Law and Order

(Edward L. Cahn, US 1932, 75 min., 35mm)

Frame Johnson, “the man who cleaned up Kansas,” arrives in Tombstone ready to settle down and let someone else keep the peace. But the deliberate lawlessness of the Northrup brothers soon changes his mind and he agrees to wear the marshal’s badge. Walter Huston (in a script adapted by his son John from the W. R. Burnett novel Saint Johnson) gives a wonderfully understated performance as Frame in this early telling of Wyatt Earp and the Clanton-McLaury gang, culminating in a finely edited gunfight at the O.K. Corral. William K. Everson called this “one of the sound cinema’s best and most overlooked westerns.”