20 Mule Team

20 Mule Team (also known as Twenty Mule Team) is a 1940 American western film directed by Richard Thorpe and starring Marjorie Rambeau, Anne Baxter and Wallace Beery, who appears with his nephew Noah Beery Jr.

The film was originally released in sepia-tone, a brown-and-white process used by the studio the previous year for the Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz.

The company is unable to pay its transport drivers, the 20 mule teams that haul the borax across the desert.

Skinner Bill, a mule-team driver, is unable to pay his rent and is evicted by Josie Johnson, owner of the Furnace Flat saloon.

In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Theodore Strauss wrote that the film "moves little faster than its plodding mules" and assessed the cast performances: "As the whip-slinging skinner Mr. Beery is as hard-headed, muddled and garrulous as of yore; Marjorie Rambeau, as the mother, is obviously full of woe, and Anne Baxter is an attractive little desert flower.

Beery in the trailer