What a surprise … an early sound western that’s solid gold genre entertainment. John Huston adapted W.R. Burnett’s violent retelling of the Wyatt Earp story without an ounce of moralizing. Walter Huston is magnificent as the lawman ‘Saint Johnson,’ a town-taming killer who can’t abide thugs and despots. The show is serious, and so is the body count. Terrific input from Harry Carey, Andy Devine and in a bit part, Walter Brennan. It’s a flawless 4K restoration with perfect audio. The director is none other than Edward L. Cahn, of ’50s exploitation fame.

Law and Order
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1932 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 72 min. / Street Date June 17, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Walter Huston, Harry Carey, Russell Hopton, Raymond Hatton, Ralph Ince, Harry Woods, Richard Alexander, Russell Simpson, Andy Devine, Walter Brennan, Alphonse Ethier, Cliff Lyons, Pedro Regas, Dewey Robinson, Dorothy Vernon.
Cinematography: Jackson Rose
Art Director: John J. Hughes
Supervising Editors: Maurice Pivar, Milton Carruth
Film Editor: Philip Cahn
Title Music Composer: David Broekman
Screenplay by Tom Reed, adaptation and dialogues by John Huston from the novel Saint Johnson by W.R. Burnett
Produced by Carl Laemmle Jr.
Directed by Edward L. Cahn

What an incredibly welcome surprise: a recommended ‘obscure’ item that delivers on its promise. Universal release isn’t a lot like other westerns of the pre-Code year 1932. We never saw it being revived, despite having a lofty critical reputation and some important names on the credits. It’s an unusually serious and realistic story for adult audiences. Fresh from his monster hit  Little Caesar, author W.R. Burnett carried over his unromantic view of urban gangsters to the western town-taming story.

Law and Order is the first really good version of the Wyatt Earp legend. It changes all of the famous names but retains the town of Tombstone and the O.K. Corral. Universal’s bread and butter were inexpensive westerns averaging an hour in duration, but this is an ‘A’ production. Producer Carl Laemmle Jr. nabbed the star Walter Huston, whose son John Huston is responsible for the adaptation and dialogue script that pushes the limits of the genre. The uncompromising screenplay doesn’t avoid the rough edges of frontier town taming. ‘Law and Order’ means guns and violence and little else. The hero lawman finds that avoiding conflict is impossible, and commits himself to a project that can only end in slaughter.

Walter Huston’s presence gives the conflict an unsual gravity. Even Victor Fleming’s The Virginian (1929) with Gary Cooper presented quaint sentiments to go with its laconic humor. The only jokes in Law and Order are by killers that just think they’re funny. When favorite Andy Devine shows up, we expect standard comedy relief. Not at all. His clownish fellow is no joke — he’s a prisoner bound for the gallows.

Frame Johnson (Walter Huston) and his brother Luther (Russell Hopton) plus their companions Deadwood (Raymond Hatton) and the gambler Ed Brandt (Harry Carey) are travelling West. Frame is preceded by his reputation for taming a cattle town in Kansas, and running up a high number of kills. Frame tells his companions that he wants to hang up his guns, but Tombstone turns out to be unusually lawless. It is dominated by the criminal Northrup clan (Ralph Ince, Harry Woods, Richard Alexander), who are allied with the corrupt lawman Fin Elder (Alphonse Ethier).

Seeing so much lawlessness unopposed, Frame surprises Luther and Ed by taking the offer of a Judge Williams (Russell Simpson): a badge and carte blanche to clean up the town by any method he chooses. Frame knows that William will soon regret his offer.

The Northrups watch as Frame and Ed challeng and defuse an armed lynch mob. Frame feels the weight of his office when he must hang the legally-convicted Johnny Kinsman (Andy Devine). That only delays the inevitable a little while: after one of his companions is ambushed on the street, Frame and his two remaining colleagues prepare to wipe out Northrups at the O.K. Corral. It’s not ‘law,’ just force against force.

Some of the playing isn’t polished and a lot of the dialogue is declarative, but Law and Order fronts several excellent performances. It’s directed with high style by Edward L. Cahn, a name known to most film fans for his string of late-career crime and Sci-fi programmers for low budget producers —  The Zombies of Mora Tau,  It! The Terror from Beyond Space. Cahn’s does good things with his moving camera. It prowls across a saloon to introduce a score of characters. He uses crane shots to tie together street action with people observing from second-floor windows. Cahn also makes do with several long dialogue takes. Cahn chooses his angles well. With Huston senior and Harry Carey handling the speeches, his one-angle dialogue scenes never wear out their welcome.

One long take around a deathbed is so good, that Cahn and his editors ignored a bit of discontinuity.The town-tamers exit, and all but Deadwood arm themselves. When we cut to the next shot, Deadwood is suddenly wearing his gunbelt and carrying a rifle.

We see bits of business and details we don’t expect in a western of this vintage. Luther Johnson is shown passing a candle flame under a mattress, to check for bedbugs. An extended scene shows the boys washing up in their hotel room — taking turns dousing their faces and hair and then tossing the water out the window. An election sees votes being bought, and a corrupt deputy casually murdering a voter who displeases him.

Although the original posters prominently display the likeness of a woman, there is no female love interest. The only woman with a speaking part is a tart who cusses out Ed Brandt for confiscating a gun from her purse. A passing wagon obscures her speech, obviously a string of profanities. Ah, pre-Code is such heavenly bliss.

Walter Huston plays Wyatt Frame as an uncomplicated but completely self-assured Alpha Male, accustomed to standing up to whatever bullies are in his way. There’s no trace of the sly, corrupt characters he would later play in westerns for  Howard Hughes,  David O. Selznick and  Anthony Mann, all seemingly tainted by the unforgettable Mr. Scratch, Huston’s grinning devil in  All That Money Can Buy.

Harry Carey’s gambler Ed Brandt is a direct clone of Doc Holiday; Ed likes having Frame near his poker table, to protect him from cheaters with itchy trigger fingers. Frame’s brother Luther is just a loyal wing man, ditto for ‘Deadwood,’ a non-comic sidekick played by Raymond Hatton ( The Day the World Ended). The only characters played for laughs are a pair of undertakers with ghoulish faces. They love Frame Johnson, whose kill tally is a boon for business.

Russell Simpson looks almost as old here in 1932 as he does 27 years later in John Ford’s  The Horse Soldiers. Also on the never-aging spectrum is Dewey Robinson, whose bartender is almost as unchanged 19 years later in the noir  Roadblock.  ↓  Likewise grabbing our attention is a young-ish Walter Brennan, a couple of years before he was getting big parts and winning Academy Awards.  →  Brennan doesn’t try to upstage anyone, yet our eye goes to him every time he shows up. At 38 years, he must already have false teeth he can remove to make himself look older and more decrepit.

Frame wears a fancy gunbelt with two holsters. Other than stretching the capacity of a six-gun without reloading, the gunplay is on the realistic side. Frame’s stab at social wisdom is that any decent community needs to be disarmed, a sentiment that goes against the obvious reality of the lethal gunplay every night in Tombstone. But Frame really projects authority. Armed with a pair of shotguns, he and Ed very convincingly hold off a rabid lynch mob.

Most of the show was filmed on a standard western town set, but Huston makes his entrance at the easily-identified Vasquez Rocks location. The most impressive dramatic sequence is Frame’s thoughtful handling of the pea-brained prisoner Johnny Kinsman, played by a young Andy Devine. The ex-football player had been in films for six years but hit his stride in talkies due to his unique voice. It’s apparent that Frame hasn’t fully thought out this ‘law and order’ business. Johnny is a dope who shot a guy out of pure stupidity. Frame realizes that the law doesn’t acknowledge things like reduced accountability, and to make it easy for Johnny talks him into being proud of the dubious honor of being the object of the town’s first lawful execution. Our laughter is mitigated by Frame’s obvious distress.

Director Cahn throws a flurry of reaction shots at us during the hanging, very much as Sergio Leone will  34 years later. He then pulls out all the stops for the showdown at the O.K. Corral. The formal aspects of the scene aren’t as pronounced as in later versions by  John Ford and  John Sturges. The ‘march’ to the Corral is really a creep down main street, with Deadwood and Luther keeping pace on opposite sidewalks to watch out for bushwhackers. The climax is a couple of minutes of non-stop gunfire, blasting away inside a horse stable until almost the entire cast list is on the floor. (spoiler) The symmetrical but rather harsh coda has Frame tossing back his badge and riding out, despite being seriously wounded. What’s his hurry? — Tombstone is finally free of criminal vermin.

Later versions of the O.K. Corral gunfight story simplified things in different ways. What makes Law and Order interesting is that both factions in the fight for control of Tombstone are led by legal lawmen with badges. Frame pursues justice as a vigilante himself, ignoring a legal warrant against his brother and refusing to quit when the Judge dismisses him. On that level the film has elements in common with John Sturges’  Hour of the Gun and Edward Dmytryk’s impressive  Warlock.

Walter Huston proceeded directly to MGM and another alarmingly ultra-violent tale of Law and Order, Charles Brabin’s gangland melodrama  The Beast of the City. It’s a about a strait-laced police chief trying to rid a city of racketeers that have managed to corrupt his own brother. He also reverts to extra-legal violence. Again the story is by W.R. Burnett, who heartily approves of the vigilante justice. The payoff is an even more apocalyptic standoff / shootout / massacre. The two movies were released practically at the same time.

Universal remade Law and Order twice. The second starred Ronald Reagan and Dorothy Malone, and ditched most of the original storyline.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Law and Order is a dazzling 4K restoration performed by Universal in collaboration with The Film Foundation. The picture and sound are in great shape, as if the original printing elements hadn’t been accessed since the show was new.

The presence of Walter Huston assured that Laemmle Jr.’s western would be widely reviewed. Critics remarked on the surfeit of violent gunplay, but reacted most strongly to the lack of a main female character. In fact, the only romance in the picture is Ed Brandt’s fixation on an actress we only see in a poster, a sort of Lily Langtree connection. One reviewers recommended that exhibitors should book Law and Order with something more romantic.

Kino doesn’t scrimp on the extras. Law and Order has a full commentary by Heath Holland and screenwriter Max Allan Collins, and a 40-minute lecture by the late French critic Bertrand Tavernier. Beefing up the presentation is an entire second feature starring Harry Carey, Without Honor, presented in un-restored but very watchable condition. It’s the story of a loner who becomes a lawman so he can clear his brother’s name. The director is William Nigh and Carey’s co-stars are Mae Busch and Gibson Gowland.

Without Honor carries its own commentary by expert Toby Roan, who has enough knowledge about the (vast) world of early-talkie Hollywood westerns to keep us listening with interesting anecdotes and biographical information. Does Harry Carey strike his famous pose, his hand crooked on his elbow?  You’ll have to watch to find out.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Law and Order
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Heath Holland and Max Allan Collins
Featurette essay on Law and Order by Bertrand Tavernier (2018, 37 minutes)
Second feature Without Honor (1932) with Harry Carey (60 min.) … with an audio commentary by Toby Roan.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case in card sleeve
Reviewed: June 12, 2025
(7340law)

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