Review of North West Mounted Police

I just watched this movie for the first time. Coop made the Westerner for William Wyler, who had the script totally rewritten to accommodate Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean and Gary Cooper as Cole Harden. It was made the same year as this one, 1940. De Mille was a failed playwright who became something like a business partner to some very important nickelodeon owners in New York. They let him come west in 1913 and make the first film in Hollywood: The Squaw Man. De Mille was pretty much incompetent, but his films were nevertheless, often successful. The Westerner is arguably one of the funniest westerns ever made. Coop and Brennan were superb because the film was set up for them. De Mille tried to cut Northwest Mounted's script for Cooper, but Coop's lines didn't always fit in the square peg mounted police spectacle. That left Coop squirming to get the right grimace, wince or gulp, when the script just couldn't make room for it. The movie was close to good, but not quite. I just saw it on a downloaded DVD. I spotted Iron Eyes Cody as a young Indian in the cast, but note that he is not included in the IMDb cast. Perhaps someone wants to rectify that.