When a Man's a Man (Atherton Productions, Sol Lesser Productions, Fox Film Corporation, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 28) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video of the 1935 movie When a Man’s a Man, which I’d been curious about since we watched the nominal 1949 remake, Massacre River, a few nights ago (January 21). The story began as a novel by Harold Bell Wright in 1916 and was first filmed as a silent in 1924, with former Keystone Kop Eddie Cline as director. Cline, not surprisingly, was known as a comedy specialist who had worked with Buster Keaton in the 1920’s and W. C. Fields in the early 1940’s (he directed The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, which both ended with two of the greatest slapstick chases ever filmed in the sound era), though he directed plenty of films in other genres too. Cline directed the 1935 version as well, though as Charles pointed out, the story of this film had so little in common with that of Massacre River he’d like to read Wright’s novel just to figure out how the same basic story could generate such radically different films. The 1935 When a Man’s a Man has little in common with Massacre River but the character names of the male leads, Larry Knight (George O’Brien in 1935, Guy Madison in 1949) and Phil Acton (Paul Kelly in 1935, Rory Calhoun in 1949), and the romantic triangle between them and the female lead. Here her name is “Kitty Baldwin” (Dorothy Wilson, a personable actress who deserved more of a career than she got) and she’s the daughter of cattle rancher Dean Baldwin (Nick Carlyle). The bad guys are Nick Gambert (Harry Woods) and his henchman (Frank Ellis), who are taking advantage of a landslide (which we suspect they actually caused by dynamiting the nearby hill; this movie makes dynamite seem as easy to get as flour) that has cut off the entire water supply for Baldwin’s Triangle Cross ranch. Without water, Baldwin’s cattle are dying off one by one.

Larry Knight is an effete Easterner who enters the action when he steps off a Los Angeles-bound train in Simmons, Arizona and stumbles into a rodeo. He accepts the challenge of trying to ride a particularly violent horse which Phil Acton, who works as a hand on the Baldwin ranch, has already tried and failed to stay on for more than a second or two. The impulsive challenge causes him to miss his train and leaves him stranded in Simmons, where he accepts a job as another Baldwin hand and starts courting Kitty even though she and Phil are also dating. At one point Larry starts fingering the lock on the gate in the fence separating Baldwin’s and Gambert’s ranches – Gambert is planning to force Baldwin to sell out to him at far less than his land’s value by killing his cattle from dehydration. He pretends to break the lock (he really opens it willfully) and the Baldwin cattle flood through the opening and have at least one drink of water before Gambert catches them and forces Phil to drive them back to Baldwin’s own parched land. Larry and Phil eventually hit on the idea of drilling an underground well and thereby, shall we say, “appropriating” some of Gambert’s water for their own stock. Larry starts digging the well from the existing tunnel – which is serviced by a bucket and windlass that’s strong enough to lower not just one but two people at once – intending to plant dynamite down there and blow a hole in the ground through which some of the water will flow to the Triangle Cross. For some reason not terribly well explained by Agnes Christine Johnson and Frank Mitchell Dazey, who wrote the script from Wright’s novel, Kitty ends up at the bottom of the well planting the dynamite; she doesn’t set it off but she’s the victim of a dirt slide that threatens to bury her alive. Both Larry and Paul set out to rescue her, and in order to get to her on time Larry has to ride that fearsome horse. Ultimately the three set off the dynamite (we get a helpful shot of the label showing the rate at which the fuse will burn), a geyser of water erupts from the top of the well, the cattle are saved, and Larry leaves to catch his long-overdue train to California and nobly sacrifices his interest in Kitty to Phil.

When a Man’s a Man isn’t much of a movie, even by the meager standards of “B” Westerns of its time (it’s not at the level of Smoking Guns or Big Calibre, two genuinely innovative “B” Westerns of the same period), and the one scene in which Charles noticed that cinematographer Frank B. Good was using a red filter just underscored the plainness of his camerawork in the rest (though he and Cline deserve credit for some creative shots of the inside of the well). Neither the 1935 When a Man’s a Man nor the 1949 Massacre River include the scene at the start in which Larry Knight’s upper-class urban girlfriend sends him off to the West because she wants him to prove he’s a “real man” before she marries him, which was apparently the central premise of Wright’s novel and, according to imdb.com’s synopsis, of the 1924 silent film as well. Nor does the 1935 When a Man’s a Man contain the at least mildly sympathetic depiction of Native Americans in Massacre River (in fact it contains no Native Americans at all!) or the fascinating character of bar owner Laura Jordan who did so much to enliven Massacre River – though Kitty Baldwin is the most interesting character of the 1935 When a Man’s a Man. She spends most of the movie dressed either in buckskin pants (at a time when it was unusual for a female in an American movie who wasn’t Marlene Dietrich to wear trousers) or a cotton dress, and though for the most part she’s a typical movie heroine of the period, she’s convincingly butch when she needs to be.