About 20 minutes into this ultra-low budget early thirties oater it struck me that it might actually have been intended as a comedy, although nothing I had seen on screen had made me laugh. A slightly podgy chap named Hoot Gibson plays the lead character, a nice mother-loving, churchgoing (i.e. dull) cowboy called Peaceful Patten who bears an uncanny resemblance to a tough guy known only as The Hard Hombre. Patten applies for a job with the comely Spanish widow Martinez (the also-comely Lina Basquette) who gives him the task of recovering her 30 head of cattle stolen by evil pot-bellied Joe Barlow. Evil Joe mistakes Patten for the hard hombre and, having sold the cattle, meekly hands over a roll of bills.
Now it's pretty obvious by this point that all Patten has to do is pretend to have threatened evil Joe for the money to have the grateful widow Martinez leading him to her boudoir by the hand, but sadly he's a little slow on the uptake – in fact, the film is nearly over before he realises how he can put the case of mistaken identity to good use (and even then it's not to get himself in the Signora's boudoir).
Poverty Row film crews must have been falling over each other back in the early thirties as they roamed the Californian hills filming their 'b' movie westerns. Most of these films weren't very good, but this one is worse than most. Otto Brewer's direction is truly bad – he seems to have no idea of where best to place a camera or how to move it, and simply seems to have planted his cameraman in front of the actors and hoped for the best. It's one of the few westerns I've seen with virtually no gunplay, and the absence of any music is particularly noticeable in the so-called action scenes. Hoot Gibson makes an insipid hero – neither funny nor heroic – and looks like a middle-aged caretaker who still lives with his parents.
Even by Poverty Row standards this one's a dud.