Gentle Annie on AllMovie

Marjorie Main's first solo starring vehicle for MGM finds the formidable character actress cast as a tough-but-tender female outlaw. Living on her tumbledown ranch in Oklahoma territory, Annie Goss (Main) shelters her desperado sons (Henry Morgan, Paul Langton) from the authorities. While planning to pull up stakes and return to Missouri, the Goss family befriends marshal Lloyd Richland (James Craig), who suspects that Annie's offspring are responsible for a recent train robbery, but is hesitant to arrest them because he believes that their motivations were noble. Likewise befriended by Gentle Annie and her brood is a stranded waitress named Mary Lingen (Donna Reed), with whom Richland falls in love. If the film can be said to have a villain, it is surly Sheriff Tatum (Barton MacLane), who unlike the soft-hearted Richland is determined to uphold the letter of the law.