Tonight's Movie: The Texas Rangers (1936) - A Kino Lorber Blu-ray Review

THE TEXAS RANGERS (1936), directed by King Vidor and starring Fred MacMurray, has just been released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.Vidor also produced and teamed with Elizabeth Hill to cowrite the story; Louis Stevens wrote the screenplay of this 98-minute film. The story was inspired by a book by Walter Prescott Webb.I'll add off the top that this film is not connected with the 1951 George Montgomery film of the same title, although Montgomery plays a character not too dissimilar from MacMurray's.In this 1936 film MacMurray, Jack Oakie, and Lloyd Nolan play a trio of outlaws on the Texas frontier; MacMurray and Oakie are separated from Nolan when escaping a posse. Broke and hungry, the two men sign on with the Texas Rangers -- three meals a day! -- thinking their criminal careers will benefit from insider information.Instead the men are changed by their new jobs -- and in the case of MacMurray, the love of sweet and spunky Jean Parker -- and decide to stick with law enforcement.However,…