Alongside the handful of epic “A” Westerns of the 1930s, such as The Big Trail, came the decade's nearly one thousand low-budget B-Westerns, often set in the contemporary rural West. If most were routine, the best have an off-the-cuff vitality in which a nineteenth-century myth of the West comes to the rescue of Depression economic woes. The droll Last Outlaw is populated with practiced stars, notably Harry Carey, the lead in twenty-four John Ford silents, who here plays the eponymous frontier bank robber. Released from decades in prison, he has missed the transformation of the West into a world of autos and gangsters. He looks up his old antagonist sheriff (Henry B. Walthall, star of The Birth of a Nation back in 1915), and along with struggling rancher Hoot Gibson (also a Western star from the late 1910s), they find old ways to set the new world straight. Most B-Westerns survive only in visually diminished prints, but this charming short feature has been lovingly preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.