Tom Kennedy

One of the Zane Grey westerns Henry Hathaway directed for Paramount in the early 1930s, back when Randolph Scott was still playing B-leads in buckskin. Scott is Dale, a mountain man who overhears saloonkeeper Beasley's scheme to grab a rancher's land and kidnap his daughter — so Dale kidnaps her first, dragging the enraged but safe heiress (Verna Hillie) into the hills while he untangles the plot. Harry Carey steals scenes as a philosophical crook. Handsomely shot around Big Bear and considerably better made than the poverty-row oaters of the same year. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Western · Action

A racetrack melodrama from Grand National, one of the scrappier studios of the late 1930s. Gordon Jones plays Rinty, a trainer whose string of bad luck ends when he inherits a colt nobody wants — a horse with heart but no pedigree. Marsha Hunt co-stars as the owner who stakes him, and the picture builds to the big race where a lifetime of debts rides on one finish. Directed by Charles Lamont, who spent the decade grinding out programmers for every poverty-row outfit before settling in as Abbott and Costello's house director at Universal. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Drama