Popular reviews

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  Review by Justin Decloux ★★★★

  Director Edward L. Cahn at his most limber. A 60+ minute programmer about Wyatt Hearp that's light on the gunplay, but high on style. A young (ish) Walter Huston gets to do his best hero and Cahn pulls every cinematic trick he's got. The finale is especially notable for some rapid cutting that feels decidedly modern. There's an airy emptiness to the soundtrack that can only be attributed to the production not quite sure how to handle this newfangled sound technology.

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  Review by r_emmet ★★★★

  Edward L. Cahn's second feature film is a sleek, violent version of the Wyatt Earp legend. It stars Walter Huston as Earp stand-in Frame Johnson, and his son John Huston contributed to the story. Cahn experiments with extensive camera movement, using a crane to identify all the lunkheaded tools in Tombstone who spend their nights shooting the place up.

  Incredible cast includes the painfully young Andy Devine as a convicted murderer headed for a hanging. Initially despairing, Huston tells him it is the first legal hanging in the city's history. Devine takes this to mean he will be remembered - he is now important, the FIRST at something. He approaches death with eagerness and something like joy, and with that…

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  Review by loureviews ★★★½

  Watched to complete the Wild West Summer Challenge.

  Walter Huston plays a version of Wyatt Earp in this rather good B-Western, in which he attempts to clean up a corrupt town where good men are shot dead for refusing to vote in elections, and cold blooded killings happen "by accident" in bars.

  Andy Devine appears as a pathetic murderer convincted to be hanged (and he's so young and thin here!) and his scene with Huston just drips with pathos, marking this film up a notch. Huston himself is very good, at this point still essaying leading roles and doing them well.

  This is an interesting film which has really been forgotten in the parade of much more showy Westerns, but it steers away from cliche. Directed by Edward L Cahn (who directed minor crime pictures, Our Gang shorts and sci-fi exploitation), this is something of a high point for Universal's supporting feature output.

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  Review by Eclectic Cinephile ★★★★½

  Recommended by David Lambert (davidlambertart)

  Law and Order is one of the best pre-Code westerns, and one of the more interesting of the "Wyatt Earp" films. Like Warlock or Lawman, it takes the Wyatt Earp legend and does something quite interesting with it — it creates a hard-edged, pre-Code crime film/western, with Walter Huston as a striking Frame "Saint" Johnson, having a certain force and dignity (à la another of his famous pre-Code roles as an authoritarian American president).

  The hard-edged feel is quite different from the more poetic and lyrical quality of John Ford's My Darling Clementine, and the final gunfight, quickly edited and sharply violent, has much in common with something out of Sam Peckinpah (it might be Sam Peckinpah if he used pre-Code aesthetics and resources).

  If only Criterion could get a hold of a decent print of this, and restore it, and remaster it and publish it. That would be good.

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  Review by Richard Cross ★★★½

  A roving former lawman and his friends reluctantly become the law in Tombstone.

  Surprisingly dark and realistic Western despite frequent bouts of humour and an amiable, easy-going performance from Walter Huston. Written by the star's 26-year-old son John Huston, it's a thinly veiled account of the clash between Wyatt Earp and the Clantons (quite why Universal felt it necessary to change the characters' names is a mystery), although Doc Holliday is missing. Packed with smart dialogue, tense situations and a real feel for detail, Law and Order is undeservedly forgotten.

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  Review by John Charles ★★★

  An early effort from Edward L. Cahn, this western often seems on the primitive style (on the version viewed, the sound was bad until the last reel), but it's still moderately engaging, thanks mainly to Walter Huston's lead performance. Andy Devine is amusing in a supporting role as a thoroughly guileless killer.

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  Review by gabz ✧ ★★★★

  bought the sketchiest copy of this on eBay because that was literally the only copy I could find anywhere. worth it.

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  Review by Jonathan Hastings ★★★½

  Seen last week at MoMA, part of their terrific series of Universal movies from the early 30s. The story here (a version of the Wyatt Earp in Tombstone yarn) isn't especially coherent in terms of the way it develops its themes or presents its ideology, but the filmmaking is really tremendous, showing Eddie Cahn at his most lively and inventive: the way he moves between background and foreground action, and builds shots up so that our attention is constantly jumping around from character to character; point-of-interest to point-of-interest in a way that's practically Walshian. There aren't any dud shots: each is a chance for Cahn to do something new; to play with staging and framing in a new way --…

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  Review by bwolo ★★½

  The silver lining of sitting through this tedious take on the Wyatt Earp legend—other than a touching interlude in which Andy Devine takes solace in being the first Tombstone criminal to be hanged legally—is to reaffirm the greatness of My Darling Clementine. You can't fully appreciate John Ford until you get a sense of how boring westerns were before he started tearing shit up.

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  Review by Matthew Film Guy ★★½

  Clunky and simplistic retelling of the Wyatt Earp story, interesting for those with the urge like me to just see every various way this uber-myth of the American West has been told on screen. Extremely basic in its conception, characterisation, direction, and overall goals - even changes OK corral to OK stables - and as they all do hits most of the main points - the reluctant iconic lawman dragged back into service upon his arrival in Tombstone, dragging his brothers into it and facing the ire of the locally corrupt sheriff and the cattle-rustling family that has the town under its thumb. Perhaps historically nuanced for a western in 1932 (and perhaps suffering from the poor SD TV version…

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  Review by FilmFan1971 ★★★

  New favourite thing: seeing actors from the Flash Gordon serials turn up in Pre-Code movies. Charles Middleton (Ming the Merciless) is in a bunch of them and this one has Richard Alexander (aka Prince Barin) putting his beefy charms to good use as the main heavy.

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  Review by joelnox ★★½

  While this is no My Darling Clementine it is a sturdy take on the Tombstone tale. The film is in desperate need of restoration though.