The Wild West, 19th century. Kent is a criminal saloon owner who basically uses rigged poker games to steal ranches of people who lost the game. He is assissted by the attractive saloon girl, Frenchy. When the drunk Dimsdale is appointed as the new sheriff, in order so that nothing can change, he surprisingly calls for help of the young lad Tom Destry who is summoned to the town to be the deputy sheriff. At first, Destry is ridiculed for being too nice, and refusing to even wear a pistol, but he slowly starts investigating how people are losing their land in the poker games, and how the previous sheriff Keogh was killed, so he starts arresting people. Kent thus orders Dimsdale to be killed. This angers Destry, who puts on a gun for the first time. In the saloon, Frenchy is shot and killed by Kent, while Destry shoots Kent. Afterwards, Destry remains in the town as the sheriff.
"Destry Rides Again" is a good western comedy, yet demonstrates that not every James Stewart movie is always a classic: it lacks more inspiration and tighter writting to feel more complete or to satisfy the viewers on a higher level. Stewart plays the title character well, who arrives 20 minutes into the film, traveling in a stagecoach and saying some of the darnedest lines ("I had a friend once. His name was Stubbs. He was always going around threatening to blow people's heads off. One day a fella came along and took him up on it. Well, folks say that now Stubbs' forehead is holding up the prettiest tombstone in Greenlawn Cemetery"), and then takes on a role of a seemingly naive guy who later on turns out far more competent than expected in solving a problem, in this case as a deputy sheriff. Marlene Dietrich is excellent as the sleazy saloon girl Frenchy, especially in the opening act where a man brags how he has an ace in a poker game, so she ostensibly "falls" and spills her drink on him, after which his card conveniently disappears and he loses his ranch. However, Frenchy practically disappears from the story after Destry appears, so their love story thus feels shoehorned in the finale, since she simply wasn't around the protagonist. The story has some sharp observations about the exploitation of people through gambling and rigged games, yet a fair share of it is too slow, too long, and does not always feel genuine. This anemic approach dates the film, as well as the abrupt ending, but one sequence is simply brilliant: in the shootout, two groups of men shoot at each other across the street, until a mass of women marches between them. The men have to stop, since they cannot shoot at the women. And then, the women march into the saloon, and start beating up all the men inside, ending the "Mexican standoff" their own way.
Grade:++
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