River's End (1940)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

No review here as such, but this enjoyable little semi-Western puzzled me a bit, for the female star (playing one of the Dennis Morgan characters' sister), is given as Elizabeth Earl, a name used in only a couple of late films instead of her real one, Elizabeth Ingles, used more often earlier. Since I could not remember encountering her under either name before, and she was a really comely lass (the character is Scottish), a good actress, and reasonably charismatic, I was amazed that she would be in a good-sized production like this and disappear more or less totally from future view, so I looked her up in the actor biography section provided by IMDb (just hit her name in the cast listing and you are there) and found out that she left the screen shortly after for marriage and that Elizabeth Earl/Elizabeth Ingles is the mother of Sigourney Weaver(!). How about that? The screen lost a pretty good actress when she left, but she produced a sci-fi film legend to compensate. She could have done worse! In fact, cinematically-speaking, she almost did in this film, for she is surely the only actress in film history who would have chosen to marry Victor Jory instead of Dennis Morgan; one must assume she hadn't met Henry Daniell yet!

George Tobias could just play any part, although his accent does come and go in this one. Here, he's a supporting character "Dijon", helping our main character to escape. Our lead man is Dennis Morgan, playing both a convicted man (John Keith)and the County Mountie (Connison) assigned to chase him down. While it is a shortie, it is quite well played. There is some comedy in this "Canadian Western"... every couple minutes, Dijon's girlfriend comes running into the picture to make a big scene, even though Dijon promised to keep a low profile. He even starts a bar-room brawl as a pretense to get one of the bad guys in jail. Of course, there are a couple of chase scenes, and even a fist fight on the edge of a cliff. Victor Jory is Talbot, the "foil" in the story. Directed by Ray Enright, who had worked his way up in the business in the early days of Hollywood. Based on the story by James Curwood, a prolific writer who seems to have written numerous novels about the outdoors, and the wild west. Fun film to watch. It starts as a serious drama, but seems to turn into a lighter comedy/drama about halfway through.

Calling this a mystery is a stretch as the only mystery is when the incredibly credulous townsfolk of River's End, Alberta, will figure out that Dennis Morgan is actually an escaped convict and NOT the Canadian Mountie sent in pursuit of him. Yes, it's the old chestnut about the two fellows who look exactly alike and switch identities in order to right the wrongs of an imperfect judicial system. If you can accept the premise, you'll enjoy this speck of fluff. Victor Jory offers the only interesting performance as a relatively likeable bad guy.