Mystery Ranch / (B&W)

Deranged ranch owner Henry Steele (Charles Middleton) wages a bloody campaign of terror against his Arizona neighbors with a sadistic iron fist and a ruthless band of renegade Apaches. When Steele orders the murder of an Arizona Ranger caught snooping around his remote ranch, Ranger Bob Sanborn (George O'Brien) is sent to investigate. Posing as a cowboy, Sanborn soon discovers that Steele's megalomaniacal scheme to grab more land and power also includes a forced marriage to his dead partner's daughter (Cecilia Parker), being held prisoner in Steele's guarded compound. Sanborn's mission to stop Steele and rescue the imprisoned woman is imperiled when Steele gets wise to Sanborn's true identity

Mystery Ranchis a moody, genre-transcending western thriller, marked by the superbly inventive camerawork of Joseph August, co-founder of the American Society of Cinematographers who later would shoot The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Gunga Din, for which he won an Oscar. Charles Middleton, renowned as Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials, plays the classical piano-playing mad rancher in an intensely dark performance culminating in a shocking suicidal climax. George O'Brien brings an engaging naturalism and convincing physicality to the typically clich?riven role of the lone western hero in this under-appreciated cowboy classic.