Tag Archives: Gary Cooper

Dallas

Nicholas Chennault ~ March 24, 2014

Dallas—Gary Cooper, Ruth Roman, Raymond Massey, Leif Erickson, Steve Cochran (1950; Dir: Stuart Heisler)

Clunky writing and unduly lurid names mar this otherwise ambitious effort. In color and with Gary Cooper, this obviously had a good budget for a western in 1950. It starts with a cameo appearance by Bill Hickok (Reed Hadley) as a marshal in Springfield, Missouri, who helps Blayde Hollister (Gary Cooper—see about the florid names?) stage his own death so that he won’t be followed by “wanted” posters in trying find the nefarious Marlow brothers.

U.S. Marshal Martin Weatherby: “But Marshal! This – this outlaw; if you don’t arrest him, I shall!”

Wild Bill Hickok: “Outlaw? Let me tell you something, son. This ain’t Boston. We had a war down here and you’ll find men in high offices who are thieves and cutthroats. You’ll find others who are branded outlaws that are only fighting for what’s their own. There’s those known as bad men and those as are bad men. You better learn to tell the difference!”

Hollister, Weatherby and Hickok: Instructing the inexperienced marshal.

Hollister is an unreconstructed Civil War veteran hunting evildoers who burned his place and slaughtered his family in Georgia during the war. He befriends Martin Weatherby (Leif Erickson), an apparently incompetent U.S. marshal from Boston. Weatherby’s on his way to Dallas to aid the family of his fiancée, Tonia Robles (Ruth Roman), and Hollister persuades him to change places, since Weatherby is not only inappropriately dressed but incompetent with a gun.

Raymond Massey is the oldest and chief of the nefarious Marlow brothers, William, Cullen and Bryant. Bryant (Steve Cochran) wears a Union kepi and two guns on two belts; he’s the most obvious and open gunman among the Marlow brothers. William is apparently a respectable businessman, while actually being the mastermind of the Marlow operations. Hollister kills Cullen soon after arriving in Dallas, and the question is how he’ll get the other two brothers.

Tonia Robles: “Do you know what Texas means? It’s an Indian word for friends. It’s a big land with room for everyone. And you could be a part of it in time.”

The Marlows temporarily capture Hollister, and he shoots it out with Bryant. Bryant tells him it was William who lit the fires in Georgia. As Hollister heads for town to get William, the oldest Marlow brother gets out on the other side of town while Hollister’s real identity is revealed by one of his former men. He pursues William toward Fort Worth, where William has been successful in arranging for a posse to capture the infamous Reb Hollister. William heads back to Dallas to extort as much as he can from the Robles family before he departs for good.

Hollister escapes from jail with the posse in hot pursuit, heading for Dallas, where Tonia’s father Don Felipe has been trying to raise money. He enters the Robles house disguised as the father, taking out William’s accomplices and getting into an extended gunfight with William. Meanwhile the posse follows and runs into the rest of Marlow’s men, who are captured. Of course Hollister wins the fight with William, who is turned over to the authorities. Weatherby has meanwhile arranged for a full pardon for Hollister, and Tonia has fallen for Hollister as well. Weatherby goes off to build a railroad.

This is watchable but not terribly memorable. This formulaic stuff is what Gary Cooper’s career in westerns had come to before High Noon; it had a big enough budget but isn’t remotely among his best stuff. He’s watchable but not particularly believable. Ruth Roman may be the best thing in this movie. (See her in The Far Country; she’s good in that, too.) It has some modestly comic touches, many of which are intentional.

Vera Cruz

Nicholas Chennault ~ February 15, 2014

Vera Cruz—Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Cesar Romero, Denise Darcel, Sara Montiel, Jack Elam, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Henry Brandon, George Macready (1954; Dir: Robert Aldrich)

After the American Civil War, rootless American soldiers of fortune are drawn southward into Mexico, where the Mexicans led by Benito Juarez are rebelling against the Austrian-French regime of the emperor Maximilian. Among these mercenaries are the two protagonists of this film: Joe Erin, a flashy, grinning gunfighter of dubious morality (Burt Lancaster) and an impoverished plantation owner from Louisiana who had fought for the Confederacy, Ben Trane (Gary Cooper).

At the beginning of the film, Trane’s horse breaks a leg. As he tries to find a replacement he encounters Joe Erin, who sells him a horse for an exorbitant $100 in gold. He has stolen the horse from a platoon of lancers, who show up and chase the two as they make their escape. During the chase, Trane makes one of those shots so common in the 1950s, in which, shooting over one shoulder while his horse is rearing, he shoots a gun out of the hand of the captain of the lancers. Wildly improbable, this establishes Trane’s skill with a gun, however. Erin seems to have heard of him. As Trane is knocked off his horse by a shot, Erin leaps to loot the body, but Trane re-awakens and takes Erin’s horse and saddle instead.

Lancaster, flashing his pearly whites, as he does for much of the movie; and Cooper, with his unflinching rectitude. The collaborations and collisions between these two provide most of the tension in the film.

In the next town, Trane encounters a rough band of Americans in a cantina, who assume that he has killed Erin to take his flashy horse and rig. As they set upon him and are about to kill him, Erin shows up, demonstrates that he’s not dead, and they all head off to meet with the Juarista general to see how much he’ll pay them. As they enter another town, they see another rough band of Americans tormenting young maidens. Trane rescues one of them, the fiery Nina (Sarita Montiel), who kisses him and steals his wallet. Erin takes over the new band of Americans, adding them to his own unsavory gang.

Trane unconvincingly romances the fiery Nina (Sarita Montiel).

The first potential employer they encounter is not the Juarista general but Maximilian’s general, Marquis Henri de Labordere (played by the smilingly cosmopolitan Cesar Romero). He recruits them for a mission for Maximilian and is willing to promise more than the Juaristas can pay. However, all of them are trapped in the town square by the Juarista forces until Erin and Trane engineer a way out by using children as hostages. The Juarista general mouths a number of honest-sounding revolutionary platitudes, so we know now which party has the moral high ground in this struggle.

Arriving in Mexico City, the crude-mannered Americans attend a magnificent soiree at Chapultepec Palace, where they meet Maximilian (George Macready), give a demonstration of marksmanship and weaponry, and negotiate a mission for $50,000. They are to conduct the French countess Marie Duvarre (Denise Darcel) to Vera Cruz on the Mexican coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where she will catch a ship for France. In an aside between Henri and Maximilian, it is clear they do not expect the Americans to survive to collect their fee. From this point, everyone is trying to doublecross everyone else, with Joe Erin and increasingly Ben Trane frequently quoting Erin’s cynical mentor Ace Hanna, whom Erin killed.

Joe Erin meets the Emperor Maximilian.

The countess sets off for Vera Cruz, accompanied by the Americans, Henri and a troop of lancers led by Capt. Danette (German actor Henry Brandon). Various competitions are developing among the alpha males in the entourage. There is constant tension between Erin and Trane about whether they are really on the same side. They both want the countess, although they don’t trust her. Danette despises the Americans, especially Erin. Henri is playing them all. And what about the Juaristas?

Erin and Trane discover the real reason for the mission: the countess’ carriage is carrying $3 million in gold, to be used to hire more mercenaries for Maximilian. She tells Erin and Trane, however, that she intends to steal the gold, and she’ll cut them in. They run into a Juarista ambush in a small town, and fight their way out with some casualties. Nina takes over a cart when the driver is shot, and joins the caravan. The countess secretly meets with a sea captain who’ll help her get away, and she makes arrangements that exclude Erin and Trane.

[Spoilers follow.] Henri really doesn’t trust the countess, either, and he takes her prisoner with the intent of executing her. Erin and Trane follow the carriage, and it is attacked by Juaristas. They find the gold is gone and join the Juaristas, for a promise of $100,000. They provide covering fire for a Juarista attack on the town held by Henri and Danette, where the gold supposedly is. At great cost, the attack is successful. Erin kills Danette. With Lancaster’s trademark acrobatic agility, Erin climbs up into a third-floor room to rescue the countess.

“So if the gold isn’t in the wagon …”

And finally, the ultimate loyalties get sorted out. Erin has demonstrated that he doesn’t have any except to himself. Trane has now decided that he supports the Juaristas. They shoot it out in classic fashion; Trane even throws away his rifle to do it with handguns. (The final showdown is very well done, with due gravity given to the ceremony of the occasion.) Trane rides off into the sunset with Nina, and apparently will get the $100,000 to rebuild his plantation, with all the rest of the unsavory Americans killed.

This was produced by Lancaster’s company (with Henry Hecht), and it’s bursting with vibrant color cinematography, great locations in Mexico, a huge and talented cast, a complicated plot and ultimately even a good guy (Trane) to root for in all the doublecrossing. That’s a lot to cram into 94 minutes. As with most of his westerns during the 1950s, Cooper seems old for his role. But Trane’s still Gary Cooper, so it works. He doesn’t sound a bit like he’s from Louisiana, nor does Lancaster sound like he’s from Texas. Next to Cooper’s understated acting style, Lancaster’s performance seems a bit manic here. A more experienced director would probably have helped him tone it down, if he had the clout to do so. Among the other Americans, Ernest Borgnine stands out as Donnegan, about the same time as he was playing effective bad guys in movies like Johnny Guitar and sort-of-good guys in films like The Badlanders.

This is the second of Denise Darcel’s two westerns. She’s better in the other, Westward the Women. She and Sarita Montiel, who is fine here but has no chemistry with the much older Cooper, did not appear to have much in the way of American film careers after this. Cesar Romero, whose smilingly corrupt Marquis is sometimes referred to by the other characters as “Old Crocodile Teeth,” has his second most prominent role in a western after playing Doc Holliday in 1939’s Frontier Marshal. It is a close contest whether his teeth or Lancaster’s are more in evidence in this film; Lancaster probably wins that one. Henry Brandon, Capt. Danette here, shows up as Indians in other westerns: Comanche chief Scar in The Searchers, and a Sioux in The Last Frontier and as Comanche Quanah Parker in Two Rode Together. Charles Bronson, in the days when he was playing Indians and heavies at the start of his career, plays the crass Pittsburgh, under his real name, Charles Buchinsky. Jack Elam’s here, too, although he doesn’t get to do much. George Macready as Maximilian was 54, twenty years older than the real Maximilian was at the time of his death.

Aside from the individual performances, the direction of the larger-scale action scenes is good. The script isn’t great; in a short movie we hear way too many quotes about Ace Hanna, who’s dead long before it begins. The music by Hugo Friedhofer is very good. The story is by experienced western writer Borden Chase. The use of not-completely-bad and not-entirely-good characters in westerns was innovative for its time. It is said to have strongly influenced Sergio Leone and other makers of spaghetti westerns. The camera work sometimes (as in the scene where Erin kills Danette) makes one wonder whether they thought this might be shown in early 1950s 3D.

Many see Vera Cruz as one of the great westerns, but the parts don’t work together well enough for that. It is one of those rare cases where maybe the film should have been longer to help us cope with the spectacle and plot twists. It is fun to watch, however, and more than once, to try to figure out what the various characters’ real motivations and allegiances are. Dave Kehr refers to it as “Robert Aldrich’s hugely influential comic western … This cynical and exuberant film [is] the direct precursor to the disillusioned 1960s westerns of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.” It’s probably only comic in the limited sense that there are some elements that can’t be taken quite seriously, rather than in the sense that it’s played for laughs.

Garden of Evil

Nicholas Chennault ~ January 10, 2014

Garden of Evil—Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward, Richard Widmark, Cameron Mitchell, Hugh Marlowe, Victor Manuel Mendoza (1954; Dir: Henry Hathaway)

During the California gold rush (putting this more or less in the 1850s), passengers on a steamship are stranded in Puerto Miguel on Mexico’s Pacific coast. They include Hooker (Gary Cooper), a former sheriff from Texas; Fiske (Richard Widmark, in what turns out to be a good-guy role), a gambler; and Daly (Cameron Mitchell), a bounty hunter. Leah Fuller (a husky-voiced Susan Hayward) arrives in town, desperate for help in getting her mining engineer husband John out of a gold mine, where he lies trapped with a broken leg. The title of the film refers to the region surrounding the mine, about three days of rough travel into Apache country.

Fiske: “You know, at first I thought she was one of those women who come along every so often and fascinate men without even trying or even knowing why.”

Hooker: “And now what?”

Fiske: “She tries, and she knows why.”

Hooker, Fiske and Daly sign up for $2000 each, along with Vicente Madariaga (Victor Manuel Mendoza), a Mexican. After an arduous trip on which Daly makes a move on Leah, they find the mine, rescue Fuller (Hugh Marlowe) and fix his leg. The unreliable Daly gets his fill of gold and they head back, followed by Apaches and slowed down by the injured and embittered Fuller.

At the first stop, Daly helps Fuller escape on a horse to get rid of him. Daly is killed by the Indians, and the group finds Fuller’s body hung upside down from a cross. The party is now on the run. Vicente is killed, and they reach the narrow trail down a cliff just ahead of the Apaches. Fiske stays behind to hold them off, and Hooker and Leah make their escape. Hooker goes back to help Fiske, but it’s too late. The suggestion is that Leah and Hooker go off together, perhaps with some of the gold from the cursed mine.

Motivations are uneven. Leah appears to love her husband (he doesn’t think so), but she also appears to be attracted to Fiske (maybe) and Hooker, though not to Daly. It’s taken for granted that she drives all the men crazy with lust, although only Daly seems to act badly on that impulse. (What, no bathing in a stream scene?) The Apaches’ motivation doesn’t appear to be all that consistent, either, and they don’t look much like Apaches. Clothes and equipment (guns, particularly) don’t fit the 1850s. The writing is a little spotty, and there are obvious comparisons to Treasure of the Sierra Madre. One or two of Cooper’s brief speeches get a little heavy-handed, but his presence is strong as always. This story could have used a bit more character background development.

“I guess if the earth were made of gold, men would still die for a handful of dirt.”

There are questions left at the end. For example, did any of the gold get out, and what happened to it? Did Hooker get his $2000? This is watchable, but not the unrecognized gem some would claim. Spectacularly shot on location in Mexico in early Cinemascope and Technicolor, but there are occasional obvious painted backdrops, too. Good score by Bernard Herrman and competent direction by Henry Hathaway. If you like Susan Hayward in this, catch her in Rawhide with Tyrone Power, where she’s even better.

Man of the West

Nicholas Chennault ~ January 1, 2014

Man of the West—Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Royal Dano, John Dehner, Jack Lord, Arthur O’Connell, Robert Wilke (1958; Dir: Anthony Mann)

Link Jones (Gary Cooper) to his cousin Claude (John Dehner): “Don’t you talk anymore, Claude? We used to talk, you and me, when we were kids. What happened? Things have kind of gone to hell, haven’t they? And you’re still at it – stealing and killing and running.”

This psychological western has a pretty meaningless generic title, and it’s not as good a film as the westerns director Mann made with James Stewart. Except for the 1960 remake of Cimarron, this was Anthony Mann’s last western and the third of his post-James Stewart period (after The Last Frontier and The Tin Star and before Cimarron).

Publicity stills of Gary Cooper and Julie London from Man of the West.

Gary Cooper was always watchable in a western, but he seems too old for the role he’s playing in this one. He’s Link Jones, a reformed outlaw in west Texas in 1874 on his way to Fort Worth to hire a schoolmarm for the new school in his town. An unsuccessful train robbery leaves Jones, saloon singer Billie Ellis (Julie London) and talkative gambler Sam Beasley (Arthur O’Connell) stranded a hundred miles from anywhere. Jones used to know the territory, and they hike to an apparently abandoned ranch. It’s not abandoned but is being used for the moment by the Dock Tobin gang with which Jones used to run and which pulled the botched train robbery.

In fact, Tobin (Lee J. Cobb) is Jones’s uncle, and the two most effective members of the gang are Jones’s cousins Coaley (Jack Lord) and Claude (John Dehner). The others are the mute Trout (Royal Dano) and Ponch (Robert Wilke).

Jones, who’d abandoned the gang a decade earlier, makes like he intends to rejoin them and tells them that Ellis is his woman (although he actually has a wife and two kids back home in Good Hope). Tobin wants Jones back, but he’s just barely in control of this gang of brutal scumbags, and the rest of them aren’t at all sure of Jones. The two most disturbing scenes are when Coaley makes Ellis strip while holding a knife at Jones’ neck, and later when Jones beats the crap out of Coaley and rips Coaley’s clothes off in retaliation. Tobin seems to see Link as a more capable successor than either of his own sons, and they both resent it and don’t trust him as much as Tobin is inclined to.

Jones joins the gang for a bank robbery in what turns out to be a ghost town now, and he kills Trout, Ponch and Claude, one by one. Returning to the wagons, he finds that Ellis has apparently been raped by Dock, and Jones and Dock have it out. At the end, Link and Ellis set off for civilization, Link with his town’s money back and the gang all dead (and Link’s unsavory past with them), and Ellis in love with Link but knowing there’s no future in it.

Link (Gary Cooper) and Dock (Lee J. Cobb) talk about the past.

Some would draw parallels between Link Jones and Clint Eastwood’s character William Munny in Unforgiven. Both have a past filled with outlawry and violence, from which they have moved on to a life of law-abiding peace. Both are called back to their old skills early in the movie and must use them to accomplish what needs to be done. But Link goes back to his peaceful life when he’s done; William Munny never can.

It’s kind of a bleak western. Cobb wears an unconvincing hairpiece and seems distracted and half-crazed for much of the movie. Dano, being mute, has no lines, and Ponch very few. Dano and London were in Saddle the Wind the same year. This movie was not a critical or commercial success, blamed in part on Cooper being too old for the part. (Cobb, playing his supposed uncle, was in fact ten years younger than Cooper.) The fight with Coaley is not entirely convincing, partly because of Cooper’s age and physical limitations. French critics liked the film, though. Adapted from Will C. Brown’s novel The Border Jumpers. In color.

Great Performances in Westerns, Part 4

Nicholas Chennault ~ December 6, 2013

Glenn Ford as Ben Wade and Van Heflin as Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma

The two are inseparable, because it’s the tension between them and the opposite ideas they represent that make this movie work. In large part, that’s because neither of them is quite what he seems. Ford’s Wade claims to be an unrepentant outlaw, but he’s drawn to the decency he sees in Heflin’s Evans. Evans is decent, but by the end of the movie he has shown the development of a quiet heroism that no one else in the movie will step up to. And that makes a difference even to Wade. For other really good performances by these two, look for Ford in Cowboy, Jubal (both with excellent director Delmer Daves) and The Sheepman and Heflin in Shane.

Christian Bale as Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma

It’s somewhat the same story, but there are differences, especially in how things end. Russell Crowe is excellent as the captured outlaw leader Ben Wade, but the Dan Evans role as a desperate honest rancher is harder. How do you make quasi-ineffective decency attractive, both to the movie audience and convincingly to the other characters? Evans gradually becomes less ineffective and more heroic, to us, to Wade and to his own son. He doesn’t ask for their admiration, but by the end of the movie he has it.

Alan Ladd as Shane in Shane

Movie roles don’t come any more iconic than Shane, the mysterious gunfighter in the film with his name as its title. The entire movie revolves around him, as its title implies. As an actor, Ladd has some drawbacks to overcome: his small size works against him in a couple of fight scenes; his urban-seeming reserve nevertheless works to lend him some mystery as a western gunman; and he was not a natural either with guns or horses. Maybe some of his success in this role is due to brilliant direction by George Stevens, who was into an amazing string of movies at the time Shane was made. But when the film ends, it’s Ladd as Shane that we remember. He makes almost as big an impression on us as he does on young Brandon de Wilde in the movie. Ladd made a number of westerns during his career, although none of them are as strong as Shane. The next best is probably Branded; after that try The Badlanders, Red Mountain and Saskatchewan.

Bruce Dern as Asa Watts (Long Hair) in The Cowboys

The role of demented ex-con Asa Watts gave Bruce Dern the chance to both kill John Wayne and to chew the scenery in one of the best bad-guy performances ever in a western. He’s exactly what’s needed in this role—never quite convincing in his belated attempts at sincerity, and clearly psychotic as he takes on Wayne and his boys. In Dern’s long career as a supporting actor, this is one of the roles that defines him. For a similar role, see him as a villain fighting Charlton Heston in Will Penny. For a comedic variant on this role, see him as ne’er-do-well miscreant Joe Danby in Support Your Local Sheriff. He plays an outlaw who may be more sympathetic than any of the lawmen in the revisionist Posse. In a more sympathetic role late in his career, catch him as an aging lawman on a manhunt south of the border in the made-for-television Hard Ground.

Gary Cooper as Will Kane in High Noon

Cooper was too old for the part, and presumably for the young Grace Kelly as his romantic interest, when he played Will Kane. But his particular style of underplaying worked magnificently in this role, and it revitalized his career. Besieged on every side by a resentful deputy, by old relationships, by evasive townspeople, and most of all by the advancing hour with its approaching confrontation with evildoers, Kane takes the strain and steps up to do what a man’s got to do. This, Alan Ladd’s Shane and John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards are the iconic roles of the western in the 1950s. A westerner from Montana himself, Cooper always had both a good feel for playing western roles and a Gregory Peck-like way of projecting a basic decency. See him also in Man of the West, a later role for which he was also too old, The Hanging Tree, Vera Cruz and Garden of Evil. For a younger Gary Cooper, see him as Wild Bill Hickok in The Plainsman and as a friend of Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner. He’s even good as a quasi-comic singing cowboy in Along Came Jones, although he clearly can’t sing.

Yul Brynner as Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven

One of the most memorable roles in Brynner’s long and varied career is as the enigmatic Chris Adams, the leader of the Seven. His accent is hard to place, and Brad Dexter refers to him, not entirely convincingly, as “You old Cajun.” In the end, we go with him, though, through the tryouts, the planning, the initial confrontations with the bandits, and the outright battles. We don’t really know him any better as he and Steve McQueen ride out of the village they have saved, though. But there’s a reason he reprised this role at least twice—once in the first of the sequels and again as a robotic version of his character in Westworld. And it’s a version of this role he plays in the spaghetti western Adios, Sabata and in Invitation to a Gunfighter. The role had become iconic, although Brynner didn’t make many westerns.

Steve McQueen as Vin in The Magnificent Seven

This was McQueen’s breakthough role in movies, although he had become a television star of sorts as the moral bounty hunter Josh Randall in Wanted: Dead or Alive. Seemingly a natural for westerns, he nevertheless didn’t make very many of them; his career flowered as the genre was going through one of its numerous fades. Vin is a rootless cowboy who steps up to help Chris Adams drive a hearse with an unwanted Indian corpse to Boot Hill, in one of the movie’s most memorable scenes. It’s even more interesting if one considers that McQueen didn’t get along well with Brynner and was looking for ways to make Vin more noticeable with bits of business (shaking shotgun shells, taking off his hat to scan the horizon, etc.). It works for him; he pretty much steals the scene, and it’s interesting to watch from that perspective. Notwithstanding the lack of personal chemistry between the actors, the relationship between the characters works, too. The only other westerns in his body of work were Nevada Smith (1966) and Tom Horn (1980, when the actor was already dying). McQueen and director Sturges would have another significant success with the non-western The Great Escape,1963.

Kevin Kline as Paden in Silverado

Silverado is really an ensemble movie, but the character most at the heart of it is Kevin Kline’s Paden. He never actually loses his temper or composure, even in the most threatening or dire circumstances. He has a native elegance and competence, but we never learn as much about his backstory as we do about the other major chatacters. We discover that Paden rode with Cobb’s outlaws for a time and has a quixotically humane streak along with a fondness for saloons, but that’s all we know. The result is that he’s a bit enigmatic. For all we know, after the action shown in the movie, Paden lives out his days as a saloon proprietor with Linda Hunt in the town of Silverado, although he’s been instrumental in wiping out the largest rancher in the area. The character works, although in a way it cries out for a real romantic relationship, aside from his friendship with Hunt’s character. There’s an allusion to an attraction to Rosanna Arquette’s settler character, but it’s not very developed or persuasive, with the feeling that much of it was left on the cutting room floor. Kline’s film career largely took place during a period when not many westerns were made, and this may be his only such movie. For other roles showcasing his sly humor, see Soapdish, Princess Cariboo (in a minor role with wife Phoebe Cates as the lead) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not to mention The Big Chill, another ensemble movie by Lawrence Kasdan from the early 1980s.

The Plainsman

Nicholas Chennault ~ November 14, 2013

The Plainsman—Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, James Ellison, Charles Bickford, Helen Burgess, Porter Hall (1936; Dir: Cecil B. DeMille)

In Belgium, Hickok wasn’t even billed as the main character.

Two or three years later, and this large-scale western would have been made in color. This may be Gary Cooper’s best pre-High Noon western, although many of his earliest efforts in the genre (The Winning of Barbara Worth, The Virginian, Wolf Song, The Spoilers, Fighting Caravans) can be hard to find now. It is better than The Westerner, a 1940 version of the Judge Roy Bean story. This and the 1936 version of Last of the Mohicans are probably the most watchable pre-1939 westerns of the 1930s.

Cooper plays Will Bill Hickok, the long-haired plainsman of the title, although that could also be his friend Buffalo Bill Cody (James Ellison), newly married to easterner Louisa (Helen Burgess) as this film starts at the end of the Civil War. The events between 1865 and Hickok’s death in 1876 are compressed seemingly into just a few months, and the movie is an overt exercise in myth-making. Still, it can be fun to look for the actual history when it shows up.

Bill heads to Hays City, Kansas, where he finds miscreants led by Jim Lattimer (Charles Bickford) planning to sell surplus repeating rifles to the Sioux and Cheyennes. Trying to prevent that, Bill gets into trouble both with the Indians and with Custer’s Seventh Cavalry (the historical Hickok did have run-ins with Custer’s brother Tom and other soldiers as a peace officer in Kansas in the late 1860s). Meanwhile, Cody’s new wife Louisa tries to get him to settle down and start a hotel with her. The third principal character is Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur, considerably more blond and much better-looking than the historical character), who has an ambiguous relationship with Bill but would obviously like to make it more romantic.

Captured by Yellow Hand.

After capture by Indians, a couple of battles and attempts by Custer to find and arrest him, Bill’s pursuit of the gun peddlers takes him to Deadwood, where he kills Lattimer and holds the rest of Lattimer’s gang for the army, until Jack McCall (Porter Hall) shoots him in the back, leaving a beautifully unmarked corpse. Cody arrives with the Fifth Cavalry, Bill is posthumously exonerated of any wrongdoing and America goes on to conquer Indians, evildoers and the frontier generally.

Two frontier Bills (Wild and Buffalo) holding off the Cheyennes under desperate circumstances.

Cooper plays one of the most attractive Hickoks on film, tall and lean with restrained humor and wearing two guns with butts facing forward (he’s convincingly good with them). Arthur is quite good as well, although she looks very little like the historical Calamity Jane, and Ellison is adequate if a bit wooden in a good-looking way. Director De Mille reportedly hated Ellison’s performance and wanted to ensure that Ellison never had as good a part in quite as good a film ever again. If so, he was successful. The historical Cody marriage was troubled, as this one starts out. Young Anthony Quinn shows up toward the end of the movie as an unnamed Cheyenne.

Jean Arthur began her career in silent movies, and she was in some very good movies in the 1930s and early 1940s. But they were mostly in urban settings working with great directors–Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, George Stevens–in such films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Only Angels Have Wings, The More the Merrier, etc. She wasn’t bad in three westerns, though: The Plainsman, Arizona (1940), and Shane (1953), her last movie.

DeMille directs Ellison and Cooper in The Plainsman.

In black and white. DeMille hired famous Indian photographer Edward S. Curtis to shoot some stills and film for this movie.

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High Noon

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 23, 2013

High Noon—Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Thomas Mitchell, Katy Jurado, Lloyd Bridges, Lon Chaney, Jr., Ian Macdonald, Lee Van Cleef, Harry Morgan, Sheb Wooley, Jack Elam (1952; Dir: Fred Zinnemann)

A perennial fixture on the list of greatest westerns, High Noon is a creature of its time, an apparent Hollywood reaction to the era of McCarthyism. For all of that, it’s also excellent story-telling with terrific actors and a claustrophobic feel as the designated hour approaches.

Part of the tension is caused by the action of the film taking place almost in real time. Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is the aging town marshal of Hadleyville, who is now retiring from those responsibilities as the movie opens. The primary reason for that well-deserved retirement is his brand new wife, the young anti-violence Quaker Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly, looking elegant and cool in her first starring role). However, Kane’s past threatens to catch up with him He arrested Frank Miller some years ago and sent him to prison. Now Miller’s getting out, and he wants to have it out with Kane. Miller has henchmen who’ve remained attached to him during his incarceration; the citizenry of Kane’s town, who have benefited from his service and past courage, have little similar faithfulness.

The title High Noon refers to Miller’s impending arrival on a train. We know we are in good hands from the opening shot, as Jack Colby (Lee Van Cleef in his movie debut) sits smoking on a rock. The Oscar-winning theme song “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” starts at the same time, its rhythms evoking the sound of a railroad locomotive. The song Tex Ritter’s singing provides a plot synopsis as the titles and credits roll, and Colby watches as Ben Miller (Sheb Wooley) rides toward him. They are then joined by veteran screen heavy Robert Wilke as Jim Pierce, and the three ride off together toward Hadleyville. They are Frank Miller’s hard-eyed henchmen. They ride into town past the church, and a Mexican woman crosses herself as she watches them.

Miller’s henchmen: Lee Van Cleef, Robert Willke and Sheb Wooley.

Meanwhile, Will Kane and Amy Fowler are being married on this Sunday morning. As the ceremony ends, Kane turns in his star and hangs up his gun, since he has now married a Quaker. He is then given a telegram telling him that Frank Miller has been pardoned and is heading his way. Will the marriage hold up under the collision of principles that is about to take place, not to mention the apparent 30-year age difference between Kane and Fowler?

Just married, and already they have a troubled relationship.

Will Kane tries to leave town, but decides he has to come back when he realizes his replacement as marshal won’t be in town until the next day. “I’m the same man whether I wear this [star] or not.” He can’t walk away from what he sees as his responsibility, which is not limited by formalities. And if he stays in town, he figures he can get backup from his long-time friends there. Amy’s not so sure of any of this; she argues for Will to leave with her, partly because of her pacifist religious principles and hatred of violence and guns. She declines to wait in the hotel for the next hour or so to see whether she’s going to be a widow before she’s even had a chance at marriage. She buys a ticket for St. Louis, planning to leave on the same train on which Miller will arrive.

Kane’s hopes for support fade by the minute. Judge Mettrick (Otto Kruger) who originally sentenced Miller to hang can’t leave town fast enough. Young Deputy Marshal Harvey Pell (Lloyd Bridges) is angry at being passed over for promotion to the top job, and tosses in his badge. He figures Kane won’t support him in wanting to be the marshal because of Pell’s current relationship with Helen Ramirez, Kane’s former mistress and the most prominent business person in town (played by the darkly beautiful Katy Jurado, excellent in her first U.S. movie). Ramirez sells her businesses to leave town; she has history with both Kane and Miller, in addition to her current relationship with Pell. She understands Kane better than his new wife does in some ways; Amy mistakenly thinks a lingering affection for Ramirez is the reason Kane won’t leave.

An iconic image with a lot of resonance in different circumstances.

Some in town figure that business was better when Frank Miller was around. Some just don’t like Kane. Some, like Selectman Sam Fuller (Harry Morgan) hide from him. Kane approaches the people in church, many of whom have their own reasons not to take a role in the impending clash. Kane hasn’t been much of a churchgoer himself. Mayor Jonas Henderson (played by Stagecoach’s Thomas Mitchell) wants him to leave town. The former marshal, Kane’s mentor, is too tired and too crippled with arthritis to help. Harvey Pell, tired of Ramirez and everybody else thinking he isn’t up to Kane’s standards, picks a last-minute fight with Kane in the livery stable. In the end, Kane has only a one-eyed drunk and a 14-year-old boy who’re willing to stand with him. It’s really just Kane against the four gunmen.

Kane (Gary Cooper) is on his own against Frank Miller and three of his gang.

During the shootout, Kane does get some help from an unexpected quarter. In the famous last shot, he tosses his marshal’s badge into the dirt at the feet of those who’ve come to congratulate him after his success in the shootout, and he rides out of town forever in a two-set carriage.

The cast is brilliant, although some of these actors were quite early in what became distinguished careers. 50-year-old Gary Cooper was thought to be past his prime when the film was made, and this performance reinvigorated his career. Grace Kelly doesn’t quite balance him, but she’s fine in her first starring role. (She was only 21 at the time.) Katy Jurado gives a smolderingly good performance, and her part is not written as bloodlessly as Kelly’s. The many small roles (including Howland Chamberlain as the hotel clerk who doesn’t like Kane) are excellently played. Ian Macdonald might be less effective as Frank Miller, but he isn’t actually on screen much, and he’s fine. Lon Chaney, who plays Kane’s retired mentor, was actually five years younger than Cooper. Jack Elam appears uncredited in a couple of shots as the locked-up town drunk. Cooper might have been on the downhill slope of his career, but a number of good acting careers were just getting started in this movie.

The film was nominated for seven Oscars and won four. It lost the Best Picture Oscar to The Greatest Show on Earth, generally regarded as one of the weakest winners ever of that award. Cooper won his second Best Actor Oscar for this performance. (The first was for 1941’s Sergeant York.) He remained a bankable star throughout the decade, making several more notable westerns (Vera Cruz, Man of the West, The Hanging Tree, They Came to Cordura). The other Oscars this movie received were for Best Editing, Best Original Song (the first such Oscar winner from a non-musical) and Best Score for Dimitri Tiomkin’s music. Indeed, the Oscar-winning theme song started a new fashion for sung themes in westerns, frequently used badly and intrusively (see, for example, Rancho Notorious, Trooper Hook and the original 3:10 to Yuma).

Visually, the movie is quite effective, although it was shot mostly on the Columbia back lot in Burbank. The editing is superb, with frequent images of clocks and pendulums, and low-angle shots of railroad tracks stretching off to the horizon. The editing heightens tension without becoming too repetitive, a delicate line. The film is intentionally shot in black and white, not color, and it doesn’t feature the huge western skies and landscapes so effectively used by John Ford, George Stevens, Howard Hawks and others.

Cooper has fun with wardrobe tests during filming.

Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian of Jewish descent who had grown up on the stories of German author Karl May, was an unusual choice to direct a western. He and producer Stanley Kramer did not particularly intend to make an allegory for the McCarthy hearings then at their height, but screenwriter Carl Foreman and cinematographer Floyd Crosby did. Foreman was blacklisted and fled to England before the film was finished.

Somehow High Noon manages to transcend the trap of being stuck in its time. To the extent it could be said to have underlying political themes, it’s never so overbearing with them that it can’t be seen in a variety of ways. Right-wing John Wayne and the Soviet news agency Pravda were equally offended by it. Regardless of what Foreman, Kramer and Zinnemann may have been thinking at the time (and they weren’t thinking the same thing), it represents the most effective presentation of a theme common in 1950s and 1960s westerns: the role of ordinary citizens in defending civilization and their uneasy relationships with those who use violence and run risks in upholding the law for them. (See, for example, such movies as The Tin Star, Warlock, The Fastest Gun Alive, A Man Alone, Lawman, etc.—even the parody Support Your Local Sheriff.) Not everyone agreed with High Noon’s take on this issue, either. Howard Hawks said that he made 1959’s Rio Bravo partly as a counter-statement to High Noon, and it works marvelously, too. Dave Kehr refers to “Cooper playing an inflated archetype — the Man of the West — rather than a character” in this, “his most overrated film, Fred Zinnemann’s didactic political fable High Noon (1952).” For more background on the film, see Glenn Frankel’s High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (2017).

Another character who throws his badge in the dirt after having saved his community: Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry twenty years later, making a very different statement than writer Foreman, at least, intended for this movie.

William Faulkner, a great American writer who had a substantial history in writing for the movies, said that High Noon was one of his favorite films. “There’s all you need for a good story: a man doin’ something he has to do, against himself and against his environment. Not courage, necessarily.”