Sherlock Holmes movie fans know that any film bearing the name of director Roy William Neill is worth a good look. The driving creative force behind the Holmes films of the 1940s starring Basil Rathbone, Neill's direction can usually be counted upon for strong visual imagination and deep atmosphere. But before the Holmes films (which actually culminated his career), Neill directed nearly 100 other movies; one of them, The Avenger (1931), has been given a quiet new release by Sony in their made-on-demand "Choice Collection" line of DVDs.

It's a little B western from Columbia Pictures, barely an hour in length, and it's a lot better than it has any right to be, thanks to Neill's hand with atmospherics and action. It centers on the character Joaquin Murrieta, in real life a notorious Mexican bandit of the 19th century who supposedly took bloodthirsty revenge against Americans for their maltreatment of him and his wife. At least that's the legend -- that he became a kind of Mexican Robin Hood. He was also a likely inspiration for the famous character of Zorro.

In any case, in The Avenger he is played by cowboy star Buck Jones -- an unlikely piece of casting, though Jones acquits himself very well -- and the story makes him completely sympathetic. Arriving in Senora after romancing, and serenading, a woman on a stagecoach, he finds that his brother has been accused of horse-thieving and is about to be hanged. In reality, the brother has been framed by greedy prospectors who want his claim. Murrieta is unable to stop them, and is forced to watch the hanging while strapped to a tree. Then he's whipped. Some years later, he returns to town under an assumed name and a new appearance: snazzy clothes, a mustache, top hat, and even a new accent. He's returned to exact revenge, and as the mysterious, Zorro-like "Black Shadow," he and his cohorts hold up stagecoaches and rob the gold, and quickly the entire area is on the alert. But then he gets down to his main business -- revenge against the three men who murdered his brother. Instead of killing them himself, however, he concocts ingenious plans to set them up to be killed inadvertently by others. But getting the main villain, Goss (Walter Percival), will prove especially challenging.

Roy William Neill's hand is evident in imaginative scene stagings, such as in a schoolhouse where Murrieta and Goss vie comedically for schoolmarm Helen (Dorothy Revier); or the hanging sequence in which Neill notably does not show us the hanging, leaving it to our imaginations and finding instead a simple visual way to show the rage and hurt building in Murrieta; and in a superb night-time bank scene, in which Murrieta finds his revenge against one of the three villains. That scene looks like something out of a film noir a decade later. There's also an impressive stampede through a town, and several gorgeous, galloping horse chases at night, filmed with low angles and silhouettes. These are exciting, suspenseful action scenes, creatively presented, and show the work of a real stylist at the helm.

To consider Neill's skill in creating atmosphere, look no further than the remarkable first three shots of the film: a panning long shot of a stagecoach careering across a rough landscape, a slow dissolve to a panning close-up of the side of the coach, and then a slow dissolve to a two-shot of a man and a woman inside, with the man playing guitar and singing a plaintive melody. The music, singing and slowly gliding camera moves and dissolves make for a striking contrast to the clattering speed of the stagecoach. We don't yet know what's going to happen, but the presentation casts an intriguing and arresting spell.

Buck Jones maintained his own film unit through much of his career, both at Columbia and Universal. Film historian William Everson wrote that Jones "always managed to get his personal imprint on his westerns... On the whole his standards were high... His pictures were rugged, well-mounted, deliberately avoiding slickness and streamlining, and usually keeping well out of the formula rut."

The Avenger was remade as Vengeance of the West (1942), starring Bill Elliott, but the character of Joaquin Murrieta has been played on screen by several other actors including Richard Dix in The Gay Defender (1927), Warner Baxter in Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936), Phillip Reed in The Bandit Queen (1950), Jeffrey Hunter in Murieta (1965), and others.

The only real flaw in this film are the long, drawn-out pauses between lines of dialogue that mar many early talkies. But putting that aside, The Avenger will still satisfy classic film fans who understand that this is a small B film -- better than most, but still small. Sony's DVD is a very no-frills affair, with not even a title menu. But the film has been beautifully restored and Ted Tetzlaff's outstanding cinematography looks great. Tetzlaff would later shoot films like Remember the Night (1940), The Enchanted Cottage (1945) and Notorious (1946) before becoming a director himself.

By Jeremy Arnold