Some years ago, in the before time when streaming wasn’t a common way to locate and see film I chanced upon a fragment of a broadcast of 1950’s The Baron of Arizona, a western starring horror icon Vincent Price.

The film’s central plot, loosely adapted from a historical event, is how James Addison Reavis (Vincent Price) with forged documents nearly swindled the government of the United States out of almost all of the territory of Arizona.

That idea is so grand and so daring that I really wanted to see the film adaptation of it, particularly since it starred Vincent Price and was written and directed by Samuel Fuller. This month The Baron of Arizona is streaming on The Criterion Channel, and I have finally watched it.

It’s hard to remember an anticipated film that disappointed me more than this one. The film about a swindle of nearly unimaginable scale is told with dull plodding voice over and all the excitement of long boring day at work on a Monday. We follow Reavis as he takes the steps to work his forgery and swindle, a globe-trotting series of events that includes infiltrating a monastery to gain access to ancient Spanish records and manipulating a Roma Tribe to gain access to a noble’s library. After putting the grift into operation Reavis faces angry ranchers and locals who look less than kindly upon the man now calling himself their Baron and demanding rent for lands that thought they had own. but even when the plot escalates into action with hurled sticks of dynamite and federal government sending forgery experts to investigate the pace remains glacial and not even Price’s magnetic screen presence can make the movie interesting or compelling.