Destry Rides Again

By VARIETY STAFF

Universal/Realart. Director George Marshall; Producer Joe Pasternak; Screenplay Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell, Henry Myers; Camera Hal Mohr; Editor Milton Carruth; Music Frank Skinner; Art Director Jack Otterson, Martin Obzina
 
Marlene Dietrich
James Stewart
Charles Winninger
Mischa Auer
Brian Donlevy
Allen Jenkins
 

Destry Rides Again is anything but a super-western. It's just plain, good entertainment [from an original story by Felix Jackson suggested by Max Brand's novel], primed with action and laughs and human sentiment.

Marlene Dietrich's work as the hardened, ever-scrapping ginmill entertainer serves pretty much as the teeterboard from which this picture flips itself from the level of the ordinary western into a class item.

This gangster fable with an early West background revolves for the most part around the rowdy, gaudy ginmill and dancehall which Brian Donlevy operates in the frontier town of Bottle Neck. With the aid of his No. 1 entertainer (Dietrich), Donlevy cuts a wide swath cheating the townsmen at cards and working a waterhole racket until he makes the mistake of appointing the town rumpot (Charles Winniger) the local sheriff.

(B&W) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1939. Running time: 90 MIN.