Before you get excited, let me tell you that the 1932 film Law and Order has nothing to do with the television series in the 1990s. This type of law and order has to do with the Wild West, when there was none. Frequently, towns that were so overrun by bandits and criminals sent away for a deputy to "clean up" the town. In this film, Walter Huston is the new sheriff. Of course! He's always playing someone decent and honorable, except for the rare roles when he plays someone really mean.
Walter is supposed to be a real stand-up guy, but one scene in the film made me dislike his character. After a hanging sentence gets passed on a young Andy Devine, Andy starts to cry. Walter's way of cheering him up is to say, "Pull yourself together. You've got to act like a man now." Then, he tells Andy his will be the first legal hanging-as supposed to just a lynching by the angry mob-in the county, to get him excited for his own death! I was all set to dislike him for the rest of the movie, but it's not really possible to dislike Walter Huston, is it? He has a wonderful presence, an almost magical quality that makes you think every movie he's in was written for him.
As it turns out, that part of the movie was just to show how "by the books" his character is, so that when he finally gets to his last straw-and this is a Walter Huston movie, so you know he will-he'll really lose his temper. For an early western, this movie isn't that bad, and it has all the elements fans look for: shootouts, bad guys, death scenes, and saloons.
