Once you have seen enough of a particular genre, the work starts to blur together. It can seem very repetitive, especially if we are dealing with either the earlier years of Hollywood filmmaking or a genre that didn’t initially allow for much space for exploration and experimentation. Unfortunately, a film like Doomed at Sundown meets both of these criteria, and ultimately becomes one of the many forgettable westerns produced in the 1930s, an era where the genre was starting to achieve its first burst of popularity (taking over from the swashbucklers that reigned supreme during the silent era), and thus were produced at an alarming rate, every Hollywood studio churning them out on what was very likely akin to a metaphorical assembly line, cobbling together some combination of hackneyed story and pairing it with whatever western star was available (or more commonly, whatever masculine-presenting individual was closest in proximity to the camera, which explains some of the very poor acting we often found in these films), and flinging them into cinemas, where they were nearly always enjoyed and then subsequently forgotten – it’s the only way to make sense of the fact that you could throw a dart at any assemblage of westerns from this genre and find that at least a dozen of them share the exact same plot structure, if not having identical premises as a whole. I am not in the business of tearing art down (especially not in terms of early works in a particularly genre), but every allegation around westerns being part of a run-of-the-mill, formulaic style of filmmaking is proven by Doomed at Sundown, a film so endearingly incompetent, it feels almost delightful to see for ourselves just how far it can go in hitting every predictable note, long before it happens.

There is a difference between a genre trying to find its voice and actively struggling to make ends meet, even when it runs less than an hour. Doomed at Sundown may be a paltry 52 minutes, but it yet feels so much longer, and not in the sense of other early westerns like The Range Feud and The New Frontier, which also had shorter running times, but felt complete in a way that makes this film (which was produced after both of them) feel so much more rushed. Understandably, the studios were insistent that these films run a certain amount of time, so that they could be thrown in at the end of the main attraction as the B-movie that only those with a penchant for the more exciting would remained seated for – but when so many other films never saw shorter durations as an obstacle, it doesn’t reflect well on the director or anyone else involved in this film, since there was at least some potential that could have been found with either a more concise approach to the storyline (such as excising the lengthy first few scenes, which bear very little relevance to the plot, and are strangely quite disturbing, with the presence of hooded figures assembled in a cave filled with fiery torches being reminiscent of a particularly sinister organization), or slightly more time to develop its ideas. The latter seems like it was never a possibility, so every issue we find with this film can ultimately be attributed to the former, where writer George H. Plympton (who was most certainly not an impotent artist – he was responsible for writing the scripts for many cherished early genre films) and director Sam Newfield just perpetually fail to put together two scenes that make sense. On both a narrative and visual level, Doomed at Sundown feels deeply inconsistent and honestly quite unsettling in its reliance on convention, since it not only fails to establish its own voice, it falls victim to far too many cliches that it actually loses all semblance of originality as a whole.

The more you watch these 1930s westerns, the clearer it becomes that they are all following a specific formula – take a simple premise (which normally involves the cold-blooded murder of an upstanding member of society, which then provokes their valiant son to seek revenge) and choose from the ever-changing roster of western stars that the studios had on their books – and the choice of leading man often impacted the identity of the film. If Roy Rogers was your lead, expect a healthy dose of singing, and the same can be said for Buck Jones and his brand of humour, or John Wayne’s almost patriotic heroism. It’s not clear where Bob Steele fits into all of this, or what his particular brand was, other than perhaps being the most obvious case of someone being so manufactured to be a western star, even their name feels like a parody of the kind of overly macho actors that populated the genre. He is certainly not a particularly good actor, and his entire persona doesn’t translate well to this film, which is especially worrying considering he is made out to be the charismatic lead, when in reality we often struggle to notice him in group scenes. Steele is somehow upstaged by Warner Richmond, who is a much better actor, but who is once again playing a sinister saloon owner who moonlights as a gang leader (seemingly not even changing out of the exact same costume he wore in The New Frontier, in which this archetype is used far better), and who really doesn’t get anything valuable to do. It is true that westerns of this era weren’t designed to be showcases for acting, but one could at least expect some degree of charisma on the part of the leads, and Steele (nor any of the other actors outside of Richmond) seem capable of delivering anything all that interesting.

Not every film can be a success, and some have to just accept their status of being happily mediocre – and with something like Doomed at Sundown, where the audience forgets everything that happened almost immediately after the film has ended (since nothing of value is retained, since there isn’t much that lingers in the memory), such an assessment is certainly very generous. There is so little difference between this film and nearly every other western film produced during this period, and thus there really isn’t anything that is done here that is discernibly interesting or all that captivating. It is a mercifully short film, but this actually impedes on the quality, since there were clearly far more ideas in this film than anyone knew what to do with, so it becomes an exercise in seeing exactly what is resolved and what exists just to be forceful exposition (such as the opening scene with the sinister cult-like group, which could have been entirely excised without any impact on the narrative, mainly since it contributes virtually nothing to the story), which is its ultimate downfall. Doomed at Sundown is unremarkable and conventional, and it feels like it is just going through the motions, which is never a good approach for any film to take, and the primary reason why, even after seeing it, there is almost nothing that lingers with us, especially nothing that indicates any real value behind this film.