Big Dan on AllMovie

Fox Western star Buck Jones enjoyed a change of pace in this boxing melodrama directed by a young William Wellman. Returning from the war, Dan O'Hara discovers that his wife has left him for another man. To find a new purpose in life, Big Dan turns his home into a gym for street boys, where he teaches them how to box. He later falls in love with pretty Dora Allen (Marian Nixon), but a jealous woman (Jacqueline Gadsden) is only too happy to inform Dora of Big Dan's marital status. Fortunately, the errant wife obligingly dies in a sanitarium, leaving Dan and Dora free to marry. Big Dan successfully mixed action with sentiment, leaving the comic relief to veteran comedian Monte Collins and African-American actress Mattie Peters, the latter portraying a no-nonsense factotum named Ophelia. Hired originally to keep the studio's reigning cowboy star Tom Mix in line, Buck Jones proved to be no mere copy and quickly found his own audience. Unlike Tom Mix, Jones would regularly be cast in non-Westerns, but his bread-and-butter remained sagebrush tales.