Bret Harte's spare but stinging frontier tale "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" - first published in January 1869 in Harte's Overland Monthly - has been adapted for motion pictures several times, from John Ford's 1919 silent starring Harry Carey to Lucio Fulci's gory 1975 spaghetti western Four of the Apocalypse. RKO Radio Pictures dusted off the material in 1936 as a vehicle for star Preston Sturges, whom the studio cast as John Oakhurst, a casino proprietor during California's Gold Rush who becomes an unlikely Moses to The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1937). The screenplay by John Twist and Harry Segall feathers in elements from Harte's 1892 tale "The Luck of the Roaring Camp," which saddles Oakhurst with an orphan charge (child actress Virginia Weidler), a schoolmarm (Jean Muir) with designs on making an honest man of him, and a reform-minded parson (Van Heflin, in his second film role), whose best intentions bring out the worst in frontier society. Director Christy Cabanne's long career included scutwork for D.W. Griffith on Birth of a Nation (1914) and Intolerance (1916), a documentary about Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, a slew of pre-Code crime films, and the Universal chiller The Mummy's Hand (1940). Harte's story was again mounted for films in 1952 by 20th Century Fox, with Dale Robertson and Anne Baxter in the leads, and for television by Kraft Theatre in a live 1958 broadcast starring George C. Scott.

By Richard Harland Smith