RUSTLER’S PARADISE. Ajax Pictures, 1935. Harry Carey, Gertrude Messinger, Edmund Cobb, Carmen Bailey, Theodore Lorch. Story-screenwriter-director: Harry L. Fraser.

   Rustler’s Paradise.could have sat right up there with Ride Lonesome and The Searchers for sheer perverse obsession, but as served up in the clumsy mitts of Director Harry Fraser, it just seems a bit quirky.

   Loveable, crusty old Harry Carey Sr. plays a vengeful cowboy out to get the guy who seduced his wife and stole his daughter, and in his late 50s here, he’s a bit old to be carrying the heavy heroics, but he acquits himself with his own unassuming charm, and his age even lends a bit of authenticity to the proceedings.

   Just as engaging is Edmond Cobb, looking like a cartoon villain with oversize nose and pointy chin, and his final comeuppance at the hands of loveable, crusty old Harry comes as rather a shock.

   There’s a potentially very effective moment where the outlaw gang, rushing to the hideout to dispose of Carey, see what he’s done to their boss, and all the fight just runs right out of them.

   Which could have been quite enjoyable in the hands of a capable director.

   But director Harry Fraser snuffs the glimmerings of anything strange and memorable in Rustler’s Paradise pretty quickly. Fans of Ed Wood should take a look at Fraser’s oeuvre and be humbled at the feet of the master.

   Where Wood made a few bad movies, Fraser was an auteur of epic ineptitude who stayed in the cheap-movie industry for a quarter century, turning out things like Captain America (the serial with the Atomic Vibrator), Chained for Life (a murder movie with actual conjoined twins as stars) and The White Gorilla, which features Ray Corrigan chasing himself in an ape suit.

   In Rustler’s Paradise Fraser takes the directorial reins, uses them to strangle a fine actor, and turns an off-beat story into something barely coherent. Dreadful, but typical of the man.