criminal.

Perfect as the gallant Confederate officer

The picture was produced by Zanuck
himself. He was really pushing Tierney at that time. It was directed by
Irving Cummings. Cummings had started in movies as an actor back in 1909 (he’d
been in the 1912 The Life of Buffalo Bill)
and was a popular leading man in silent-movies, including Westerns, in the 20s.
By the 30s he was Fox’s go-to director for the big musicals and comedies they
specialized in then, but he had quite a good Western track (or trail) record
too. He had directed Warner Baxter’s Oscar-winning performance in In Old Arizona in 1928, and he directed
some scenes of Jesse James, filling
in for a temporarily bed-ridden Henry King.

Cummings

The writers were top-drawer – or would
become so. The story was by Niven Busch, who had co-written the screenplayfor
the Gary Cooper/Walter Brennan Judge Roy Bean picture The Westerner the year before and who would, after the war, write
the famous Duel in the Sun (more popularly known as Lust
in the Dust) and then fine noir
Westerns such as Pursued and The Furies later in the 40s. The
screenplay from Busch’s story was written up by Lamar Trotti, Fox regular since
the mid-30s, who often wrote from a (rather romanticized) Southern perspective.
He would write pictures for John Ford and William A Wellman, including
the excellent Gregory Pecknoir
Western Yellow Sky. He was a
considerable talent. However, the screenplay of Belle Starr is not excellent: we never really understand why Sam is
still fighting a lost war, nor why he lets himself be captured so easily and so
often. And there is a very paternalistic (and to