Here’s my

review

of Universal’s beautiful new DVD of “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” I saw a nitrate IB Technicolor print at the Museum of the Moving Image with my late Aunt Rose a year and a half ago, and this is a lovely representation of this pioneering three-strip (the first shot mostly out of doors) melodrama from 1936. Three years earlier, Henry Hathaway directed a similar story about a backwoods Romeo and Juliet caught up in a family feud. “To the Last Man” was an entry in Paramount’s Zane Grey series that Hathaway cut his directing teeth on; it also established Randolph Scott as a western star, though it would be 15 years before Scott focused exclusively on this genre. Unfortunately, the Zane Grey series was not included in the huge pre-1948 talkie library that Paramount sold to MCA, as Universal’s parent comedy used to be known, in 1956. The series, which ran for nine years beginning in 1932 (and then resumed at RKO in the ’40s) long ago fell into the public domain, and I taped an introduction for Roan’s somewhat mutilated DVD edition of “Last Man” a few years ago. As it happens, an apparently intact complete version arrives on DVD today, even if the first reel has so many scratches it looks like it was dragged across a barroom floor. It’s included in Mill Creek’s “Shirley Temple and Friends” under the reissue title “Law of Vengance.” Though she goes unbilled, Shirley (who would work with Hathaway and Scott again) has a showy role as the daughter of Gail Patrick and Barton McLaine — in one scene, a bad guy shoots the head off her doll! Leading lady Esther Ralston has a semi-nude dip in this pre-Code western, and it’s pretty clear she and Randy spend the night together. Hathaway had been an assistant director on Victor Fleming’s 1923 version of the same story, and stock footage from the earlier film is rather obviously used for the climactic landslide. The set includes two other features, Shirley’s full-length debut the rarely seen “The Red-Haired Alibi” (1932) and the inescapable “The Little Princess” (1939), as well as the usual assortment of her Educational Pictures shorts from ’32 and ’33. There are two more discs devoted to Shirley’s “Friends” — a common dodge on PD collections — including Natalie Wood, Sharyn Moffett, Lois Butler, Sandy Desher, Bonita Granville and four “Our Gang” shorts.