It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Bad Man, The (1941) ** (out of 4) OK, try to follow this and I'll try to make sense out of it. A rancher (Ronald Reagan) and his uncle (Lionel Barrymore) are about to lose their ranch to a greedy banker (Henry Travers) after a bandit, Pancho Lopez (Wallace Beery) steals their cattle. The bandit soon learns that the rancher is the one who saved his life years earlier so he wants to do good and that includes hooking him up with the woman (Laraine Day) he loves but who is married to another man (Tom Conway). This western/comedy is rather hard to judge because it tries to do so much in its short running time but by the end of the movie the laughs had turned dry and I found myself getting rather bored. When you've got two scene chewers like Beery and Barrymore you'd expect something more and in the end this film just didn't deliver enough. I found the best thing to be Barrymore who is a hoot in his role, which really seems to have influenced Yosemite Sam. I'm not sure if the Looney Tune character was based on Barrymore's work here but it really seems like it. The two act very much the same way, use similar words and even have close to the same accent. Barrymore is downright hammy, in a good way, and you can't help but laugh at him constantly embarrassing and poking fun at Reagan. Reagan, Day and Conway add nice support but they have a hard time breaking through all the scene chewing by the two other leads. I was somewhat disappointed in Beery and his bad Mexican outfit even though I haven't seen VIVA VILLA!, which apparently this is somewhat spoofing. This was the fourth version of this film, including a 1937 version with Boris Karloff but it didn't impress me too much. The great cast will have people turning in to watch but to me only Barrymore was worth it.

Until Wallace Beery shows up, this is a dull Western with an all-too-familiar plot. But Beery, despite the worst Mexican accent of all time, is a hoot. He must have realized what a joke he had made out of Pancho Villa in VIVA VILLA! (1937) and decided to go for the laughs this time around. Beery ridicules everyone in sight, making fun of Ronald Reagan's ethics. As much as he tries to help Reagan, Beery does not understand all of the hero's moral objections. Berry and Lionel Barrymore fight to see who can be the bigger ham. Tom Conway, looking just like brother George Sanders, is a slimy villain who cannot compete with Beery. Laraine Day is useless as the token romantic interest. Viewers need to treat this silly movie as a what it is--a farce.

A curious, inconsistent hodgepodge from the start, this picture appears for a time to be an altogether conventional, cliche-ridden Western, despite its "A" cast. What drama exists in the story is compounded by the late arrival of the film's nominal star (top billing), Wallace Beery, reprising his Pancho Villa characterization under a different name. At first a danger and a menace to the good folks, the character gradually - but none too subtly - becomes a caricature, a mercurial buffoon difficult to take seriously. After the plot is resolved by a familiar turn or two, the picture ends with a ludicrous scene of Lionel Barrymore in a wheelchair being towed at considerable speed across the prairie by Beery on horseback. As a Western, the picture is totally undistinguished. Its comic elements, such as they are, generate exceedingly feeble humor. Among the few positives: Ronald Reagan gives a winning low-key performance as a gentle cowhand, Lionel Barrymore chews every bit of scenery in sight, and Nydia Westman is impressive in a quirky minor role. But when all is said and done, it is not easy to figure out exactly what kind of picture this was supposed to be - or, for that matter, why it was made.

Smooth rough and tumble character western with a great grizzled performance from Lionel Barrymore, but a grating one from Wallace Beery. This one has a great closing scene of Barrymore trailing behind a horse on his wheelchair through the desert.