by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ran a short
movie that will probably be the last one I comment on in 2013: The Border
Patrolman, an archive.org download
of a 1936 production from Sol Lesser’s Atherton Productions (one of Lesser’s
many corporate identities), directed by David Howard from a script by Dan
Jarrett and Ben Cohen that seems to have originated when one of the writers
said to the other, “Hey! Let’s do It Happened One Night as a modern-dress Western!” George O’Brien, whose
career rivaled Johnny Mack Brown’s in its sudden descent from prestige roles in
major films (like F. W. Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise and Michael Curtiz’ Noah’s Ark) to a long stint in “B” Westerns, stars as Bob
Wallace, a border policeman — it’s unclear what government agency he works for, but his job seems
to consist of riding along the fence separating New Mexico from the original
Mexico, which as of 1936 was just two strands of barbed wire stretched across a
line of thigh-high fenceposts (ah, how times have changed!), and busting people
for relatively penny-ante offenses like smoking in fire-prone parkland. This
part of his job causes him to run afoul of spoiled heiress Patricia Huntley
(Polly Ann Young, sister of Loretta Young and Sally Blane), who thinks nothing
of diving into the swimming pool of the New Mexico resort where she’s staying
in her tennis outfit, stealing someone else’s robe to dry herself, and
generally cutting a swath of destruction and misappropriation, secure in the
knowledge that her grandfather’s money will pay for it all. Granddad is
Jeremiah Huntley (William P. Carleton), who raised Patricia — that’s right,
this is yet another movie featuring the Magically Disappearing Parents — and
who’s spoiled her rotten, indulging her in her every whim except one: he
strongly disapproves of the man she’s become engaged to, lounge lizard Courtney
Maybrook (LeRoy Allen). Wallace catches Patricia and Courtney smoking in a
national park and busts them, then is forced to let Patricia go and apologize
to her when she comes on to his supervisor, Captain Stevens (Frank Campeau) —
whereupon Wallace abruptly quits his job as border patrolman in protest against
having to suck up to the rich bitch’s whims. It turns out, as anyone who’d seen
more than about three movies in their life might guess, that this is all a
blind; Wallace and Stevens are working together to catch a gang of jewel
thieves who are smuggling stolen gems across the border and using the New
Mexico resort as their base of operations. Needless to say, in addition to
being a lounge lizard, a male gold-digger and an overall creep, Courtney is
also the mastermind of the jewel-stealing ring; he has two associates, Johnson
(Tom London) and Myra (Mary Doran — who had a long career in the 1950’s playing
mothers, so it’s something of a surprise to see her young!), whom he’s told to
lay low in Mexico until the border patrol stops putting so much heat on the
area.
They’re getting restless, though, especially since Myra is in love with
Courtney and is understandably jealous of all the attention he’s paying to
Patricia. Polly Ann Young and Mary Doran look strikingly alike, and there’s at
least one casually dropped line of dialogue suggesting that at some point the
writers intended to make that a plot point, but instead they go the It
Happened One Night route of having the
heiress taken down by a hard-ass proletarian determined to teach her the
virtues of simple living. Jeremiah Huntley hires Wallace to “bridle” his
granddaughter — the script actually compares taming the wild heiress to
breaking a wild horse! — which Wallace does by getting word to the hotel
management that she is to have nothing: no cash, no gasoline for her cars, no drinks, without his written
approval. She rebels by running off with Courtney and agreeing to marry him
immediately in Mexico, which is just fine with him because he’s already stolen
a priceless piece of jewelry (we’re told it’s a necklace but onscreen it looks
more like a broach) and decided to get it across the border by buying her a
Mexican handbag as a present, concealing the piece in a secret compartment in
the bag, and thus making her his unwitting “mule.” The film is set in 1936 —
something we were made aware of instantly by seeing a car in the opening
establishing shot — and the final chase is done with cars instead of horses,
though the cars are convertibles so that Wallace, once the baddies shoot out
his own tires, is able to do a flying leap into Courtney’s car, take over the
wheel and get the now-subdued crooks across the border so they can be arrested.
The Border Patrolman benefits
from reasonably creative direction by David Howard, who shot the final action
sequence in Death Valley (and used it quite effectively, though the scene is
handicapped by the lack of a music score — albeit the sorts of sorry stock
recordings available to producers like Lesser might not have been much help),
but it’s taming-of-the-shrew plot line had already been done to death in far
superior screwball comedies.
Indeed, there seems to have been at least some
attempt to make The Border Patrolman what I call a “portmanteau movie” — one with a lot of disparate
elements seeking to appeal to as many different audiences as possible (a common
strategy of producers in the 1930’s and a far cry from the narrow “niche
marketing” most filmmakers pursue today, aiming their movies at one and only
one set of filmgoers!): it contains a screwball plot, plenty of Western
settings (and horses, even though the principals also drive cars) for the
Saturday-matinee crowd, a typically dry comic-relief performance by Smiley
Burnette (Gene Autry must have had that week off), who also sings two songs,
and even a Mexican band (guitar, chitarrón, violin and bass) who do two songs
in Spanish in the rather sad-looking cantina to which Courtney takes Patricia for the quickie
Mexican wedding he wants to put her through (only she threatens to derail his
plans when she gets cold feet and wants to wait). Charles pointed out that in
Mexico a cantina is a really sleazy sort of
bar to which women would be unlikely to go, but the place in this film is
raunchy enough one can well understand Patricia’s disquiet at her groom’s
insistence on marrying her in such a place. The film ends, of course, as you’d
expect it to, with the crooks in jail, Wallace restored to the good graces of
the border police force, and Patricia solidly attached to the poor but decent
Wallace, with whom she’s inevitably fallen in love; it isn’t much as a film,
but this is at least a good, solid piece of “B” moviemaking and probably helped
O’Brien make his re-entrée to the world of the major studios (RKO would sign
him after this one for a long-running series of “B” Westerns, with better
production finishes than The Border Patrolman but generally without this film’s quirky appeal).
