Let's be realistic.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

One more time, I realize that the users have not pointed a very important information about this film. A film that demonstrates a very exceptional violence right in the middle of the thirties. That was so unusual, even before the Hayes Code arrival. I speak of the fact that there was another film made in the same period, a crime film, also written by the terrific W R Burnett and characterized by the great Walter Huston, with also a brutal final gunfight. I talk, of course, of THE BEAST OF THE CITY. I am surprised that no one has spoken about this. Even a blind man, would have told that.Both of them are pure masterpieces, and not only because of the extreme violence. I will never be tired of watching them.

If you are old enough to remember the "oaters" from television in the '50s, this is one that you wish you had seen. A thinly vieled "Gunfight at the OK Corral" 25 years before the fact with few words, much action and as the shorts used to say "blazing guns". No gratuitous shootimg here. All the bad guys deserved it.

A stark and rugged early talkie western, Law and Order stars Walter Huston and Harry Carey, and is basically a fictionalization of the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. The names are changed to protect the innocent(and the guilty) but this is basically the same story. W.R. Burnett's novel provided the basis for this film. Young John Huston was one of the screenwriters.Those who think that all early sound movies are chatty comedies and lugubrious soaps ought to take a look at this one. It's fast-paced and realistic, and ends in a breathtaking and amazingly well-sustained blaze of violence and gunplay. Director Edward Cahn proved himself a master on this one. He mostly directed B's and short subjects, and yet on this one occasion showed himself the equal of a Ford or a Hawks.

"Law and Order" is one of the first (if not THE first) screen treatment of the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Curiously enough, although the main characters are clearly based on the Earps and the Clantons, they are called by other names. The "Earps", for example, are called Johnson and the "Clantons", Northrup. All that aside, "Law and Order" is an excellent action packed western from the early sound era. As such, many of the actors were still learning to act for sound. So you will still see many of the exaggerated facial expressions and gestures that were common in silent films. The gunfight sequence is as good as you will ever see. Walter Huston plays a Wyatt Earp type character called Frame Johnson who with his brother Luther (Russell Hopton) sidekick Deadwood (Raymond Hatton) and a Doc Holiday type character called Brandt (Harry Carey), ride into the lawless town of Tombstone. There they encounter the ruthless Northrup Brothers (Ralph Ince, Harry Woods, Richard Alexander) culminating in the famous gunfight which takes place, for the most part,in the O.K. barn. Along the way, Huston hangs a dim-witted murderer (a very young and very thin Andy Devine). Huston plays the lead alternatively between a Gary Cooperish style country bumpkin and the no nonsense law enforcer. Carey as always is excellent as the stove pie hatted gambler Brandt. Woods is his usual sneering villain. Also down the cast list is a young Walter Brennan as a saloon worker and perennial bartender Dewey Robinson as, you guessed it, the bartender. "Law and Order" is an excellent western of this or any other period. It is a pity that it is not more widely available for viewing.