After the first day on location, Allan Dwan realized that this film was going to be "a miserable thing." He closed down the production, and had the script rewritten as a comedy. The result is a film that bears all the marks of a B-Western-turned surreal. Trail of the Vigilantes couldn't be further from the execrable Western parodies of the 1970s. Dwan sends up the genre with a knowledge of its absurdities gleaned through a career that had begun back before his one-reel Western which we'll screen on September 14, Maiden and Men (1912). Franchot Tone plays an unlikely undercover cowhand, investigating rustlings and murders. He shares the bunkhouse with such other oddball ranchhands as Broderick Crawford (whose motormouth summary of the plot convolutions must be heard), Andy Devine ("black sheep" in a long line of aristocratic manservants) and Mischa Auer (who steals the show with his bizarre metamorphoses of ethnic heritage). As a simultaneously comic and "classic" Western, only Destry Rides Again and Along Came Jones rival Trail of the Vigilantes. Scott Simmon