Mark Robson's Roughshod (1949)

Whenever I go with my seven-year-old daughter to some crummy new piece of animation I think of how movies once appealed across age and gender differences.  Case in point:  Roughshod.  The film has a young kid (nicely played by Claude Jarman, Jr.), a handsome older brother (played by Robert Sterling) and a sexy woman (Gloria Grahame) on a trip to California, pursued by a bad guy (John Ireland).  The film takes place mostly outdoors among rocks and forests, photographed with dappled chiaroscuro by cinematographer Joseph Biroc.  Although the film has a noir mood (it was written by Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote Out of the Past, 1947) it does have a happy ending of sorts, after all the bad guys are killed (as well as some of the good guys), and Claude Jarmen, Jr. is taught his ABC's by Gloria Grahame.

 This is a B Western, well crafted by director by Mark Robson, after his apprenticeship with Val Lewton (The Seventh Victim 1943 ) and before his bloated later films (Peyton Place 1947 et al.)