When I saw the lineup of actors playing the Daltons and their chief sidekick in WHEN THE DALTONS RODE (1940), I was a little skeptical. If it was a Universal picture in 1940 featuring Broderick Crawford, Stuart Erwin, Frank Albertson, and Andy Devine, then it had to be a comedy, right? Well, I was pleasantly surprised. Crawford, Erwin, and Albertson play Bob, Ben, and Emmett Dalton, respectively, while Brian Donlevy plays Grat Dalton, with Devine along as their womanizing(!) comic relief sidekick, Ozark Jones. Sure, there's humor along the way, but once these guys hit the outlaw trail, after a violent encounter with land grabbers on their farm, they mean business and they play it with a vigor I haven't often seen associated with these actors. Donlevy usually played snarling authoritarian villains (see BEAU GESTE and JESSE JAMES), but he's quite engaging here as a quick-tempered farmer out to avenge the injustice done to his family (kind of like his nemesis of the previous year, Jesse James, come to think of it). I'm attributing it all to George Marshall's assured direction. And it helps that there are some beautifully staged second unit action scenes involving chases on horseback, speeding trains, shootouts, and lots of stuntmen, all filmed on location.
The big problem with the film lies with the odd casting of the two stars, Randolph Scott and Kay Francis. Francis plays the town's telegraph operator, who happens to be Bob Dalton's girl yet finds herself increasingly drawn to the Daltons' lawyer, Scott, once the Daltons go on the run. Their scenes together bring the movie to a grinding halt and I wish they'd been cut down or excised completely. Scott is good, but I would have preferred greater emphasis on the Daltons themselves and a supporting actor rather than a top-billed star in the role of the sympathetic lawyer. Miss Francis had been a major star at Warner Bros. in the 1930s but her melodramatic acting style had gone out of fashion by this point, eclipsed by the likes of Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, and she was reduced to supporting roles and B-movies in the 1940s. An ingenue could have played this part just as well and required fewer scenes than second-billed Francis.
Indicative of the kind of schizophrenia characteristic of Hollywood treatment of outlaws during the reign of the restrictive Production Code, the opening text insists that "In the history of the reckless violence that seized Kansas and Oklahoma, no name carried more terror than DALTON. There were more famous outlaws; but none more daring, none more desperate." Following which we get a consistently sympathetic and terror-free account of the Daltons.
The big problem with the film lies with the odd casting of the two stars, Randolph Scott and Kay Francis. Francis plays the town's telegraph operator, who happens to be Bob Dalton's girl yet finds herself increasingly drawn to the Daltons' lawyer, Scott, once the Daltons go on the run. Their scenes together bring the movie to a grinding halt and I wish they'd been cut down or excised completely. Scott is good, but I would have preferred greater emphasis on the Daltons themselves and a supporting actor rather than a top-billed star in the role of the sympathetic lawyer. Miss Francis had been a major star at Warner Bros. in the 1930s but her melodramatic acting style had gone out of fashion by this point, eclipsed by the likes of Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, and she was reduced to supporting roles and B-movies in the 1940s. An ingenue could have played this part just as well and required fewer scenes than second-billed Francis.
Indicative of the kind of schizophrenia characteristic of Hollywood treatment of outlaws during the reign of the restrictive Production Code, the opening text insists that "In the history of the reckless violence that seized Kansas and Oklahoma, no name carried more terror than DALTON. There were more famous outlaws; but none more daring, none more desperate." Following which we get a consistently sympathetic and terror-free account of the Daltons.