Tag Archives: Mormons

The Avenging Angel

Nicholas Chennault ~ October 3, 2014

The Avenging Angel—Tom Berenger, James Coburn, Charlton Heston, Kevin Tighe, Jeffrey Jones, Fay Masterson, Leslie Hope, Andrew Prine (MfTV 1995; Dir: Craig R. Baxley)

“They trained him to shoot. To ride. To kill. He was the hunter. Now, he’s the hunted.”

Conspiracies and counterplots among the polygamous Mormons of Utah in 1872 drive this made-for-television (TNT) account of Mormon assassin/bodyguard/security agent Miles Utley (Tom Berenger). Historical figures such as Brigham Young, Porter Rockwell and Bill Hickman are mixed with fictional ones like Utley in an environment that has some historicity but was probably not as overheated as depicted here.

Young Miles Utley is headed west with the Mormons in 1847 when his father dies. Brigham Young (Charlton Heston, playing the American Moses) assigns Bill Hickman (Tom Bower) to care for young Utley and raise him. Hickman and Utley are shown as members of the Mormon militia that slowed down Albert Johnston’s army invading Utah in 1857. Fast forward to 1872: By this time Utley is a kind of security agent for the Church, reporting to Milton Long (Jeffrey Jones), its head of security. He is shown dispatching dissident Jonathan Parker with a bowie knife to the throat, so he is not exactly a good guy. He is also shown frolicking with Young’s daughter Miranda (Fay Masterson), so we know he takes political/spiritual chances, too.

Miles Utley (Tom Berenger) takes aim. Not all his enemies are obvious.

Long assigns Utley to shadow a couple of suspicious newcomers in Salt Lake City, and he follows them to the Assembly Hall on Temple Square. Elder Benjamin Rigby (Kevin Tighe, playing a fictional character) preaches fire and brimstone against outsiders. Brigham Young arises to espouse more restraint and less violence against non-Mormons. As he does so, a hooded figure approaches him and pulls a derringer; Utley intervenes and shoots the supposed assassin first and is himself attacked and rendered unconscious. When he starts asking questions about the person he shot, he is again hit (he should be suffering from multiple concussions by now). He awakens on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Apparently his assailants intended that he should drown, but he floated in the salty waters.

He is retrieved by Eliza Rigby (Leslie Hope), who doctors his wounds. She is an estranged polygamous wife of Elder Rigby, who she says was more interested in her sister Sarah. As Utley heals, the two develop an interest in each other. He is about to leave when Rigby himself shows up, with Alpheus Young (Daniel Quinn), Brigham’s son. Young leaves and Rigby is heard hitting Eliza, with Utley restrained by the pleading of her young daughters.

Miles Utley: “You know, Alpheus, the problem with polygamy is that when you’ve had 27 wives and 56 children [a reference to Brigham Young’s extensive family], one’s just bound to turn out as dirt-stupid and pig-ugly as you.”

Utley (Tom Berenger) finds Porter Rockwell (a hairy James Coburn) in the canyons of southern Utah.

Still investigating the deceased assassin, Utley finds apparent grave robbers digging up her body. Yes, it was a woman—Eliza Rigby’s sister Sarah, a disaffected former Mormon. Put in jail, Utley is sprung by his boss Milton Long; both Long and Miranda Young smuggle him guns. He warily heads south, looking for his long-time friend and mentor Porter Rockwell (James Coburn, with long hair and beard wigs). He visits his sister’s family (with daughters played by two Berenger girls). As Utley departs, he is attacked by and forced to kill Alpheus Young. He stops to see his disaffected, alcoholic foster father Bill Hickman in Kanab and is given Jonathan Parker’s diary before heading into wild country. As he leaves, he is attacked again, and joined by Miranda Young, who is wounded. He fights the attackers off and sends Miranda back with their remnants. He reads Parker’s diary and finds that he was simply an honest dissident and was doing nothing for which he deserved killing.

Utley and Rockwell join forces to fight a conspiracy led by Elder Rigby to take over the Church and Utah. Brigham Young is reported to have headed to his winter home in St. George, threatened by the conspirators. Rockwell creates a diversion without killing any of Young’s faithful bodyguards and Utley enters the house, to find that Milton Long is part of the conspiracy and he is now captured. Brigham Young slips him a gun, which he uses to take out Long. He heads back to Salt Lake, to the Assembly Hall, where he finds an unhinged Rigby speaking to an imaginary audience, now that his conspiracy has fallen apart. Eliza persuades Utley not to kill Rigby, and he hangs up his guns.

Brigham Young (Charlton Heston) is about to slip Miles Utley (Tom Berenger) yet another gun.

The title refers to the Danites, a supposedly historical group of thugs and assassins who did the Church’s dirty work, of which Utley is supposed to be one. To the extent they were real, they existed principally in the 1830s; by 1872, they were long gone. Porter Rockwell was the most prominent of those said to have been Danites, and he was an actual lawman and frontiersman well into the Utah period, dying about the same time as Brigham Young in 1877.

Elements of the cast are very good. Berenger is sympathetic as Miles Utley, although he sometimes seems confused in his religious environment. His character could have used a bit more subtlety in the writing of his motivations. He made this between appearing as Gen. James Longstreet in Gettysburg and as Lewis Gates in Last of the Dogmen. His production company played a role in getting this made. Aging actors Heston and Coburn are fine in their roles. The casting of Jeffrey Jones and especially Kevin Tighe telegraphs that their characters are not to be trusted, however. The female parts are not strongly written.

The sometimes autocratic Brigham Young, ca. 1870, about 69 years old; and the aging Mormon lawman and frontiersman Orrin Porter Rockwell.

The polygamous Mormon church, with its secrets and undercurrents under Brigham Young and his successors, would make a fertile environment for mysteries and action films for a generation after the time depicted here, until the church gave up the practice in the early 20th century. This is based on a novel by Gary Stewart, who apparently has a Mormon background, and, while enjoyable enough, it’s not particularly memorable. Mormons may enjoy watching it for what strikes them as historical and what seems misplaced. It was written by somebody who likes guns; when Utley is smuggled guns in jail, they are described in loving detail (a Smith & Wesson .44, said to be just like Jesse James used; a .36, said to be light but effective) as they are slipped to him.

The screenplay won the Western Writers of America 1996 Spur Award for Best Drama Script (Dennis Nemec). Not to be confused with another made-for-television western, Avenging Angel, with Kevin Sorbo (2007). For another western featuring Brigham Young, see Dean Jagger in 1940’s Brigham Young, with Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell. For historical background on Young, see Brigham Young, American Moses, by Leonard Arrington (1985) or John Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (2013). The definitive biography of Porter Rockwell, an authentic western character, is probably still Harold Schindler’s Orrin Porter Rockwell, Man of God, Son of Thunder (first edition, 1966; go with the revised edition, which is easier to find).

Bad Bascomb

Nicholas Chennault ~ June 2, 2014

Bad Bascomb—Wallace Beery, Margaret O’Brien, J. Carroll Naish, Marshall Thompson, Marjorie Main (1946; Dir: S. Sylvan Simon)

Wallace Beery is the eponymous Zeb Bascomb, leader of an outlaw gang, in this blatant attempt to recapture the sentimentality of his earlier hit with Jackie Cooper, The Champ (1931), which had been in turn a variation on Charlie Chaplin’s sweeter The Kid (1921)–a societal outcast is reformed or saved by the love of a child. In other ways it uses story elements from the 1940 western Wyoming, in which Beery plays a nasty military deserter who ends up helping the good guys in a range war.

Shortly after the Civil War, Bascomb and his gang try to rob a bank, only to run into a trap with law officers waiting for them. Pursued by a posse, Bascomb, Bart Yancy (J. Carroll Naish) and young Jimmy Holden (William Marshall) escape and join a Mormon wagon train headed for Utah. There is gold hidden on the train, and eventually Yancy finds it. The plan is to take the gold and flee.

However, by now Bascomb, going by the name Zeke Smith, has formed a relationship with nine-year-old Emmy (Margaret O’Brien), a member of the lost (and particularly clueless) Mormon wagon train. And Bascomb further becomes romantically entangled with Emmy’s grandmother Abbey Hanks, played by Marjorie Main. As the head elder lies dying, he entrusts leadership of the wagon train to Bascomb and makes him promise to get them through to Utah. Yancy is disgusted and leaves to see if he can find more reliable allies.

Bascomb (Wallace Beery) with Emmy (Margaret O’Brien) and her grandmother Abbey Hanks (Marjorie Main).

Bascomb (Beery) and Bart Yancy (J. Carroll Naish) have a difference of opinion.

As the wagon train encounters hostile Indians, egged on by Bascomb’s now-former associate Yancy, Bascomb directs the set-up of the defense and rides off 40 miles to seek help from the cavalry. (That’s an obvious double doing all the hard riding on film for the 61-year-old Beery.) He fights off Indian attackers in his desperate ride, and meanwhile the wagon train is attacked. The defense is led by Bascomb’s young (outlaw) associate Jimmy Holden, who has come to fancy one of the young ladies in the wagon train and, like Bascomb, is forsaking his outlaw ways.

In the end, after rescuing the wagon train, the reformed Bascomb rides off with the federal officer to face the music for his life of crime. Even the love of a child can’t save him from that. In the 1940s and 1950s, outlaws had to be shown receiving the consequences of their crimes and seldom were allowed to just change their ways and get away with it.

Al Hirschfeld caricatures of O’Brien and Beery and of Beery by himself. His characters don’t usually smile, contrary to what both of these seem to show.

Wallace Beery had had a long and successful career as a bad guy (see him as Magua in the 1920 Last of the Mohicans, for example), and, surprisingly, as a rough-hewn not-really-so bad guy with a heart of gold. He was a big star in his time, even though he obviously lacked matinee-idol looks. By most accounts, Beery was not as nice to work with as the characters he portrays on screen, especially for child actors; he had all the coarseness his characters usually do, without the heart of gold. Margaret O’Brien claimed that she had to be protected by crew members from Beery’s insistence on constantly pinching her. He and Marjorie Main were paired in a number of movies beginning around 1940 (Wyoming), as Beery had been with Marie Dressler in the 1930s. Bad Bascomb was one of Beery’s last five movies. It was kind of an old-fashioned film even in 1946; Beery died three years later in 1949. For current audiences, all the bonding with young Emmy can seem slow and cloying; others find it heart-warming, as the filmmakers intended. This is interesting as a cultural artifact, a sort of film that isn’t made now. Use it as a test, to see if you can get into the mindset of an earlier generation of filmgoers from almost seventy years ago.

You might see this as similar in theme to Angel and the Badman, made a year later in 1947, where an outlaw is reformed by his love (fatherly in this case, rather than romantic, as in Angel) for a young religious female. It is also said that Bascomb inspired Anthony Mann in making one of his own westerns taking a Bascomb theme (bad guy-fugitive seeks refuge in/leads wagon train) in 1954’s Bend of the River. The opening scene of Bend of the River pays homage to Bad Bascomb by having James Stewart ride up to a wagon and receive a piece of food from a little girl. Some say that more than twenty years later in the original True Grit, John Wayne was channeling Wallace Beery as Rooster Cogburn, and winning his only Best Actor Oscar for it. In black and white, at 112 minutes. Filmed on location in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Wagon Master

Nicholas Chennault ~ December 17, 2013

Wagon Master—Ward Bond, Ben Johnson, Joanne Dru, Harry Carey, Jr., Jane Darwell, Alan Mowbray, Charles Kemper, James Arness, Francis Ford, Hank Worden, Jim Thorpe (1950; Dir: John Ford)

The title of this movie is sometimes written in one word, but in the movie titles it’s two. Even lesser John Ford westerns, like this and 3 Godfathers, are better than average westerns. This one, although well cast, is lacking in star power, with leads going to actors who usually played supporting roles in Ford’s westerns. It is normally thought that the title refers to Ward Bond’s character, who went on to play the role of the wagon master in the television series Wagon Train before his death in 1960 at the age of 57. But in the film Bond refers to Ben Johnson’s character as the wagon master.

Here Bond plays the role of Elder Wiggs, leader of a band of Mormons stranded in Crystal City, a town that doesn’t like them, as they try to make their way toward the San Juan River country, not too far from the Monument Valley and Moab locations where this was filmed. Wiggs encounters the horse trading Blue brothers Travis (Johnson) and Sandy (Harry Carey, Jr.) who are familiar with the desolate country and hires them to guide the beleaguered Mormons.

The Blue brothers and Elder Wiggs (Ben Johnson, Harry Carey, Jr. and Ward Bond).

The first problem encountered is a medicine show (or “hoochie-coochie show,” as Wiggs refers to it) wagon, also kicked out of Crystal City and now stranded in the desert when its team of mules took off. They’re consoling themselves with Dr. A. Locksley Hall’s elixir. Hall (Alan Mowbray, who played the alcoholic Shakespearean actor in Ford’s My Darling Clementine) and his troupe reluctantly join the Mormons, who with equal reluctance are willing to give them replacement stock and take them as far as the cutoff to California. Travis is drawn to Denver (a woman with a past, and named after a city, like Dallas in Stagecoach), the most attractive of Hall’s entourage. (John Ford’s older brother Francis plays Mr. Peachtree, a minor member of the Hall group.)

The next problem is water, scarce in this dry part of the southwest. Third, they encounter the Cleggs, a Deliverance-style band of related outlaws led by Uncle Shiloh Clegg (Charles Kemper), wounded in their most recent holdup—in Crystal City, as it happens. He needs medical attention and decides not to leave the train after he gets it. The Cleggs’ willingness to resort to violence and gunplay seems to put them in charge, to the dismay of the non-violent Mormons.

Shiloh and Floyd Clegg.

Next up, Indian trouble: they encounter what seem to be hostile Navajos, played by the actual Navajos Ford normally used as Apaches or Comanches in his Monument Valley epics—except for Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox, in his last film appearance. However, the Navajos actually seem inclined to trust Mormons more than normal white men, and the two groups bond over a campfire dance. Reese Clegg attacks a Navajo woman, and in order to prevent bloodshed Wiggs orders him whipped.

A posse from Crystal City, where the Cleggs robbed the bank and which evicted both Hall’s wagon and the Mormons, catches up with them, seeking the Cleggs. The Cleggs won’t let Hall’s wagon leave at the appointed place, and it looks like the Mormons are in for it from the Cleggs as well. They come to a place where the Mormons have to dig a track for their wagons, including their unwieldy wagon with seed grain needed for their colony on the San Juan. Still resentful at Reese’s whipping, Uncle Shiloh is on the verge of making Wiggs take the seed grain wagon on the track at full speed, insuring both Wiggs’ death and the destruction of the Mormons’ vital seed grain. But Sandy, attracted to one of the Mormon girls (Kathleen O’Malley), is slipped a gun by her younger brother and starts shooting. His brother Travis grabs a gun from a downed Clegg and together the two of them finish off the nasty Cleggs. Wiggs’ comment to Travis: “I thought you said you never got involved in gunplay.” “I said, only shootin’ snakes.”

The medicine wagon and a prominent occupant: Joanne Dru as Denver.

As far as we know, Sandy ends up with Prudence and Travis with Denver, although Denver is rather uncooperative through most of the movie, even when Travis tempts her with the prospect of joining him at a ranch in a special valley he knows (reminiscent of Ringo’s pitch to Dallas in Stagecoach).

Historically, the story seems grounded in the actual story of the Mormon pioneers’ grueling journey to the San Juan River country in far southeastern Utah. A couple of times they sing “Come, Come Ye Saints,” the Mormon signature hymn, although there is also a rendition of the inevitable “Shall We Gather at the River.” There’s some actual familiarity with Mormons behind all this, although there are stereotypical elements in the portrayal of the Mormons, too.

Bond and the young Johnson are excellent, as are Mowbray (with a whiff of W.C. Fields about him) and Kemper in lesser roles. Ben Johnson, with his cowboy background, did his own stunts and was one of the best riders in westerns (along with perhaps Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott). Carey is fine in a slighter role. Joanne Dru (married to actor John Ireland at the time) here reminds one of her role in Red River, although that was directed by Howard Hawks; she’s good at playing an attractive semi-bad girl. James Arness shows up in an early role as Floyd Clegg; Hank Worden is a mentally-impaired Clegg. Charles Kemper is very good as the slimy Uncle Shiloh Clegg; he was killed in an automobile accident not too long after making the movie. Jane Darwell is Sister Ledyard, who blows a horn to get attention or to get things moving.

Sister Ledyard (Jane Darwell) calls for attention.

The movie is short, at less than 90 minutes, but well put together. It is one of the better wagon train westerns; it would make a good double feature with Westward the Women, from about the same time. There’s a fair amount of music from the Sons of the Pioneers, as in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande. This was made between those two cavalry movies. Ford was clearly enamored of the singing group during this period, although they’re an element that hasn’t aged particularly well for the tastes of modern audiences. There’s a strong strain of Fordian nostalgia here, as in many of his westerns. Ford is said to have claimed this was his favorite of his movies, and it’s quite good, if more modest than some others. In black and white.

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Tag Archives: Mormons

The Avenging Angel

Bad Bascomb

Wagon Master