Tall in the Saddle (1944)

John Wayne arrives in town to discover that the rancher that he'd planned to work for is dead, and that the town seems to be controlled by a variety of scheming civic leaders, and to have persistent trouble with cattle rustling. He joins forces with an unpredictable woman (Ella Raines) who runs one of the smaller ranches. Together with the young eastern girl who had inherited the ranch Wayne was originally to work for they solve the mystery of what's going on.

For early(ish) John Wayne, the acting is generally pretty good, and I felt that some of the weaknesses in his performance were more down to the editing (which left a few awkward silences at the end of scenes) that the acting. The characterisation wasn't bad, although wasn't terribly deep either: Wayne does a nice line in firmly authoritative, Gabby Hayes does his usual "grizzled old coot" act, the baddies (the town judge for example) are unpleasant without being obviously evil, the women mostly swoon at John Wayne. The cynic would say that Arly Harolday (Raines's character) veers haphazardly between hating Wayne and girlishly falling for him, however I'm not that unfair and in any her slightly misplaced film-noir femme-fatate type character was a nice change of pace and it was good to see the script going with the "non-obvious" girl.

It's all pretty amiable, easy-going stuff—in fitting with John Wayne's character her really. My slight frustration with it is that the heroes seemed to mostly spend their time tinkering on the edge of the villain's schemes, and then suddenly everything is revealed. In addition a large chunk of the film hinges on something (Wayne's identity) which is known to some of the characters, but slightly lazily suddenly revealed to the audiences only at the end. However, these are really only slight annoyances with the script, and don't spoil and enjoyable (if unexceptional) film.