THE DESPERADOES rode into war-worried 1943 as Columbia Pictures first venture into Technicolor, a humor-infused western actioner directed by Charles Vidor (Gilda, Love Me Or Leave Me) with the script by Robert Carson (A Star Is Born, Beau Geste) coming out of a story by the phenomenally prodigious Max Brand. *

Utah, 1863. With a crooked banker, a corrupt judge and a bevy of outlaws on hand, straight-shooter  ‘Sheriff Steve Upton’ (Randolph Scott) finds himself aligned with partial rascal ‘Cheyenne Rogers’ (Glenn Ford), who had been ready to participate in a bank robbery, but is given a chance at redemption by saloon owner ‘Countess Maletta’ (Claire Trevor). Among interested parties are ‘Uncle Willie’ McLeod (Edgar Buchanan), who was privy to the robbery Cheyenne missed out on, his feisty daughter ‘Allison’ (Evelyn Keyes) who hankers for Cheyenne, and ‘Nitro Rankin’ (Guinn Williams), Cheyenne’s dynamite-expert pal.

The plentiful jokes are pretty stale, but the Utah scenery around Kanab, Johnson Canyon and Paria is nicely showcased. The 87 minutes pack in two bank robberies, a dance, some romance, a big-scale horse stampede, a jail break, a couple of explosions and the expected shoot-out finale. There’s also a bar-wrecker brawl (inspired by the never-topped saloon smashup in Dodge City) and some quite impressive full-gallop, hell-for-breakfast chases, with impeccable riding from Scott, Ford and Williams—Scott and a horse are effectively a centaur.

Not to be confused with a crappy 1969 western bearing the same title, this grossed $3,100,000 in 1943, #95 on the moneymaker list. With Porter Hall, Raymond Walburn, Irving Bacon and Glenn Strange.

* Branded—as in Max Brand, the gent the story came from. Brand was the best-known of 19 pen names used by the astonishingly prodigious Frederick Schiller Faust, born in Seattle in 1892. Among his more than 500 short novels, some 300 were westerns. He was mortally wounded in 1944 while serving as a US war correspondent in Italy.

Keyes, fetching and frank: “I have often wondered what my life would have been like if I had needed a size 38 bra instead of a modest 34.”  She was 26 here, in the 4th of six times working with Ford, also 26.

The most notable thing about this old-fashioned oater is that it introduced Scott, 45, and producer Harry Joe Brown to Budd Boetticher (then an assistant director), forming friendships/partnerships that would later result in some memorable westerns.