This wonderful comic Western remains virtually unknown. After the first day on location, Allan Dwan realized that what he'd intended as low-budget drama was going to be “a miserable thing.” He closed down 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. Dwan sends up the genre with a knowledge of its absurdities gleaned through a career begun in the 1910s with literally hundreds of one-reel silent Westerns. Franchot Tone plays an unlikely undercover cowhand, investigating rustlings and murders. He shares the bunkhouse with such oddball ranchhands as Broderick Crawford (who provides motormouth summaries of the plot convolutions), Andy Devine (“black sheep” of a family of manservants), and Mischa Auer (who steals the show with his metamorphoses of ethnic heritage). As a simultaneously comic and classic Western, only Destry Rides Again (July 25) surpasses Trail of the Vigilantes.