Trail of the Vigilantes. 1940. USA. Directed by Allan Dwan. Screenplay by Harold Shumate. With Franchot Tone, Warren William, Broderick Crawford, Andy Devine, Mischa Auer, Peggy Moran. 35mm. 75 min.
Allan Dwan had directed Westerns since the silent era but hadn’t made one in roughly 20 years when Universal handed him this script. He read it, found it dramatically inert, and, with the cooperation of the cast and without telling the front office, turned it into a comedy. The studio carried no producer credit on the finished film, a mark of institutional displeasure that does nothing to diminish the result. What remains is one of the more disarming genre comedies of the 1940s. A tenderfoot from back East (Franchot Tone, returning to film after a Broadway sojourn) goes undercover in a Kansas frontier town to investigate a protection racket, aligns himself with a hard-drinking cowhand (Broderick Crawford) and his partner (Andy Devine), and never quite masters the local customs, including the horse.
Shot in crisp black and white by Milton Krasner and Joseph A. Valentine, the film works because of Dwan’s understated, slow-burn style; this is no camp send-up. Tone’s particular gift—dry, slightly baffled self-possession—fits the material perfectly. The comedy isn’t parody exactly, it’s closer to affectionate subversion, a studio Western that knows what it is and enjoys being something slightly different. Universal was chasing the success of Destry Rides Again from the previous year, and while Trail of the Vigilantes never landed with the same force, it is in some ways more perceptive about the genre’s conventions.