A Holy Terror (1931)
6/10
Getting Some Answers
30 September 2008
Humphrey Bogart made his western debut in this film A Holy Terror based on the Max Brand novel Trailin'. It had been filmed ten years earlier as a silent under its original name with Tom Mix in the lead. Western star George O'Brien is in the lead with Bogey as one of the villains.

Interestingly enough this might have been Bogart's best outing in a western. He was a villain later in Warner Brothers big budget westerns The Oklahoma Kid where he's too much of an eastern gangster and Virginia City where he sounds laughable as a Mexican bandit. Here he's just right as the foreman of a western ranch who gets a case of the green eyed monster when easterner George O'Brien starts eying Sally Eilers.

But that's just a sidebar to the main story. O'Brien is a polo playing easterner whose dad, Robert Warwick, is found shot to death. Searching his papers O'Brien finds that Warwick's original name was changed and that he had kept tabs on the whereabouts of a certain Wyoming rancher for years.

O'Brien goes to Wyoming to investigate and by the end of the film all his questions are answered. He might be an eastern dude, but his polo training makes him ride with the best of the cowboys as they learn to their regret. In fact O'Brien whose big break came in the John Ford silent western classic, The Iron Horse, got his start in the army horse cavalry before World War I.

As for Bogart he's the foreman who gets his boss's intentions all wrong as far as O'Brien is concerned. He's not bad in the part though and is noticed, especially by his legion of fans for whom he's an existential legend.
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