and
had won a contract from Zanuck in 1940. She had been the female lead to
Henry Fonda’s Frank James in Fox’s Fritz Lang-directed The Return of Frank James later that year, though she would not be
a Western specialist. In fact after The
Return and Belle Starr she would
only do The Secret of Convict Lake
with Glenn Ford in 1951 and finally the semi-Western Way of a Gauchowith Rory Calhoun in 1952. She was really too upper-class and Eastern for the genre. In Belle Starr she goes for the Scarlett O’Hara vibe (and too-obvious accent)
and copes well (or her stunt double does) with the sidesaddle gallopin’. Like
Scarlett, though, she does come across as essentially tiresome, and while Tierney is
satisfactory as the grande dame on
the plantation, she is much less so when roughingit with pistol packin’ bandits
in the hills.

Tierney as Belle

Randolph Scott was very famous by ’41. From his
1936 The Last of the Mohicans onward,
he had become a leading figure of the Western. Jesse James in 1939 (another whitewash in color) was a major big-budget Fox picture, and as the
first screen Wyatt Earp in Frontier Marshal later in the year Scott had been enormously popular. He was fine in Western Union early in 1941, another big
Fritz Lang film, and he had been a gallant Confederate officer in Virginia City with Errol Flynn, so he was
the ideal casting for the lead as Sam Starr. The Fox writers couldn’t have him
as a Cherokee renegade, though. He had to be a Southern gentleman. Wealthy
Virginian Scott was far too grand to be a common