It is a performances centric movie

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Better Late Then Never

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The first thing that strikes a current audience is the way the characters are introduced, silent film style. An interesting idea, but you can see why it went out of fashion as it interrupts the flow of the narrative. We're well into the movie before Randolph Scott finally appears and it's a bit disconcerting to suddenly have a sub-title superimposed, "Randolph Scott... Lynn Hayden."The next arresting thing is undoubtedly the fact that in some scenes Hathaway keeps his camera jumping around in a fascinatingly imaginative fashion, taking full advantage of the breadth of the sets and the width of the great outdoors. Pace is further enhanced by breaking up many of the scenes into (by modern standards) an unusually large variety of camera angles (leading to some rough editing in places).The lighting by Ben Reynolds also dates the picture on at least two fronts as it's unfashionable to use soft focus anymore; and illuminating night scenes with only a little key light and little or no background fillers at all has been a definite no-no ever since picturegoers complained that they paid money to see their favorite stars at full strength not half-hidden by shadows.For all Hathaway's efforts to quicken the pace, his players tend to work against him, not only by speaking slowly but by inserting long pauses between words, phrases, and especially cues. Oddly enough, the villains are the worst offenders. In fact this film reverses the general Hollywood rule and makes the goodies much more interesting and diverting than the baddies. Noah Beery and his bunch are not only dull and cliched but abnormally colorless. Hammy acting from Noah Beery and Jack LaRue doesn't help. Not that the good guys are innocent of theatrics, but Scott gives such a likeable and personable performance, he makes up a lot of the leeway. As for the once super-popular star Esther Ralston we can understand why her fortunes declined in the talkies. Her voice is okay but it not only doesn't jibe with the character, she's unable to use it expressively. All her emotions are still registered through her eyes, her facial muscles, her body language. Some of the support players are so bland or so impersonal or so amateurish it's hard to credit they managed to carve out considerable careers in the years ahead: Buster Crabbe, Gail Patrick, Barton MacLane, Fuzzy Knight. Plus Beery and LaRue. As for Miss Temple, well she was only five years old at the time and she does reasonably and recognizably well by her small part. It's the abominable Watson brat who has the lion's share of the kiddie footage.Hathaway's taste for violent action (the principals fight without doubles) and his penchant for location shooting are well in evidence throughout, though the long-awaited climax is a bit abrupt and resolved in a somewhat unsatisfying fashion, but these structural faults doubtless derive from the Zane Grey novel. Incidentally, despite reports to the contrary, there are only five or six short snips of stock footage, few of which seem to have been lifted from the original 1923 picture which has quite different emphases in its storyline.

I saw this film under the title "Law of Vengeance", with an interesting convention of introducing each character with their film credit when they first appeared on screen. It's not unusual to see early silents and even talking films show all the characters in the story before the action gets under way, but I don't think I've seen it done this way before. Which means Randolph Scott, top billed but not appearing for about the first twenty minutes, suddenly shows up as Randolph Scott portraying Lynn Hayden.Probably the best recommendation to see this film is for the players, a fairly top flight cast (perhaps in retrospect) including Scott, Buster Crabbe, Barton MacLane, Jack Larue and Noah Beery. Funny, but Beery looked more like his real life son Noah Beery Jr. before doing the fifteen year prison sentence in the story. Then suddenly he looked like a totally different actor. I'll have to go back and check that out again.The bigger surprise though might have been catching Shirley Temple in an early uncredited screen appearance. Back in my early parochial school days, it seemed we were treated to a Temple film every couple of months. Others on this board have mentioned one of the Colby bunch taking her doll's head off with a rifle shot. I thought that was bad enough, but later in the story one of the bad guys was actually going to shoot her brother when another character ruined his aim. Seems to me that was carrying a feud just a bit too far.What I don't understand is the way the picture ended. We're led to believe that most of the Hayden clan was killed in the blast that leveled the mountainside, but it seems that the Colby bunch was buried too! Then Larue's character offs the senior Colby (Beery) in order to marry daughter Ellen (Esther Ralston), which Jed Colby didn't approve of. Of course, Lynn Hayden had other plans, and in one of the more interesting finales to a final showdown you'll ever see, Hayden strategically positions a knife to defeat Jim Daggs, even though he was almost unconscious. Not a move I would recommend for a would-be hero in real life.

After spending fifteen years in prison for killing the patriarch of a rival clan, Noah Beery heads west to continue the family feud that turned him into a murderer. While he attempts to goad his rivals into another round of killing, Beery's daughter falls for Randolph Scott, who as a boy watched him murder his grandfather.Another decent entry in Paramount's Zane Grey series, this features early performances from Scott and Buster Crabbe, as well as an early directing job for the great Henry Hathaway.It's also fairly interesting in it's use of the old silent film trick of introducing each cast member as they appear, via a subtitle and a little bit of precode skinny dipping.Speaking of precode, this appears to be pre-common-sense as well, when in one scene a young Shirley Temple is sitting outside and a hidden bad guy shoots her doll in the head, which is only a few feet away. This might not seem very alarming today, but this was before the invention of modern special effects, when film studios employed actual sharpshooters for these types of scenes, a practice that was abandoned when James Cagney refused to do another film that involved him being shot at.In other words, A LIVE ROUND WAS FIRED PAST SHIRLEY'S HEAD!!

The transfer of this film is horrible. It has been released by Alpha Video under the title of Law of Vengeance. THe movie starts off slow and is something of an oddity in the beginning. Law of Vengeance is the only film that I have seen that shows the actors credit on the screen when they enter the picture. For example, Randoplh Scott's character makes his entrance at 20 minutes into the picture. It is then that the screen credit "Randolph Scott as Lynn Hayden" rolls across the screen. I thought this was interesting.About 30 minutes into this western the story starts to get good. Mostly due to Scott and the female character known as Ellen Colby. The dialogue is very good in places.This western is of importance for a film historian. Not only was it directed by Henry Hathaway, it also stars Buster Crabbe, Barton Mclane, Jake Larue and two uncredited performances by a very young Shirley Temple and a young John Carradine. This film was important in the career of Randoplh Scott and if you are a fan of his, you definitely want to own this movie. At a price less that 5 dollars, it is surely worth it.