Tom Keene

If there was one actor who had many cinema 'lives' and permutations, it was George Duryea ... who became Tom Keene ... who became Richard Powers ... and who returned to being Tom Keene.

His filmwork was on and off, and his days as a western hero were likewise.

Most sources note he was born in/near Rochester, New York, or Smokey Hollow, New York. However, some e-mails from Duryea family members advised that his home town was really Oakland, New York (about 50 miles from Rochester). Some Keene biographies also mention that he attended Carnegie Tech and/or Columbia University. He got the acting bug and wound up on the Broadway stage, and the story goes that Cecil B. deMille saw him and signed him for a role in a Pathe film which he was shooting.

While details of his early life are cloudy, we do know that young George Duryea wound up in Hollywood in the late 1920s in a lead role in deMille's THE GODLESS GIRL. Over the next couple of years, he appeared in other films at a variety of studios and production units ... but stardom was elusive.

In the early 1930s, RKO studios decided to bring out a low-budget western series to compete with similar fare that was being churned out by the major studios as well as the Poverty Row production outfits. Duryea, who was familiar to RKO due to several earlier films, was hired as the lead ... and for whatever reason, his name was changed to Tom Keene.

A dozen were made with the first being THE SUNDOWN TRAIL (RKO, 1931) and the last being CROSSFIRE (RKO, 1933). Sandwiched in between were several fine oaters, and two of my favorites are: SCARLET RIVER (RKO, 1933), in which Keene portrays a Hollywood movie cowboy, and THE SADDLE BUSTER (RKO, 1932), which had a rodeo setting as the background for the film.

There was no character continuity ---- Keene played different roles in each. And, as you can see from the various stills, Keene did not have a consistent range uniform (other than the gunbelt buckled in the back). He even alternated between black and white hats.

Above, a publicity still showing the eerie atmosphere of GHOST VALLEY (RKO, 1932).

(Courtesy of Minard Coons)

Above, Tom Keene on his un-named paint horse during his 1930s films at RKO (where he also rode a black)..

Above, young Billy Butts, Keene and stuntman Yakima Canutt in SCARLET RIVER (RKO, 1933). Keene's style was to have the gunbelt buckled in the back.

Keene's last RKO oater, CROSSFIRE, was released in the Summer of 1933. Why the series ended remains a mystery --- some writers have suggested that Keene didn't want to be typecast as a B-western lead and opted to move on to other film work ... and that may be the truth. However, after the Keene films concluded, RKO was without a B-western series for 3+ years (RKO did continue to release an occasional higher grade western starring the likes of Richard Dix and Harry Carey during those years). Their next full-fledged B-western range rider was muscular George O'Brien who arrived in late 1936. Thus, I would suggest that Keene's exit may have been initiated by RKO's coolness toward the series western.

After RKO, Keene went to Paramount, and included in his work were several pretty good westerns, DRIFT FENCE (Paramount, 1936) and DESERT GOLD (Paramount, 1936).

In between RKO and Paramount, he starred in King Vidor's OUR DAILY BREAD (1934), a depression era saga that apparently received critical acclaim but no box office draw.

Keene then went to work for lowly independent Crescent Pictures, and during 1936-1937, a series of 'historical dramas' were released. These were not westerns, but outdoorsy adventures which used storylines based on real events such as Mexico during the days of Pancho Villa for UNDER STRANGE FLAGS (Crescent, 1937).

A very young Rita Hayworth, then billed as Rita Cansino, was in REBELLION (Crescent, 1937) and OLD LOUISIANA (Crescent, 1937). Several years later, both of these films were re-released with Hayworth listed as the 'star'.

In the picture on the left, Keene is in his 'conservation officer' uniform romancing Peggy Keys in RAW TIMBER (Crescent, 1937), which is probably the last of his eight films for Crescent.