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.

1933's "Scarlet River" was a Tom Keene Western depicting how a Hollywood studio (in this case RKO) goes about making such films, the same thing Lugosi's "The Death Kiss" did for murder mysteries. Judy Blake's Scarlet River Ranch is the perfect location for Keene's latest, but the unscrupulous foreman, Jeff Todd (Creighton Chaney), is in cahoots with villainous 'Clink' McPherson (Hooper Atchley), seeking to put her out of business and foreclose. Judy (Dorothy Wilson) has a younger brother who falls under Todd's bad influence, smoking, chewing tobacco, even lying to his big sis, until Tom manages to get things straightened out by the 54 minute mark. One scene shows a galloping horse making a pickup with the camera speeding alongside by car, in case you were wondering how it was done in those early days. Despite its lack of background music, it's 54 minute running time keeps things moving. The most famous sequence takes place early on in the studio commissary, as Keene is greeted by Joel McCrea, Myrna Loy, Julie Haydon, Bruce Cabot, and Rochelle Hudson, all playing themselves (in that order). In only his fourth film, 'Creighton Chaney' was to change his name two years later, building on these RKO efforts as 'Lon Chaney Jr.' Impressively third billed, 26 year old Creighton acquits himself well, yet after one more opposite Tom Keene ("Son of the Border") left RKO to freelance.

Tom Keene vehicle has our hero as a movie star who can't find any open land in Hollywood -- a very funny scene opens the film in which his film crew encounter real estate agents and customers and other obstacles while trying to film in Hollywood itself. This is a good joke for those who know of the situation in Hollywood in the early 30s -- after all, Hollywood's first productions (including the famous "Squaw Man") were mostly westerns and a major reason for its selection as "film capital" had to do with its convenience for filming western movies, always (until the 60s) the staple of the film industry.Keene and crew find a ranch outside of town, and end up getting mixed up in a land dispute engineered by the lovely ranch owner's main hired hand (Chaney Jr. in an early role, credited under his proper name of "Creighton"). Ates and cast add a lot of good laughs (and Wilson her spunk and appeal) to this fairly standard Hollywood oater.

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.