Tag Archives: Cattle Queens

The Violent Men

Nicholas Chennault ~ February 23, 2015

The Violent Men—Glenn Ford, Babara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Brian Keith, Dianne Foster, May Wynn, Richard Jaeckel, Basil Ruysdael, James Westerfield (1955; Dir: Rudolph Maté)

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This belongs to the “cattle queen western” subgenre, along with Johnny Guitar, Rancho Notorious, Forty Guns and various others from the 1950s, in which a dominant character is played by an established and prominent Hollywood actress of a certain age.  The violent men of the title are played by Glenn Ford, Edward G. Robinson and Brian Keith, but it turns out to be Barbara Stanwyck who dominates the course of the plot.

Capt. John Parrish (Glenn Ford) is a wounded veteran of the Union cavalry in the recent Civil War. He had come west three years previously to recover from a wound that went through his lung.  He receives a clean bill of health at the start of the movie and intends to marry Carolyn Vail (May Wynn), sell his ranch and movie back east.  The only potential buyer is Lew Wilkison (Edward G. Robinson), the crippled owner of the huge Anchor Ranch, by far the largest in the valley.

Lew Wilkison:  “Here at Anchor we don’t pay much attention to that hogwash about the meek inheriting the earth.”

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Meeting the Wilkisons: Cole (Brian Keith), Lew (Edward G. Robinson), and Martha (Barbara Stanwyck), with John Parrish (Glenn Ford).

Wilkison has long been trying to expand his Anchor Ranch to encompass the entire valley.  Twelve years previously during a burst of violence in the valley he was crippled, and he now walks only with crutches and even then with difficulty.  Parrish notices the Anchor men, especially gunman Wade Matlock (Richard Jaeckel), renewing their efforts to chase off other landowners; Matlock shoots the local sheriff in the back, and he is replaced by the unctuous Magruder (James Westerfield), who is more completely in Anchor’s pocket.  Lew Wilkison and his brother Cole (Brian Keith) offer Parrish only $15,000 for his ranch.  Wilkison’s alienated daughter Judith (Dianne Foster) is outraged at her father’s behavior, but his wife Martha (Barbara Stanwyck) appears to be pulling the strings and to have developed a relationship with Cole.

John Parrish:  “Don’t force me to fight, because you won’t like my way of fighting.”

Matlock and several Anchor riders try to push Parrish by killing one of his hands, but Parrish, who has been a determined pacifist to this point, takes the hand’s gun, confronts Matlock, and kills him.  No one attends Wade Matlock’s funeral, and one of Parrish’s riders wonders if there will be reprisals from Matlock’s friends.  John Parrish: “Matlock wasn’t the kind to have any friends after he was dead.”

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Gunman Wade Madlock (Richard Jaeckel) meets Parrish (Glenn Ford).

[Spoilers follow.]  Parrish brushes off his military skills from the war and prepares for battle.  Carolyn is appalled and ends their engagement when Parrish refuses to go east immediately.  Using his own ranch as bait, he sets up an ambush in a canyon when Anchor riders burn it down and take the shortest way home.  In retaliation,  Parrish and his men stampede Anchor’s horses and cattle, and use the distraction to burn most of the Anchor buildings.  Martha escapes the burning mansion, tossing away Lew’s crutches and leaving him to die in the flames.  Cole and Magruder lead a small army of riders attacking all the smaller ranchers and farmers, until Parrish finds that Judith has rescued her father.  In a confrontation at the Anchor ranch, Lew orders the riders away.  Parrish and Cole have a classic showdown, and Martha is killed by Cole’s Mexican paramour.  At the end, Lew wants to hire Parrish to run the Anchor ranch, and Judith and Parrish appear to be striking up a relationship.

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This is a good melodramatic range war western for its time, but pedestrian direction takes it out of the really excellent category.  Neither the Stanwyck nor the Dianne Foster character has much nuance.  Glenn Ford is good in his tenth western; he’s wearing the same hat he’ll be wearing for the next 15 years, and it’s not yet as disgusting and shapeless as it would become.  Edward G. Robinson was an excellent actor, and his presence, along with Stanwyck’s, reminds us of Double Indemnity (1944), giving this more of a western-noir flavor.  Robinson didn’t make many westerns, in part because, like James Cagney, he seems to have a modern, urban presence.  But he works well here, hard but able to shift tone convincingly.  Brian Keith, in dark hair and a thin mustache, makes a fine bad guy early in his career.  And Richard Jaeckel is good as a gunman without conscience.  An uncredited Richard Farnsworth is one of the Anchor riders.

During its second half, the action is interesting enough but not well developed, as the two sides progress through strike and counter-strike.  In particular, the shootout between Ford and Keith at the end is not well-edited (compare it with Budd Boetticher’s handling of Randolph Scott and Lee Marvin in Seven Men From Now [1956] in a moment of similar dramatic intensity, for example), nor is Stanwyck’s death.  The end seems very quick, not fleshed-out, and a bit out of character for Parrish.

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For another crippled cattle baron in a range melodrama, see Lionel Barrymore in Duel in the Sun (1947).  For Barbara Stanwyck as another cattle queen, see her in Forty Guns (1957, with Barry Sullivan); she doesn’t win there, either.  She’s better in Trooper Hook (1957, with Joel McCrea) and The Moonlighter (1953, with Fred MacMurray).  For Glenn Ford in another range melodrama, see him in Jubal (1956), which is better than this.  For James Westerfield displaying the same unctuousness in a range war, see Man With a Gun (1955, with Robert Mitchum).  For another Union Civil War veteran trying unsuccessfully to revert to pre-war pacifism because of the horrors of the war, see Rock Hudson in Gun Fury (1953).

There is some well-written dialogue here, by Harry Kleiner.  The music is by Max Steiner.  Shot in Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills, in California, and in Old Tucson, Arizona.  In color, at 96 minutes.

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Forty Guns

Nicholas Chennault ~ February 18, 2014

Forty Guns—Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Gene Barry, Dean Jagger, John Ericson, Robert Dix, Hank Worden (1957; Dir:  Samuel Fuller)

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The forty guns referred to in the title are employees of the boss of the range, Jessica Drummond (Barbarbara Stanwyck) in Cochise County, Arizona, in this Earpian-cattle queen melodrama.  U.S. marshal Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) comes to town with two of his brothers, with a warrant for one of those employees. 

Drummond has run things pretty much as she pleased, with her private army and the local sheriff Ned Logan (Dean Jagger) in her pocket.  Her wild younger brother Brockie (John Ericson) has a tendency to drink too much and to father illegitimate children, whose mothers Drummond then has to pay off.  The Bonnell brothers are bathing when Brockie and his friends shoot up the town, including shooting the elderly near-blind town marshal (Hank Worden).  After some entreaties, oldest brother Griff (Barry Sullivan) tackles Brockie and arrests him.  The corrupt sheriff then lets him go with no consequences.

40GunsJessica Getting the brother out of jail.

Griff serves his warrant at the Drummond ranch and meets Jessica.  She seems intrigued by him.  Bonnell brother Whit (Gene Barry) meets the local female gunsmith and is taken with her.  Griff keeps trying to send youngest brother Chico (Robert Dix) off to California, but he resists because he wants to join the family business.

The man Griff arrested is shot in jail, and Griff looks for the shooter.  He develops more of a relationship with Jessica, while Ned Logan sets up a trap for Griff with the supposed shooter as bait.  When Griff walks into the trap, Chico gets the shooter who would have shot Griff.  Brockie goes crazy, displaying the corpse of the shooter at the local undertaking establishment.  Griff and Jessica deepen their relationship while all this trouble also gets deeper.  She fires Sheriff Logan, who hangs himself in despair at being cut out of Jessica’s life.

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On the day of Whit’s wedding to the lady gunsmith, Brockie tries to kill Griff from afar with a rifle and kills Whit instead.  Jessica pays for his legal defense and bribes judges, but he’s convicted and she refuses to help him escape.  Her empire, based on bribery and other sorts of crime, is falling apart around her ears, while she tries to do the right thing and square herself with Griff.  Brockie breaks out and uses Jessica as a hostage/shield.  Griff shoots Jessica non-fatally and then empties his gun into Brockie when he drops her.  Chico takes Whit’s position as the town marshal, and Griff heads off to California in his two-seater buggy.  Around the end credits we can see a distant shot of Jessica running up the dirt street after Griff and catching up to him at the fade-out.  Presumably they make up and live happily ever after, rebuilding Jessica’s empire.

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The Earp connection is made overt by having this take place in Tombstone, in Cochise County, Arizona, and by having the Bonnell brothers’ father named Nicholas (also the name of the Earps’ father).  It has some heavy-breathing passion, some apparent double entendres and some noir touches.  A good, watchable movie, with a fair amount of talking for a western.  The title song “High-Ridin’ Woman With a Whip” is reprised a couple of times.  Some of the interior scenes at the Drummond ranch are apparently shot in the remodeled set for Tara from Gone With the Wind.  Filmed in black and white; not a long movie, at around 80 minutes.  This has become a modest cult favorite, with some similarities to Johnny Guitar.  Stanwyck and Barry Sullivan also starred together in The Maverick Queen.

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Rancho Notorious

Nicholas Chennault ~ December 23, 2013

Rancho Notorious—Marlene Dietrich, Mel Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy, William Frawley (1952; Dir:  Fritz Lang)

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Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich) is a former saloon girl who runs a horse ranch in the southwest where outlaws can take refuge while on the run.  She gets 10% of their ill-gotten loot as a fee.  (Among the outlaws staying there are George Reeves, Jack Elam and the blacklisted Lloyd Gough.)  The ranch is called Chuck-a-Luck because she won the money to start it at that roulette-like game.  Her paramour is gunfighter and bank robber Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer). 

When Kinch (Gough) robs an assay office in Whitmore, Wyoming, he rapes and kills Beth Forbes (Gloria Henry), fiancée of rancher Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy) and kills his own partner Whitey (who wears an egregious wig).  Haskell laboriously becomes good with a gun and tries to track down the rapist-robber over the next year.  He keeps hearing stories about Altar Keane and a place called Chuck-a-Luck.  In one town he helps Frenchy break out of jail, and Frenchy takes him to Altar Keane and her ranch, where he becomes another of the guys on the run there.  He sees Keane wearing a brooch he’d given his fiancée and tries to find out where she got it, feigning an attraction to Keane. 

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The outlaws get shot up in a bank holdup when Kinch prematurely takes a shot at Haskell.  Haskell turns Kinch over to the local sheriff, and the rest of the gang (except for Frenchy) turns on Keane for telling Haskell about Kinch.  In the ensuing shootout, Haskell kills Kinch, but Keane takes a bullet for Frenchy and dies.  Haskell and Frenchy apparently ride off together, a la the ending of Casablanca.

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Haskell is a typical Lang hero with a fixation on vengeance after a terrible wrong.  But the Van Heflin-esque Kennedy is not particularly memorable in the lead role.  There a faintly amoral air to the movie, and a slightly European feel from the cosmopolitan Dietrich and Ferrer and Austrian director Fritz Lang.  Lang is not particularly interested in gunplay or action, except for the final shootout.  He tries to persuade us that Dietrich is fascinating; her character is the subject of most of the movie.  She inevitably reminds us of her role in Destry Rides Again 13 years earlier (where she played a character named Frenchy), and was said to have hated working with the Prussian-minded Lang.  The movie has a truly terrible theme song, which intrudes at several points throughout the movie, and there are several obviously painted vistas in a curiously lurid Technicolor.

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Lang’s most famous films are M and Metropolis, made when he was still in Europe, and this was the last of three westerns he made (along with The Return of Frank James and Western Union).  In the U.S., he mostly made films noir and suspense/thrillers.  This is an interesting, not-completely-effective, noir-ish, almost campy artifact, reminiscent in some ways of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar from the same era.

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Johnny Guitar

Nicholas Chennault ~ December 13, 2013

Johnny Guitar—Joan Crawford, Sterlling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Ward Bond, Scott Brady, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Cooper, Royal Dano, John Carradine, Paul Fix, Frank Ferguson  (1954; Dir:  Nicholas Ray)

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An unusual cult favorite with a large cast, noir influences and bright colors; similar to Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious in having a big female star from Hollywood’s golden age in the lead and in the melodramatic noir sensibility, among other things.  More obviously an artifact from the time it was made than any attempt to re-create the 19th century west for its story, it’s nevertheless an interesting artifact.

Former saloon girl Vienna (Joan Crawford in her hard-edged mode, a veteran of 30 years in the movies at this point) has finally built up her own saloon in the wilds of Arizona, although local ranchers (Ward Bond as baron John McIvers) and business people (Mercedes McCambridge as banker-rancher Emma Small) see her place as a haven for outlaws and rustlers.  The railroad is coming through, which they think will bring in hordes of new settlers to take their land, and Vienna stands to make a lot of money then. 

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Things come to a head when the local stage is robbed, Emma’s brother is killed in the holdup, and a tall, guitar-playing blond guy from Albuquerque shows up, apparently responding to a call from Vienna.  This is the titular Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), who initially spends his time fending off hostility both from McIvers and his group and from four apparent outlaw-miners, especially Bart Lonergan (Ernest Borgnine).  McIvers gives Vienna and the four 24 hours to clear out; Vienna makes it clear she’s not going.  Johnny Guitar fights with Bart, and wins.  As he’s leaving, young gunman Turkey Ralston (Ben Cooper) shows off and Johnny Guitar grabs a gun and bests him.  It turns out his real name is Johnny Logan, and he and Vienna have a lot of history, although they haven’t seen each other in five years.  She instructs him to leave his guns in his saddlebag.

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The four outlaw-miners include Bart, tubercular Corey (Royal Dano), Turkey and their leader the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), a former paramour who now fancies Vienna more than she fancies him.  There are clearly a number of conflicts coming up.  The four aren’t yet real outlaws and didn’t rob the stage; they have a silver mine, but it’s played out now.  They decide that if they’re being chased out, they might as well rob the local bank (owned by Emma) before they go.

Vienna goes to the bank the next morning and withdraws all her money.  While she’s there, the four rob the bank, while Vienna tries unsuccessfully to talk them out of it.  McIver and Emma lead a vengeful posse in pursuit of the four, but Emma’s also convinced that Vienna had something to do with the robbery.  During the chase, the passes on the escape route are dynamited by railroad crews, and the four retreat to the Lair, their large house in a hidden, defensible position.  Turkey is hurt when his horse falls, and even more when his horse runs under a low-hanging branch and knocks him off.

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Having lost the four, the posse comes to Vienna’s, which is closed.  Vienna is playing the piano in a white dress; Johnny Guitar is out of sight.  The posse finds the wounded Turkey hidden under a table, and McIvers and Emma promise him he won’t hang if he gives up Vienna as an accomplice.  Turkey cracks (Vienna tells him to save himself, so she’s kind of acquiescing although not taking responsibility for the lie), and he does it.  The posse proceeds to hang them both from a bridge anyway despite their promises.  At the last second Johnny Guitar cuts Vienna down, and they make a break for the Lair.  Vienna’s saloon is in flames.

Johnny-Guitar-HangingVienna Hanging Vienna.

The posse follows Turkey’s horse to the entrance to the Lair, and Emma convinces lookout Bart to turn on his compatriots.  He knifes Corey and Johnny shoots him as he’s trying to shoot the Kid in the back.  Emma wounds Vienna and the posse kills the Kid but refuses to go farther with Vienna.  The furious and implacable Emma then pushes Vienna into a shootout, which Vienna wins, and the posse slowly leaves.  Presumably Vienna and Johnny get back together on a long-term basis.  Maybe Vienna rebuilds her hard-won saloon.

Joan Crawford dominates the film with her character Vienna, who’s always working out what her various relationships will be.  Sterling Hayden is slightly flaky as her gunless gunman in a supporting role, although the movie is named after him.  He apparently didn’t get along well with Crawford during the filming.  Ward Bond’s McIvers has some scruples, but not enough.  Emma is said to be a one-time rival of Vienna for the Kid’s affections, but McCambridge is an implacably anti-Vienna wild woman for most of the movie, somewhat over the top in her performance.  Crawford and McCambridge did not get along well, either, and maybe that fueled some of the hostility.  McCambridge later admitted that she was battling alcoholism at the time as well.  Frank Ferguson as Marshal Williams, the voice of reason and restraint in the mob, John Carradine as Vienna’s caretaker, and Royal Dano as the consumptive, book-reading Corey are all particularly good.

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Director Nicholas Ray was known for his noir work (In a Lonely Place and others) in the early 1950s, and that sensibility is present in this melodrama, along with bright Technicolor touches and Crawford’s fierce eyebrows and crimson lipstick.  Some see this as an allegory for the political McCarthyism then dominating Congress, with the posse’s mob mentality and its leaders’ mistaken judgment and misplaced hostilities.  Taken as a whole, this is enjoyable to watch, if a bit overwrought.  It seems torn between its desire to have the Vienna character be a strong, self-sufficient woman (she wears pants for most of the film) and the occasional nod to 1950s social mores.  The all-female shootout between Vienna and Emma is a hallmark in the history of westerns.  Peggy Lee wrote and sings the title song.

[Other films with a 1940s-50s take on lynching include The Ox-Bow Incident (obviously), The Moonlighter, Three Hours to Kill and this.  The first two even have a black peripheral character present at the lynching to make the point that they really want us to be thinking about the problem of lynching of blacks in the south.]

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