ARIZONA
(director: Wesley Ruggles; screenwriter: Claude Binyan, based on the story by Clarence Budington Kelland; cinematographer: Fayte M. Browne; editors: William Lyon, Otto Myer; music: Victor Young; cast: Jean Arthur (Phoebe Titus), William Holden (Peter Muncie), Warren William (Jefferson Carteret), Porter Hall (Lazarus Ward), Edgar Buchanan (Judge Bogardus), Paul Harvey (Solomon Warner), George Chandler (Haley); Runtime: 127; MPAA Rating: NR; producer: Wesley Ruggles; Columbia; 1940-B/W)
“Would-be epic Western.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Wesley Ruggles (“Cimarron”/”London Town”) fastidiously directs this would-be epic Western as a spectacle. Screenwriter Claude Binyan adapts it from the story by Clarence Budington Kelland. The film would be forgotten today were it not for the stock footage it provided for many oaters. Unfortunately, its $2 million budget was too much for it to recoup at the box office.
It’s set in the frontier town of Tucson, Arizona, in the 1860s, where both Union and Confederates have army troops stationed, as it tells its bloated two-hour fiction story on how Arizona developed.
Peter Muncie (William Holden, playing in his first Western, in his 20s) is the young drifter from Missouri who comes to town and hits it off with Phoebe Titus (Jean Arthur, star in the silents, who is 40), but gets restless and bolts for California. He will come back to Tucson and marry her on his Union Army discharge. She owns a freight-line and plans to start the town’s first cattle ranch with the $15,000 she saved. When Muncie’s discharged, she sends him to Nebraska to bring back the best cattle he can buy. But small time crook, the saloon owner, Ward (Porter Hall), partners with the Confederate dandy, a nasty crook hiding behind a phony politeness, who sabotages her wagon trains and schemes to rob her money in her house vault by hiring three men to blow-up her safe, and then schemes to take away her freight-line business by giving her a loan of $15,000, which is the money he stole from her. He will also make sure she can’t pay back the loan so he gets her ranch and business.
The third act is action-packed with a big town marriage celebration, a cattle stampede, an Indian raid and gunplay between the villain and the hero.
REVIEWED ON 1/30/2026 GRADE: B
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