The Cattle Thief

This oater starring Ken Maynard investigating some rustled cattle while wearing a mask is curiously flat and limp. Perhaps it's because he spends so little time on the screen. Perhaps it's because James A. Marcus, who plays a peddler, offers us too little sense of motion..... he plays the characters as hunched and arthritic.

That sense of inability suffuses the movie as the ranch owner is confined to a wheelchair after a stroke, unable to speak. Add to that ex-Follies chorine Geneva Mitchell as the nurse/love interest looking sarcastic and bored. All in all, I think it's because this effort is so underwritten that the actual plot takes up maybe ten minutes and the rest of the movie lacks any sort of fun or effort to entertain.