small towns that's small enough to apparently have only one doctor and be close enough for people to get away to secluded cabins. Getting away is local bank (there only seems to be one bank in town) president John Fleming, who confesses to Dr. Wells that he's embezzled $1M in securities from the bank and would give up half of that to Wells in exchange for Wells helping him fake his death. Dr. Wells responds by killing Fleming, thereby saving his own life, but having the problem of being on the hook for a killing in an era where there's still a production code.

Meanwhile, back in town, Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead) has come to visit in order to get away from it all and work on her next book. To do that, she's rented a house owned by Fleming, not realizing or caring that the house has a history. After all, Cornelia isn't a local, so why should she believe any of the stories about what might or might not have gone on in the house? That, or the idea that there's a killer on the loose called The Bat, who has an ability to get into places humans can't? Of course, all of the servants in the house believe in it, and don't want to work in the house.

And, wouldn't you know it, but Cornelia and her secretary Lizzie actually see the hand of The Bat, before seeing an actual bat that bites Lizzie and starts flying around the house before the two women are able to trap it in a closet. The police come out, and then discover that Dr. Wells is doing scientific research that involves experimenting on bats. This last bit, combined with the fact that we already know Wells is going to have to face the Production Code, makes Wells one of the prime suspects for being The Bat.

And there's also the issue of the embezzled securities, which ties into the rest of what's going on in the movie. The viewers of course know that the deceased Fleming, who is still assumed to be off in the mountains getting away from it all, is responsible, but nobody else knows, so there are all sorts of suspects. The learn from the deceased Fleming's nephew that the house Cordelia is renting is one of those Hollywood houses that has secret hiding places, so perhaps the securities might be somewhere in the house. So all of the main characters wind up at the house, at which point the identity of The Bat is revealed and the innocent people get to have a reasonably good ending for them. The wicked, of course, get punished.

The fact that there was still a Production Code in force makes The Bat a bit of a mess. But thanks to the presence of Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead, the film is raised above the level of schlock to something that is at least reasonably worth watching. It's not a great movie by any means, but it will certainly entertain you.

Well, the character is named William Bonney

It wasn't uncommon back in the Hollywood studio era for studios to produce biopics that were ostensibly about a famous subject, but barely reflected reality. Recently, I watched another film that fit that description: the 1941 version of Billy the Kid.

Robert Taylor plays Billy Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, and as the movie opens he's climbing into the living quarters above a jail in what is probably Lincoln County, NM (although the location backgrounds are very obviously Monument Valley in Utah) where he overpowers a sheriff's deputy and frees his friend Pedro (Frank Puglia), whose main purpose in this story is to provide some musical background and then be a key plot point later in the movie. Billy takes Pedro to a saloon run by cattle baron Dan Hickey (Gene Lockhart). Hickey makes his money selling cattle to the US government, who need the cattle to feed their soldiers.

But it's a bit of a ruse, as what Hickey and his men really do is cause competing ranchers' cattle to stampede, which means that Hickey's cattle would be the only ones left to sell to the government. Unfortunately, this time, the stampede kills one of the opposing farmers, which is a big problem. Meanwhile, one of the men affected by the stampede is Jim Sherwood (Brian Donlevy), who knew Billy when the two of them were kids.

Jim is working for one of the competing ranchers, Eric Keating (Ian Hunter), so Jim brings Billy and Pedro to the Keating ranch with the possibility of jobs. This is the depiction of the Lincoln County War, which has been depicted by Hollywood several times, notably in Chisum and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, although it's even more fictionalized here than in other movies. Keating has a sister Edith, and Billy falls in love with her, not that they're romantically suited for each other. And there's also the issue that people are still getting shot. The sheriff, McAndrews, has been working for Hickey, so Keating decides that he's going to go see the territorial governor (which would be Lew Wallace of Ben-Hur fame although he's not a character in this movie) with the aim of being deputized into law enforcement.

Keating, however, gets waylaid and ever returns to his ranch, leading Sherwood to go and get deputized himself; he's the Pat Garrett character even though the names have changed. Billy, here on the side of Keating's men, decides to go into town to get Hickey and the men Hickey sent to kill Keating, but Hickey is no dummy and sends the actual killers away so that they can't be found. Now, we know that the real life Billy the Kid was killed at the tender age of 22, so the question remains of how this movie version of Billy is going to get it in the end.

One of the reviews of Billy the Kid that I read made the argument that this is a generic Hollywood western, except that MGM decided to attach the name of Billy the Kid to is, which causes all sorts of problems considering the liberties that they had to tak with what's known about the real Billy Bonney's life. If it had been about totally fictitious people, the movie might be better. But what we actually get is a bunch of nonsense that probably looked nice on screen back in 1941 since it's in Technicolor. But even then, the print that TCM ran isn't all that good, so we don't even rally get the benefit of Technicolor.