The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940). Walter Brennan nabbed his third Oscar for this Western about a vagabond (Gary Cooper) who comes to a small, imperiously run Texas town. Brennan plays Judge Roy Bean, who’s aggressively, impulsively rendered rulings are what keeps the townsfolk in check. Much of the pleasure of The Westerner derives from watching Cooper’s vaguely distracted humility pays against Brennan’s antic cantankerousness, a clash that takes on a comic tang. The picture’s energy ebbs significantly whenever it strays too long from that strength, notably in the romantic subplot between the drifter and a sweet, lonely homesteader (Doris Davenport). Even in the slower passages, director William Wyler brings just the right amount of breeziness to his storytelling. Even as the film is peppered with bleak details, the plain entertainment value remains high. The Westerner winds up having the same sort of aw-shucks charm as its leading man.

Follow Me Quietly (Richard Fleischer, 1949). This terse police procedural (the runtime clock in right at sixty minutes) revolves around efforts to catch a serial killer who’s running rampant in a big city. After failing with other methods for helping witnesses remember fleeting encounters with the murderer, obsessed police lieutenant Harry Grant (William Lundigan) procures a faceless dummy with the same height, build, hair color, and wardrobe of their quarry. The novel scheme improbably yields results, leading to other tips that seem fairly nondescript (they discover he favors certain magazines and smokes a lot of cigarettes) but prompt law enforcement to get excited that they’re closing in on the killer. Despite the credibility-straining details, Follow Me Quietly is lean and griping in its storytelling, largely due to director Richard Fleischer wisely emphasizing clarity and momentum in shaping the narrative. Lundigan is stiff in the lead role, which helps emphasize the liveliness in the supporting tuns by Dorothy Patrick, as an ambitious reporter who’s needling the police, and Jeff Corey, as a seen-it-all colleague of Harry’s.

The New Mutants (Josh Boone, 2020). Kudos to director Josh Boone for trying to do something different with bigscreen superheroes, even if the end result plainly doesn’t work. Boone works with co-screenwriter Knate Lee to render the X-Men comic book spinoff series The New Mutants as a horror movie, an approach clearly inspired by artist Bill Sienkiewicz’s notable tenure on the title. Unfortunately, the horror movie Boone’s work most recalls is the 1990 mediocrity Flatliners. At a remote facility where a lone overseer (Alice Braga) works with teens who are still figuring out how to use their fantastical powers, the latest patient, Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt), is unwittingly causing her fellow morose mutants to relive tragedies from their past. In part because the scary scenes are blunted by an obvious mandate to earn a PG-13 rating, the hybrid never quite locks in, making the film unsatisfying as both action and horror. More problematically, the characters don’t feel fully formed. The actors do their best to inject some personality into their roles, but only Anya Taylor-Joy comes anywhere close to succeeding in that. It helps that she’s playing the requisite bad ass of the crew.