The fourth silver screen rendition of a Bret Harte story set in the California Gold Rush. Young Melissa "M'liss" Smith (Anne Shirley), a teenage girl flowering in the rough mountain town of Smith's Pocket, is struggling. Her soggy father (xxx) can't make enough prospects to keep their home from being turned into the town's school, and her fresh-faced looks attract the wrong kind of attention. Anne Shirley follows in the footsteps of Barbara Tennant, Gladys Walton, and Mary Pickford (all whom previously played the mountaintop ingenue) for this, her fourth and final experience working under director George Nicholls, Jr. RKO had enough faith in their production to borrow Guy Kibbee from Warner Brothers to play her alcoholic father, and Douglas Dumbrille from Columbia as the local gambler. The New York Times quibbled that Bret Harte's rowdy Wild West story had been sanitized into "a commonplace small town squabbling over its new school teacher" but conceded that Shirley's interpretation of the "friendly, ungrammatical lass" wasn't a total waste.

By Violet LeVoit