THE PAINTED TRAIL. Monogram, 1938. Tom Keene, Eleanor Stewart, LeRoy Mason, Walter Long, Frank Campeau, Jimmy Eagles. Story by Robert Emmett Tansey; director: Robert F. Hill.

   A thoughtful director can bring a lot to a movie, even a B-picture like The Painted Trail, a fast-paced Tom Keene western with surprisingly arty tinges from a studio that mostly did its movies penny-plain.

   This one gives us the usual thing of a lawman going undercover (as the Pecos Kid) to thwart an outlaw gang operating on the Mexican border and coming up against baddies LeRoy Mason and Walter Long — a real veteran, who in palmier days menaced Lillian Gish in Birth of a Nation and played Miles Archer in the first film of The Maltese Falcon.

   There’s also a nice bit by an unknown actor named Jimmy Eagles as a desperate wanna-be fingered for extinction by the tough guys he wants to impress; it’s an energetic, touching job that should have led to bigger things, but Monogram was always a studio where actors ended-up rather than started-out.

   Director Robert F. Hill takes all this and runs through it with commendable speed. Hill was never known for artistry — he’s remembered if at all for helming Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars and the silent Adventures of Tarzan with Elmo Lincoln — but he throws in a couple moments here that make one wonder: there’s a clandestine meeting in a mostly darkened room, and at the end of the scene a character extinguishes the only lamp, plunging the screen into darkness: a simple yet stylish alternative to the standard fade-to-black.

   Best of all, the climax finds Tom Keene and Walter Long approaching each other for a shoot-out walking along opposite sides of a chicken-wire border fence, and Hill shoots this from every possible angle to maximize the visual play of the fence against the gunmen.

   It’s a startling, tense and eye-catching few minutes in a film that deserves a second look.