Tag Archives: Town Taming

Appaloosa

Nicholas Chennault ~ December 12, 2013

Appaloosa—Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, Jeremy Irons, Lance Hendrickson (2008; Dir: Ed Harris)

[after a shoot-out]

Everett Hitch: That was quick.

Virgil Cole: Yeah, everybody could shoot.

Beautifully shot in New Mexico, with lots of sepia tones, period details and the appropriate amount of dust. Excellent production design, with a lot of attention to detail. The story doesn’t have a lot of depth, though, and many of the film’s weaknesses seem to come from the underlying material, a novel by Robert Parker.

Partners Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), of whom Cole is the dominant partner, come to the town of Appaloosa at the invitation of the town fathers to deal with local rancher/rustler/gang leader Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) and his numerous thugs. Villain Bragg seems tubercular and just unnecessarily nasty. Harris’s supposed principal character Virgil Cole needs more development, although his reading of Emerson and attempts to develop a larger vocabulary are good touches. Irons and Harris seem too old, although western villains are frequently older (e.g., Michael Gambon in Open Range, Brian Dennehy in Silverado, and Gene Hackman in Unforgiven), and John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Gary Cooper certainly weren’t young in some of their greatest westerns. That seems to indicate that Harris, or maybe just the way his part is written, doesn’t have the moral or dramatic heft to make his character more compelling or believable.

Cole develops a relationship with Allison French (Renee Zellweger), who moves in with him. After a few exchanges, Hitch suspects that her allegiance to Cole is not as firm as it could be. Cole and Hitch succeed in taking Bragg prisoner and transport him for trial, but he escapes from the train. His hired escape consultants, the Shelton brothers (Lance Henricksen and Adam Nelson) also take Allison. Cole and Hitch follow, meeting the Shelton brothers in a prototypical shootout. After recuperating from their injuries, they return to Appaloosa, where Bragg is in charge again and Allie is with him. Hitch finds a way to resolve matters in a straightforward way that Cole couldn’t use.

Zellweger doesn’t work very well as a woman of quickly shifting allegiances; she doesn’t have nearly enough depth or interest. It might have been that any good-looking woman would instantly attract all males in the Old West, but it doesn’t just work that way on film. Mortensen is the strongest character and best actor in this film. Cole is central for a while, but fades after the shootout. Mortensen’s haircut and facial hair seem unusually authentic, and one wonders how he manages to carry that heavy-looking shotgun (they say it’s an 8-gauge) through the entire film. The town fathers are a good group of character actors, especially Timothy Spall and James Gammon, although Gammon isn’t given nearly enough to do.

The plot begs for comparison with Rio Bravo, and comes up significantly short. It also has similarities to 1959’s Warlock. Perhaps a more experienced or more Hawksian director would have done better with the film’s pacing, could have gotten a better performance out of Zellweger, done better with the supposed male bonding and given less deference to the source material. Most of the characters except for Hitch (Mortensen) seem underdeveloped, and Hitch usually doesn’t seem quite central enough to the story. There just isn’t enough real development here, and the ending feels like the story is only half told, or perhaps two-thirds at most. Violence by itself isn’t enough to build a solid western on, if you don’t care more about the characters.

Big-budget, well-produced westerns are rare enough in 2008 that one wants to like any such creature. But this one isn’t as good as its various elements suggest that it could be. The most glaring weakness is in the writing. However, it’s watchable enough to enjoy at least once, even if the lingering taste is not as satisfying as one would wish. Directed by star Ed Harris. Not to be confused with The Appaloosa (1966), with Marlon Brando and John Saxon. Cole, Hitch and Allie show up in the continuing series of four Cole and Hitch novels by Parker. For Mortensen in his only other western (and it takes place mostly in the Arabian deserts), see Hidalgo, which is engaging. For Ed Harris in another western, see him in the made-for-television version of Riders of the Purple Sage.

Hitch moves on.

Note: In addition to the shotgun, Hitch wears his pistol on his left for a cross-draw, authentically enough. In two set-piece gunfights, Cole and Hitch don’t play it for a quick draw, but approach the action with guns already drawn. That’s probably more historically authentic than the classic face-off and draw, too.

Second Note: The name of the town (and movie), Appaloosa, seems to be a historical anomaly. It’s supposed to be in New Mexico in 1882, a time at which appaloosas were not well known anywhere but in Nez Perce home country. They were a breed of horse developed by the Nez Perces of northern Idaho and northeastern Oregon, one of the very few tribes that practiced selective stock breeding. In the wake of the Nez Perce war of 1878, the breed was all but exterminated anywhere until its revival in Idaho in the 1930s and 1940s.

El Dorado

Nicholas Chennault ~ November 16, 2013

El Dorado—John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Charlene Holt, Arthur Hunnicutt, Ed Asner, R.G. Armstrong, Christopher George, Michele Carey (1966; Dir: Howard Hawks)

Seven years after Rio Bravo (1959), director Howard Hawks largely remade the same story with the same leading man: John Wayne as gunman Cole Thornton in El Dorado. Wayne is seven years longer in the tooth (now at age 58), and it shows. Although he has a (much younger) romantic interest in Charlene Holt’s Maudie, the romance doesn’t really provide the audience with the same kind of interest that the (much younger) Angie Dickinson did in Rio Bravo. El Dorado is still quite watchable, if not in the same classic category as Rio Bravo; i.e., it’s not as bad as the eventual third remake (and Hawks’ last film), Rio Lobo (1970).

Why isn’t it as good as Rio Bravo, aside from an older lead? Two reasons: the story is slightly more complicated and doesn’t hang together as well (i.e., the writing is not as good), and the cast by and large isn’t as differentiated and doesn’t have the same chemistry. Robert Mitchum as alcoholic sheriff J.P. Harrah is older than Dean Martin and has a different chemistry with Wayne—more equal. He’s good, though different. Neither of the female characters has the same charisma as Dickinson, although the writing isn’t as good for them here, either. Ed Asner as Bart Jason is in his unappealing glowering villain mode (e.g., Skin Game) without much variety in his small one-note part. Christopher George as Jason’s hired gunman Nelse McLeod is snakily charming, and George apparently became a favorite of John Wayne’s (getting future parts in Chisum and The Train Robbers); too bad for him it was so late in Wayne’s career.

el-dorado-john-wayne-christopher-george-james-caan-1967

Cole Thornton (John Wayne), Nelse McLeod (Christopher George) and Mississippi (James Caan).

A young James Caan becomes slightly tiresome with his silly hat (we don’t care about it as much as the characters seem to), inability to shoot a gun, frequent quoting of the Poe poem of the title and especially with his unconvincing imitation of a Chinaman. A significant part of his problems may be in the writing of his unnecessary character; cf. Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo and Stuart Whitman in The Comancheros, both better in similar parts as Wayne’s apprentice. Caan was a better actor than Nelson, but the script doesn’t work in his favor. At least there’s no singing here.

R.G. Armstrong is Kevin MacDonald, head of the numerous MacDonald clan. Thankfully, he’s not always spouting Bible passages, as he seems to in most Sam Peckinpah movies in which he appeared. The ensemble never really comes together. The one role that may be better than the original is Arthur Hunnicutt as bugle-playing Bull, in the Walter Brennan cantankerous old deputy part. (For other Hunnicutt performances, look for him in The Tall T, The Big Sky, Two Flags West, Broken Arrow and even with a cameo as a too-old Butch Cassidy in Cat Ballou.)

Wayne’s Cole Thornton is an aging gunman, not so convincing here with a pistol. He sometimes seems to wear it around his butt; he’s better with a longarm as a favorite weapon (Hondo and Rio Bravo). The story is in two parts. In the first part, Thornton is offered a job in the town of El Dorado by Bart Jason, asked to use his gun skills to drive the largish MacDonald family off their ranch so Jason can get their water rights. Thornton refuses but unintentionally kills one of the younger MacDonald sons, played here by Johnny Crawford of the television show The Rifleman. Sister Joey MacDonald (Michele Carey, with big hair, a useless hat, tight pants and a supposedly feisty attitude) shoots Thornton in the back, giving him a continuing injury which results in occasional pain and paralysis in his right (shooting) hand. (You can see the climax coming now, right?)

In part two, several months later in another town Thornton encounters McLeod, hired by Jason for the job Thornton had refused. McLeod is now headed to El Dorado with a band of gunmen. Thornton helps out knife-throwing Mississippi (Caan) in a bar room dispute, acquires him as an unwanted partner, and hears that his old friend Harrah has become a drunk over a bad woman, although he’s still the sheriff. Thornton gets to El Dorado barely before McLeod and tries to sober up Harrah. After a little more development, the shooting of one MacDonald son and the kidnapping of another by the sleazy Jason minions, Thornton participates in a climactic shoot-out which would be unchivalrous except for Thornton’s impairment.

Sometimes the gun hand works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Taken directly from Rio Bravo is a scene in which Thornton and Harrah pursue an assassin into a bar and the boozy Harrah gets the evildoer while facing down a crowd that treats him contemptuously. This time the scene is not as good as the original, although Mitchum does kill a piano. (If the bartender seems sort of familiar, he is played by Jim Mitchum, Robert’s brother, and there’s a physical resemblance.) In the end, it seems that Thornton gets Maudie (or she finally gets him), but the movie doesn’t really care much about that.

There are some noticeable continuity problems. Consider the wounded characters (Thornton and Harrah) constantly switching the arms their crutches are under, or Joey MacDonald’s wet and not wet butt in the scene where she shoots Thornton. This wouldn’t seem to be careful direction from the normally masterful Hawks. Other elements (lighting, camera angles, composition, etc.) are what you’d expect from a master.

Production still of stars John Wayne, Charlene Holt and Robert Mitchum. One of them seems to be underdressed.

Robert Mitchum said later that when Howard Hawks asked him to be in the film, Mitchum asked about the story of the film. Hawks reportedly replied that the story didn’t matter because the film had some “great characters.” That attitude toward the story is the cause of the movie’s weaknesses. There are too many characters and the story never entirely comes together, despite the fact that the screenwriter is Leigh Brackett, an excellent writer who worked on Rio Bravo and a number of other Hawks classics. Of course, she also worked on Rio Lobo, which was to be even worse than this one. The script here has some good lines. Thornton: “Either one of you know a fast way to sober a man up?” Bull: “A bunch of howlin’ Indians out for hair’ll do it quicker’n anything I know.” But the whole is somehow less than its parts. This, The War Wagon and Big Jake are similarly watchable, but not great, westerns from the same late period in Wayne’s career—not as bad as either Rio Lobo or The Train Robbers. And better than Chisum and Cahill U.S. Marshal, even. Even if he was John Wayne, he needed a good premise, good writing, and roles that took his age into account.

This didn’t mean that Wayne’s career was basically done or stuck in endless repeats, though. He would yet play one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit the next year (1968), for which he won his only Oscar, aging rancher Wil Andersen in The Cowboys (1972), and J.B. Books in The Shootist (1976). He was at the top of his game in all those, and they are better movies than El Dorado.

Shooting on the film started in late 1965. The movie was trade-screened to exhibitors on 15 November 1966 but not released until June 1967—about the same time as The War Wagon. Both did well enough at the box office.

Howard Hawks didn’t really make many westerns–only five–although he did have a long and illustrious career as a director of movies. If you throw out his last movie and worst western (Rio Lobo), the remaining four (Red River, The Big Sky, Rio Bravo, and El Dorado) stand up pretty well.

Trivia: A belt buckle that John Wayne sports in many scenes features the Red River D brand, an homage to his first collaboration with Howard Hawks twenty years earlier in Red River (1948). The opening credits feature a montage of original paintings that depict various scenes of cowboy life in the Old West. The artist was Olaf Wieghorst, who appears in the film as the gunsmith Swede Larsen and provides Mississippi with his sawed-off shotgun sidearm. This same kind of montage was used for the opening credits in Chisum.

More trivia: El Dorado is not only the name of the town where the Robert Mitchum character is sheriff and where much of the action takes place. It is also the name of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, quoted more than once by Mississippi. Name another western in which the Poe poem is quoted by a character. For the answer, click here.

Frontier Marshal

Nicholas Chennault ~ November 4, 2013

Frontier Marshal—Randolph Scott, Cesar Romero, Nancy Kelly, John Carradine, Binnie Barnes, Eddie Foy, Jr., Ward Bond, Lon Chaney, Jr. (1939; Dir: Allan Dwan)

The poster seems to indicate that Wyatt (Randolph Scott) and Sarah (Nancy Gates) may eventually get together, which they never do in the movie.

This film is interesting for two external reasons: (1) It catches Randolph Scott in the early flush of his career as a lead in westerns (think Last of the Mohicans, Western Union and Virginia City), and he’s good; and (2) it represents an early attempt at the cinematic legend of Wyatt Earp, one that influenced such better-remembered movies as My Darling Clementine. When this was made, Earp had only been dead for ten years, and there were many still in Hollywood who remembered him. John Ford claimed to have received Wyatt’s rifle as a gift from the old man before his death. Stuart Lake’s (more or less) biographical work on Wyatt was fairly recent; the first movie based on his 1931 book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal was in 1934, and this is better.

Wyatt Earp (Randolph Scott), the new man in town, corrals Indian Charlie (Charles Stevens).

In this version Wyatt shows up in Tombstone alone, without brothers. Apparently he has a reputation as an Indian scout for Nelson A. Miles (the historical Wyatt did no Indian scouting for the Army, for Nelson Miles or anybody else); no mention is made of Dodge City. Much as in the beginning of Clementine, Wyatt takes on a drunken miscreant Indian Charlie when nobody else will, impressing local authorities. Beaten up by the miscreant’s compatriots led by Curley Bill, Wyatt then takes the badge full time, with battle lines drawn. He meets Doc Halliday [sic] (Cesar Romero), who clearly has a death wish, and they strike up an unlikely friendship, comparing shooting irons at a bar in an unintentionally Freudian scene (much like John Ireland and Montgomery Clift in Red River). Or maybe we’re just too cynical about such things.

Doc’s former girl friend Sarah Allen (Nancy Gates), a nurse, shows up to remind him of his past life and loves. He has left all that behind him in order not to saddle her with a dying consumptive. Wyatt thinks Sarah will be good for Doc, but Doc’s current dance hall companion Jerry (Binnie Barnes) is filled with consternation, not to say hostility.

Wyatt (Randolph Scott), Doc (Cesar Romero, drinking milk) and Jerry (Binnie Barnes).

Wyatt and Doc rescue comedian Eddie Foy (played by Eddie Foy, Jr.) when he is kidnapped by a rival saloon, and they find themselves on a stage carrying gold and silver that is about to be robbed. Jerry has provided Curley Bill with information about the stage and its contents, thinking only that it’ll get Wyatt killed. However, much of the outlaw gang is shot down in the attack, and Wyatt, a wounded Doc and Foy make it back to Tombstone.

Wyatt and a wounded Doc head back to Tombstone.

In yet another shootout with the remainder of the gang, the Mexican bartender’s son is shot, and the wounded Doc is pressed back into service as a surgeon by Sarah. He operates in a saloon and is successful in saving young Pablo. As he steps outside for a breath of air, Doc is gunned down by Curley Bill, who yells to Wyatt that they’ll meet him at the OK Corral. Wyatt heads there alone, and kills them all. In the end, Jerry shoots down the fleeing Curley Bill in revenge for Doc.

As we all know by now, Doc didn’t die in Tombstone but in Colorado six years later. You can almost hear studio gears grinding: “Yeah, but we have to have somebody on Wyatt’s side die to convey the gravity of the evil he’s facing. And Doc is so doomed and expendable anyway. And the situation with the two women is unsalvageable.” Even John Ford will play it that way in seven years, and the dance hall floozy will die then, too, for good measure.

Wyatt takes on the bad guys.

Scott makes a strong, clean-cut Wyatt Earp, who never makes a play for Sarah, although he seems attracted. Romero is an effective, dark Doc, although one can think of at least five better Docs (Victor Mature, Kirk Douglas, Jason Robards, Dennis Quaid and, perhaps the best, Val Kilmer). Nancy Gates as Sarah is stronger than Cathy Downs would be seven years later as Clementine in practically the same role. Director Dwan was an experienced front-line director from the days of silent movies, so this was a bit more reputable than most low-budget B westerns of the 1930s. In fact, Dwan was said to have directed 171 westerns from 1911 to 1957, and this may have been his best.

Ward Bond is the local Tombstone marshal who won’t go after the miscreant and is replaced by Wyatt. He had been a bad guy in the 1934 film (now thought to be lost) starring former silent star George O’Brien. Bond would get promoted to playing Morgan Earp in Clementine, his third Wyatt Earp film in 12 years. Lon Chaney, Jr. is Pringle, one of Curley Bill’s gang. The bad guys seem kind of middle-aged and thick around the waist for current notions of western badmen. But they are certainly rotten. John Carradine is appropriately serpentine as the owner of a rival saloon and business manager of Curley Bill’s outlaw gang, playing this the same year he did his better-known acting as Hatfield in Stagecoach. Charles Stevens, who played the drunken Indian Charlie, repeated the role in John Ford‘s remake, My Darling Clementine. Stevens, who was half Mexican and half Apache, was supposedly the grandson of legendary Apache leader Geronimo.

Wyatt goes it alone at the OK Corral, in the dark.

Don’t expect much historical accuracy here, or length, either, at just 71 minutes. There are no Earp brothers and no Clantons, so it’s a pretty stripped-down version of the story. If you’re only going to see one early Earp-Holliday movie, it would be Clementine. But it’s also interesting to compare the two and think about why one is good (for its time) and why one is great (still). And why the great would not exist without the good.

It was Lake’s 1931 book that first brought the Earp myth to public prominence, although Lake’s version deviated substantially from the actual history. Walter Noble Burns had also published in 1927 a pro-Wyatt, factually-deficient version of events in Tombstone. Prior to these books, nobody much was familiar with what has since become the most famous gunfight in western history. Since the 1934 film is apparently lost, this 1939 version is the earliest available cinematic recounting of the Earp-Tombstone story. Lake did an updated edition of his book in 1946, on which John Ford’s Clementine was based.

Dodge City

Nicholas Chennault ~ October 7, 2013

Dodge City—Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Alan Hale, Bruce Cabot, Ann Sheridan, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, Victor Jory (1939; Dir: Michael Curtiz)

Movie stars didn’t get much bigger than the team of Flynn and De Havilland in 1939. Although this was the fifth of nine Warner Brothers movies they made together, it was also their first and perhaps best western. It obviously had a big budget, being filmed in Technicolor at a time when most movies, and certainly most westerns, weren’t. (For purposes of comparison, the other big color movies that year were Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz—pretty heady company.) The director, the Hungarian Michael Curtiz, had been responsible for Flynn and De Havilland’s most successful movies, such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (also in color the previous year) and, of course, Flynn’s earlier breakthrough, Captain Blood.

Flynn is Wade Hatton, and the movie explains his accent by saying that he’s an Irishman with wanderlust and a background in the English military in India. He fought in the Civil War for the South, and as the movie starts he and pals Rusty Hart (Alan Hale) and Tex Baird (Guinn Williams) are finishing a stint as buffalo hunters for the railroad that has just been completed to Dodge City. After a run-in with Jeff Surrett (a young Bruce Cabot), they return to Texas while Dodge City itself falls into chaos and lawlessness, under the corrupt domination of saloon owner Surrett. (His saloon is called The Gay Lady, and features Ann Sheridan in a modest role as his presumably eponymous headliner.) Interestingly enough, the bad guys are Yankees, and the good guys are southerners, a reversal of the usual situation in westerns, although there have always been some exceptions.

Facing down bad guys.

A bit later, Hatton is the honcho for a trail herd coming up from Texas to Dodge City along the Chisholm Trail. Coming along are Abbie Irving (Olivia de Havilland) and her neer-do-well brother, whose parents have died. The brother is a drunk who is killed when his constant careless shooting causes a stampede, and Abbie blames Hatton for his death. Obviously, that relationship will be repaired by the end of the movie. After (a) Surrett is clearly responsible for the death of a competing buyer for Hatton’s cattle, and (b) out-of-control gunfire results in the death of a boy on a Sunday School outing, Hatton agrees to clean up the town and make it safe for decent people, women and the Pure Prairie League. Abbie goes to work for Joe Clemens (the name an obvious homage to Mark Twain); Clemens is the crusading anti-Surrett newspaper editor of the Dodge City Star (Frank McHugh), the sort of part you can easily see Thomas Mitchell playing if he hadn’t been busy getting his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for being Doc Boone in Stagecoach that year. McHugh is fine, though, until he is whipped and then killed by vile Surrett henchman Yancey (the reptilian Victor Jory). Ward Bond shows up in an early (and brief) role as Yancey’s unconvincing alibi. (See him also in a fleeting role in the same year’s Frontier Marshal.)

When Hatton and Abbie get the goods on Yancey and Surrett for Clemens’ death, the climax of the movie is a shootout on a burning train. Ultimately, of course, Hatton, Rusty and Tex kill Surrett and his minions in the shootout, saving everybody a lengthy and uncertain trial. The end of this movie sets up the next western for Flynn and De Havilland, with Col. Grenville Dodge asking Hatton to spend his honeymoon cleaning up the mining town Virginia City which is, if anything, in worse shape than Dodge City had been.

De Havilland with Flynn as sheriff (smaller hat, baby blue tie).

Hatton’s initial wide-brimmed hat in this movie is unusual. Note how he changes hats to one with a smaller brim (along with changing all his other attire) when he becomes sheriff. The baby-blue string tie is a stretch; it probably should have been black. Flynn, especially the younger Flynn, is always watchable, but some don’t find him very convincing in westerns. De Havilland makes a lively western female lead and has her usual good chemistry with Flynn on screen. The accounts say that she had a miserable time making the movie, and would have preferred the Ann Sheridan dance hall floozy role, even though Sheridan didn’t actually have much to do. Of course, this film hasn’t much to do with the real history of cleaning up Dodge City.

Written by the young Robert Buckner, who also wrote Virginia City and Santa Fe Trail (both Flynn western vehicles), as well as Jezebel, The Oklahoma Kid, Knute Rockne, All-American, Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Desert Song. Virginia City, the follow-on, when it gets made, is not an actual sequel and has Miriam Hopkins instead of Olivia de Havilland as Flynn’s romantic interest.

Destry Rides Again (1939)

Nicholas Chennault ~ October 6, 2013

Destry Rides Again—James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Brian Donlevy, Mischa Auer, Charles Winninger, Irene Hervey, Samuel S. Hinds, Jack Carson, Una Merkel (1939; Dir: George Marshall)

Another one of the really good westerns from 1939, which was as good a year for westerns as it was for movies generally. Although it has a large and excellent cast, it depends principally on the two biggest names, James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, and how they work out things between them. With both this and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939 was a good year for Stewart, playing Thomas Jefferson Destry in one and Thomas Jefferson Smith in the other, both in obvious appeals to old-fashioned patriotism. It was Stewart’s first western and the last for eleven years, until he hooked up with Anthony Mann for 1950’s Winchester 73, well after World War II.

Bottleneck is a corrupt town run by Kent (Brian Donlevy in his smooth bad-guy mode), owner of a huge saloon where the principal entertainment seems to be provided by Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich in the first of her three westerns), not that she has a great singing voice. The local mayor Hiram J. Slade (Samuel S. Hinds), constantly chewing tobacco, is in Kent’s pocket. And Kent is busily collecting deeds to a strip of land across the valley (by means of rigged card games and other similarly unscrupulous methods), so he can extort a toll from drovers of cattle herds wanting to cross. Once the local sheriff in Bottleneck was Tom Destry, who moved on to Tombstone, leaving behind deputy Washington Dimsdale (Charles Winninger), now a drunk reduced to cadging quarters and drinks in Kent’s saloon (like the character Dude in Rio Bravo twenty years later).

Mischa Auer, James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich

As the movie opens, Kent, with Frenchy’s help, cheats yet another ranch owner out of his land at cards and kills Sheriff Keough. Mayor Slade cynically appoints Dimsdale, the town drunk, as the new sheriff. However, Dimsdale sobers up and sends for Thomas Jefferson Destry, Jr. (James Stewart), who is said to have cleaned up Tombstone after his father was shot in the back there. Destry arrives on a stage in the company of a hot-headed rancher, Jack Tyndall (Jack Carson), and his sister Janice (Irene Hervey), only he doesn’t wear a gun—says he doesn’t believe in them. He’d rather whittle napkin rings. He manages to deal with several near-crises without guns, and develops what appears to be an interest in Frenchy. He pauses long enough to demonstrate an uncommon skill with a handgun in target practice, although to the viewer the casual way Destry handles a pistol (slinging it carelessly at the target) seems unlikely to be accurate. There’s a truly impressive barroom fight between Frenchy and Lily Belle Callahan (Una Merkel)—right up there with other great fights in westerns.

Destry (James Stewart), Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich) and Kent (Brian Donlevy) get acquainted in Kent’s saloon.

Meanwhile, Destry looks into the disappearance of former Sheriff Keough, and even manages to discover the sheriff’s body. Mayor Slade appoints himself the judge, while Destry and Dimsdale secretly send for a federal judge. When Kent and Slade find out about the federal judge, a war breaks out and Destry is forced to put on his guns. Dimsdale is killed, and the forces of right and justice attack Kent’s saloon. Both sides are blasting away when the saloon is invaded by the town’s women (marshaled into action by Frenchy), wielding brooms and such. Both sides hold their fire and the women appear to be winning the battle in the saloon. Kent sneaks a shot at an unaware Destry, and Frenchy redeems herself for all her shady dealing when she takes the bullet for him. (This is the way both this and Rancho Notorious end, with Marlene Dietrich taking a bullet for somebody else to redeem herself for her nefarious misdeeds.) At the end, Destry’s romantic attentions seem to be turning to Janice, less overtly interesting than the deceased Frenchy but much more appropriate for Destry.

Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich): She knows what the boys in the back room will have.

It’s engaging and almost great, but it has a kind of Capra-esque sentimentality and shows its age a bit—more than, say, Stagecoach or even Dodge City from the same year. The tone is wryly comic (except for the occasional death) with Stewart’s Destry, and more overtly with Mischa Auer as Boris Stavrogin, a Russian dominated by his wife (Una Merkel) to the extent that everybody calls him by the name of Callahan, who was her prior husband. He’s there for comic relief, mostly effective. It’s not that easy to pull off, but it flows pretty smoothly here. In some ways, one can see Support Your Local Sheriff from 30 years later as an attempt to do the same thing, although it’s not exactly a remake. Some of the humor dealing with roles of the sexes seems a bit outmoded. Destry’s aw-shucks demeanor and interminable stories about a feller he once knew somewhere are almost as tiresome to his fellow characters as they are to us. Brian Donlevy is at his nefarious best, the same year as he played another of his memorable villains: the evil Sergeant Markov in Beau Geste. This was remade twice in the early 1950s, with Joel McCrea and again with Audie Murphy, but this second version (after a 1932 Tom Mix original) is much better than either of those—or the original, for that matter. Nobody much remembers the 1959 musical comedy Broadway stage production with Andy Griffiths.

Director George Marshall (The Sheepman) was a journeyman who started in the age of silents and ended up doing television in the 1960s. He was not particularly known for westerns. Lyrics to songs, including “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” (one of the most effective musical interludes ever in a western), were by Frank Loesser. In black and white. “Suggested by” a story by pulp writer Max Brand.

My Darling Clementine

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 30, 2013

My Darling Clementine—Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Cathy Downs, Tim Holt, Ward Bond (1946; Dir: John Ford)

Of all the cinematic versions of the Wyatt Earp story, this is the least accurate historically. (Well, with the exception of 1939’s Frontier Marshal, which is a pretty good movie, too.) But this elegant black and white retelling, with Henry Fonda as a mythic Wyatt, has a visual spareness and beauty that remain unmatched more than sixty years later. If you know much about the historical events in Tombstone, maybe the best way to watch this classic is to just enjoy the story John Ford tells here for what it is without weighing it against the actual history. Bear in mind the line from another Ford western (Liberty Valance) about legends becoming fact. Ford was helping that process along for the Earps.

Filmed in Ford’s favorite western location (Monument Valley, where he made nine movies), there are images from this movie that linger long after it’s over: Fonda sitting in a chair on the boardwalk, tipped back on the rear legs with his leg propped against a post as he watches the town’s comings and goings; Fonda and Downs at a church social, dancing outdoors on the newly-built floor of what will be the church; Fonda and his brothers finding the body of the youngest brother in the pouring rain; a hack actor getting help from Victor Mature’s Doc Holliday in finishing Hamlet’s soliloquy; a badly shot Mature calmly looking through the poles of a corral, his hand holding a white handkerchief near his head as he selects and shoots his next target.

Bruce Willis in a visual Fonda reference (Last Man Standing, a gangster-era remake of Yojimbo directed by western aficionado Walter Hill). Even the chair is the same.

The most eye-catching female role here is not the Clementine Carter of the title, played by Cathy Downs, but smoldering Linda Darnell as Chihuahua, a Mexican saloon girl and prostitute in love with Doc Holliday.

At the movie’s start, Wyatt Earp (Fonda) and his three brothers, Morgan (Ward Bond), Virgil (Tim Holt) and James, are driving a herd of cattle to California when they arrive outside Tombstone in Arizona. Leaving young James to watch the herd, they go into town for a shave and a drink. They return in the driving rain to find the herd stolen and James dead. It’s obvious to us that it’s the work of Old Man Clanton (an unusually malevolent Walter Brennan) and his four sons, who were coveting the herd earlier and tried to buy it. The surviving brothers return to town, where Wyatt, already known as a peace officer from a stint in Dodge City, accepts a job as the town marshal with his brothers as deputies.

Walter Brennan as a malevolent Old Man Clanton.

One of his first actions is to meet and establish some kind of relationship with Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), who owns the local saloon where Chihuahua sings. Doc is volatile and used to having his way, but he and Wyatt arrive at a wary accommodation. There is a sense of impending doom over Doc, due to bouts of wracking coughs that indicate he has consumption (tuberculosis). The stage brings Clementine Carter to town, a figure from Doc’s past with whom Wyatt is immediately taken. Doc is less thrilled to see her, and he tells Clementine to leave town or he will. The jealous Chihuahua thinks Doc will now go to Mexico with her and marry her. Meanwhile, Wyatt discovers Chihuahua with an elaborate silver cross that James had bought for his own girl, and she tells him she got it from Doc. Wyatt chases down the stage for Tucson and retrieves Doc. He doesn’t come easily; the two finally face off, and Wyatt wins.

On their return to Tombstone, they confront Chihuahua, since Doc knows he didn’t give her the cross. She finally confesses that she got it from Billy Clanton (John Ireland), and Clanton, who has been lurking outside the window, shoots her and flees on horseback. Wyatt takes three shots at Clanton to little apparent effect and Virgil pursues him toward the Clanton ranch. At the ranch, Billy falls dead on the porch from wounds, and Old Man Clanton shoots Virgil in the back with a shotgun.

Wyatt delivers an ultimatum to the Clantons at the OK Corral.

Meanwhile, Doc Holliday exercises his now-quite-rusty surgical skills on the badly wounded Chihuahua, using saloon tables for the operation with the assistance of trained nurse Clementine. It’s apparently successful, and for a time Doc is the skilled surgeon of old. However, the Clantons return with Virgil’s body to Tombstone, setting up the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Chihuahua dies, and Holliday joins the Earps against the Clantons. In the extended shootout, all four of the remaining Clantons are killed, with Old Man Clanton as the final member of the family to go down. Wyatt and surviving brother Morgan (Ward Bond) head for California to tell their father what has happened, and Clementine becomes the schoolmarm in Tombstone. Wyatt departs, leaving the sense that he’ll be back to resume the relationship.

Tim Holt and Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, 1946.

Wyatt and Clementine say goodbye for a while.

Fonda couldn’t be better as Wyatt Earp in his first movie role after returning from service in the navy during World War II. As it is used in this movie, even Fonda’s hat almost becomes a character itself; both its shape and Fonda’s use of it seem authentic. Victor Mature, whose most obvious characteristic was his physical size and robustness, is a strange choice to play the slight, tubercular Holliday, but it works well enough in the end. Walter Brennan is excellent as Old Man Clanton, setting up a similar role for him in the parody Support Your Local Sheriff more than twenty years later. The Clanton sons never become differentiated and don’t matter much. There’s something of a Mexican stereotype in Darnell’s Chihuahua, but she doesn’t go so far as to attempt a Mexican accent and after enough fiery close-ups she’s effective. Cathy Downs is beautiful as Clementine, and she doesn’t actually have to do much. The character actors such as Alan Mowbray’s Shakespearean hack Granville Thorndyke, Jane Darwell’s townswoman Kate Nelson, and J. Farrell Macdonald as Mac the barman are excellent. Wyatt to Mac: “Mac, you ever been in love?” Mac: “No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.”

This was also John Ford’s first postwar movie, and it began another amazing run for him. Over the next ten years, he’d make a string of some of the most remarkable westerns ever filmed. Ford was said to have known Wyatt Earp as an old man (Earp died in 1929, spending a few of those last years in Hollywood), and this film was loosely based on Stuart Lake’s biography written soon after the old lawman’s death. Ford claimed that the version of the famous gunfight that he shot was based what Earp personally told him, including a diagram and the passage of a dust-raising stagecoach during the shooting. But as usual he was “printing the legend”–telling his story the way he thought it should be. After Ford submitted his film, studio head Darryl Zanuck notoriously took some liberties with it, resulting in some new footage and a shorter cut. (See Lost Masterpieces.)

The black-and-white cinematography by James MacDonald is remarkable, especially in low shots that bring in the sky; in rain at night; in its use of shadows and light in interior shots; and in long shots that end up in the distance on a feature of Monument Valley geography. As the surviving Earps and Doc Holliday walk down the dirt street at dawn toward the OK Corral, they’re barely visible in long shots that emphasize the looming sky. The movie in general has an almost palpable sense of bygone Americana.

The mortally wounded Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) does not go gently.

If you want a more historical recounting of the Tombstone saga, and in particular the famous gunfight, try Tombstone or Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp. So what’s incorrect in Clementine? There was no Clementine historically, and Wyatt’s relations with women were less fastidious than this movie depicts. James was the oldest of the Earp brothers, not the youngest, and the positions of Morgan and Virgil were switched in this film. It was older brother Virgil, not Wyatt, who took on the job of marshal in Tombstone. The Earps did not come to Tombstone driving cattle; they came to a booming mining town looking for gambling opportunities and maybe a quick mining strike. The country around Tombstone isn’t much like Monument Valley. Wyatt didn’t meet Doc Holliday in Tombstone; they’d previously met in Fort Griffin, Texas, and had been friends for some years. Doc came to Tombstone after the Earps were already there. Doc was a dentist, not a surgeon, and he was from Georgia, not Boston, although he was trained in Philadelphia. He was not killed at the OK Corral, but died in a Colorado sanitarium six years later. His mistress was not Mexican, but a Hungarian prostitute, Big Nose Kate Elder, and she outlived Doc by more than 50 years. The Earps’ opponents at the shootout were not Old Man Clanton and three of his four sons—he had only three and he was dead months before the shootout. Ike and Billy Clanton were in the fight; Ike ran and survived, and Billy was killed, along with the two McLaury brothers. The gunfight itself was a more stand-up and shoot-it-out affair than depicted in the movie with less moving around, and it was over much quicker. Some of the more interesting aspects of the real-life story happen during Wyatt’s vendetta ride after the shootout at the corral, and that aftermath is not depicted at all in this film. And that’s for starters.

Some of these less-than-historical elements have their roots in earlier cinematic versions of the story. For example, for a Clementine figure re-entering Doc’s life in Tombstone, Doc as a surgeon rather than a dentist, a dramatic operation on a saloon table and Doc being killed in Tombstone, see Frontier Marshal from 1939, with Randolph Scott as Earp and Cesar Romero as Doc.

Wyatt and Clementine dance--he clumsy but enthusiastic, and with great joy. "Make room for our new Marshall and his Lady Fair".

The marshal dances with Clementine, as Monument Valley looms in the background.

John Ford was indisputably a great director, but he could be nasty to work with. Three-time Oscar winner Walter Brennan would refuse to work with him again after this film. And Henry Fonda, who had an extraordinarily successful history with Ford by the time this was made (Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath), would have his own falling-out with Ford about ten years later.

For historical reading on the actual Tombstone and the Earps, try Paula Marks’ To Live and Die in the West or recent biographies of Wyatt by Allen Barra or Casey Tefertiller.

On the set of My Darling Clementine, 1946.

Note: As of Oct. 2014, this classic was released on a Criterion Collection DVD, complete with commentary, extras, a fully-restored version of the 97-minute theatrical release, and even a 103-minute pre-release cut. It’s the best way to see the film. However, the earlier 2004 DVD has an excellent commentary by film historian and Ford biographer Scott Eyman that is worth listening to.

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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.”

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The Far Country

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 18, 2013

The Far Country—James Stewart, Walter Brennan, Ruth Roman, John McIntire, Corinne Calvet, Jay C. Flippen, Harry Morgan, Robert Wilke, Royal Dano, Jack Elam, Kathleen Freeman (1954; Dir: Anthony Mann)

In another of Mann’s stories about an alienated loner, Jeff Webster (James Stewart) has driven a herd of cattle from Wyoming to Seattle, where they are loaded on a steamboat for Skagway, Alaska Territory. It is 1898, so the Alaskan gold rush is on. Webster and his garrulous partner Ben Tatum (Walter Brennan) plan to drive the herd even farther north to Dawson, where there isn’t a lot of beef and they can get top dollar for their cattle. Then, as Ben tells anyone who will listen, they’ll buy a ranch in Utah, where they’ll spend the rest of their days.

Jeff isn’t just a loner; he’s a loner who’s good with a gun and killed two men on the drive to Seattle. When the boat’s authorities try to arrest him, he is hidden by saloon owner Ronda Castle (Ruth Roman), who’s taken a romantic interest in him. As he’s driving his cattle off the boat, Jeff inadvertently disrupts a public hanging conducted by Gannon (John McIntire), the local authority who is a law unto himself with a band of thugs (Jack Elam, Robert Wilke) to back him up. He confiscates Jeff’s cattle, and Jeff takes a job leading Ronda Castle’s wagons to Dawson, up over the Chilkoot Pass. When he get the wagons over the pass, he goes back to Skagway in the middle of the night, steals his cattle back and drives them over the pass toward Dawson.

Jeff Webster (James Stewart) makes a new acquaintance (Ruth Roman) while escaping the law on the way to Alaska.

Once in Dawson, Ben makes connections with the regular folk, including Renee Vallon (Corinne Calvet), a young girl they had met in Skagway. With the gold has come a rougher element and some crime, and the process is sped up by Ronda’s Dawson Castle saloon. Jeff sells his cattle at a high price and buys a local gold claim. Meanwhile, the Mounties haven’t yet figured out how to extend their authority over the unruly area. Jeff finds himself with several conflicts: two potential romantic interests; the salt-of-the-earth regular residents and claimholders against the glitzier newcomers out for a fast buck; and regular law and order against Gannon’s variety of law.

Yes, Gannon has shown up in Dawson, with an even larger gang of thugs than he had in Skagway. Claim-jumping becomes a regular feature of life in Dawson, as do murder and robbery. Jeff resists taking a hand until he’s robbed and left for dead, and Ben is killed. Renee nurses him back to health, and although his arm is still in a sling, he has a final shootout with Gannon and his minions.

Jeff Webster (James Stewart) confronts a gleefully corrupt Gannon (John McIntire, with henchman Jack Elam on his left).

This is one of the best of the “northerns” set during the Alaska gold rush (see also North to Alaska, White Fang and The Spoilers), and like many of them, it features a character based on the real-life conman Soapy Smith, who took over Skagway for a time. This has a larger cast than some of Anthony Mann’s westerns, and they’re quite good. Both Ruth Roman and Corinne Calvet are believable romantic interests, so that the final choice is not a foregone conclusion. John McIntire is excellent as Gannon, the Soapy Smith character. Walter Brennan’s talkative Ben makes personal connections much more easily than Jeff, but he tends to let information slip when he shouldn’t. Jay C. Flippen and Kathleen Freeman are both part of the good Dawson crowd. Stewart is edgy as he usually was in a Mann western; he wears his usual hat and rides Pie, the horse he rode through seventeen westerns. One key plot point relates to a bell Jeff hangs from his saddle horn.

James Stewart demonstrates that Randolph Scott wasn’t the only star of western movies who could have a romantic triangle going, first with saloon owner Ruth Roman and then with mining lass Corinne Calvet.

The script was by Borden Chase, who provided the scripts for previous Mann films Winchester ’73 and Bend of the River, as well as for Red River and Night Passage. The film was shot on location at Jasper in Alberta. Cinematography was by William H. Daniels. The DVD version in general circulation (2010) is unfortunately only a full-screen, pan-and-scan version.

The Tin Star

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 13, 2013

The Tin Star—Henry Fonda, Anthony Perkins, Betsy Palmer, Neville Brand, John McIntire, Lee Van Cleef (1957; Dir: Anthony Mann)

Grizzled bounty hunter Morgan Hickman (Henry Fonda) meets green sheriff Ben Owens (Tony Perkins in one of his first roles): “How long you had that badge?” “Since Sheriff Parker…uh, got killed.” “Nobody else wanted it, huh? How come they picked you?” “I’m only temporary.” “You’re more temporary than you think.”

The title is a generic sort for a western featuring a lawman; in fact, a short story with this name was made into the classic High Noon. In this case Hickman has come to town to collect the reward on an outlaw he brings in, dead and draped over his pack horse, only to find himself despised by the respectable townspeople. The inexperienced sheriff is just finding his way in a difficult job and tells Hickman he’ll have to wait for his money until he gets confirmation from the party offering the reward. This means Hickman will have to spend at least several days in the hostile town until he can get paid. The town bully and livery stable owner is Bart Bogardus (played by experienced villain Neville Brand, who was said to be the fourth most-decorated American soldier during World War II); Bogardus thinks he’d be a better sheriff than Owens. Hickman bails Owens out of a difficult situation with Bogardus and unintentionally becomes the young sheriff’s mentor.

Hickman (Henry Fonda) submits a claim to the green sheriff (Anthony Perkins).

Meanwhile, the hotel won’t rent Hickman a room, and he finds accommodations with young widow Nona Mayfield (Betsy Palmer) and her half-Indian son. In addition to making a place for himself as sheriff, Owens is also trying to get Millie Parker (Mary Webster) to marry him. But she’s the daughter of the previous (and now dead) sheriff, and she won’t marry him unless he takes off the tin star. The beloved town doctor (John McIntire) is killed, and Owens loses control of his posse to Bogardus. It becomes a mob. Meanwhile, Hickman and Owens find and capture the killers, but may not be able to hold them against Bogardus and the mob. As Hickman and Owens become better friends, Hickman reveals that he had been a lawman in Kansas when his own family needed help, and the townspeople he thought were his friends wouldn’t provide the assistance he needed. He now has few illusions about the relationships between townspeople and those they hire to protect them, and he thinks they ask too much while providing too little in return.

Hickman gives the youngster a few tips.

In the final confrontation between Owens and Bogardus, Hickman puts on the star again in support of Owens, but Owens, armed with what he’s learned from Hickman, is the one who has to deal with the situation. And at the end Hickman takes off with the young widow and her son to find another town that wants somebody to wear a star.

Romancing the widow.

This is one of a number of westerns from the 1950s that explored social issues, especially one of those concerned with a sense of community and how much townspeople owe to those who enforce the law against the lawless. (Compare it with High Noon, Man With the Gun, At Gunpoint, 3:10 to Yuma and Rio Bravo, for example.) The townspeople usually come off badly in such situations, so much so that it has become a cliché (see Support Your Local Sheriff, for example, which exploits that cliche to comic effect).

The cast here is appealing, with a good relationship between American everyman Fonda and the young Tony Perkins. Palmer is attractive and straightforward as Fonda’s romantic interest. John McIntire is his usual avuncular self as the town doctor, but he’s basically the same character as Walter Brennan in At Gunpoint. McIntire was a Mann favorite, and shows up more colorfully in Winchester ’73 and The Far Country, too. Villains Brand and Van Cleef do exactly what they’re supposed to do.

Anthony Mann directs Fonda and Perkins in a scene.

This is the better one of the two good westerns directed by Anthony Mann that don’t feature James Stewart. (The other is Man of the West with Gary Cooper.) Mann was more interested in psychological and social issues than some directors of westerns in the 1950s, but he knew what he was doing. This is in black and white, at a time when most movies with ambitions (even westerns) were in color. But it doesn’t suffer for all of that.

For another movie featuring Fonda as an experienced ex-lawman helping a younger and greener peace officer, see Warlock, made a couple of years later.

Rio Bravo

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 11, 2013

Rio Bravo—John Wayne, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, John Russell, Claude Akins (1959; Dir: Howard Hawks)

Well, John Wayne, yes, of course. But Dean Martin? Ricky Nelson? Who’d be able to make this work at all, let alone make it memorable? Director Howard Hawks, that’s who. Rio Bravo’s initial commercial success and the enduring respect in which it is held are usually credited principally to Hawks, with considerable justification. Hawks was one of the great directors of his long era, from silent movies to the 1970s, and he didn’t work in westerns all that often. Rio Bravo was a commercial sort of movie, not held in great critical regard at the time of its release in 1959. But that respect has increased over the ensuing 60 years, and it still scores high in re-watchability. Various of the elements of the casting and film shouldn’t work, but they do.

The title apparently comes from the fact that Mexicans refer to the Rio Grande as the Rio Bravo. The central plot is fairly common. Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne) of Presidio County, Texas, is holding the local land baron’s brother in his jail on a murder charge, and faces insuperable odds in trying to keep him there until a U.S. marshal arrives to take custody of the miscreant. Tension builds as Chance puts together his beleaguered team, strategy develops on both sides and the odds against Chance rise. Subplots involve the rehabilitation of his alcoholic deputy Dude (Martin) and an unlikely romance between Chance and young gambler/dance hall girl Feathers (Angie Dickinson).

Dude battles his demons.

This was a first film for Martin and Nelson, and very early in Dickinson’s career. Wayne was in the stage of his career (after The Searchers) where his characters became frankly middle-aged. Martin and Nelson were both better known as singers than actors, and for commercial purposes (and presumably to show male bonding), there had to be a scene where song breaks out. It’s the cheesiest moment in the movie, but surprisingly it doesn’t undercut the development of the film. Martin is excellent, as he was in another, later western (The Sons of Katie Elder). Nelson didn’t have much of a film career, but he was fine in this as youthful gunfighter Colorado Ryan. Dickinson was remarkable as the young gambler Feathers in a May-December romance with Chance.

There are lots of moments that stick with you: Chance giving the most threatening “Good evening” greeting you’ll ever see on film as he passes a suspect character on the street at night. In a saloon, an angry Chance turns, bashes a bad guy with his rifle and then says of the bleeding thug on the floor, “Aw, I won’t hurt him.” In the villain’s saloon, a frowzy, despised Dude rubs his stubbled jaw, spins, draws, shoots and drops a killer in the shadows above him who’s been dripping blood into a beer on the bar. Chance’s tough love to the recovering alcoholic deputy: “’Sorry’ don’t get it done, Dude.” Any of three exchanges between Chance and Feathers in her hotel room. Walter Brennan’s incessant cackling and complaining as Stumpy, the lame jailhouse guard. Colorado finally buying into the big fight by tossing Chance his rifle in the street while the bad guy’s thugs have the drop on him. The constant playing of the Deguello, the threatening Mexican trumpet and guitar music (composed by Dimitri Tiomkin) emanating from the bad guy’s saloon, supposedly meaning “no quarter will be given.” John Russell’s tall, smooth and impeccably dressed villain verbally spars with Chance at the jail. (This was Russell’s most memorable role in a modest career.)

Arresting brother Joe.

And there are lots of small touches that work well in retrospect: The way Wayne’s character favors a rifle (as he did in Hondo and several other movies) as his weapon of choice, and how he handles it. Martin’s sloppy attire and convincing degradation when his character is a drunk. The use of roll-your-own cigarettes throughout the movie, as an indication of male bonding. Wayne’s convincingly battered hat, which he used from 1939’s Stagecoach for the next 20 years of movies (see, for example, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Hondo), tilted forward on his head with the front brim bent slightly up.

A few touches don’t work as well: The singing scene is not universally beloved. And the stock-Mexican portrayals of the hotel keeper and his wife don’t play as well today as they may have 60 years ago. But the movie is remarkably sure-footed, and what seems to be a leisurely plot development seldom drags.

Chance and Feathers

Hawks said that one of the interests for him in making Rio Bravo was to make a counter-statement to Fred Zinneman’s High Noon, released six years earlier and nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Instead of trying to get help from townspeople and cattle drovers (as does Marshal Will Kane in High Noon), Chance here prefers to rely instead on a very small group of professionals for his support. Hawks was also not impressed with the drawn-out slow-motion violence of Peckinpah’s influential The Wild Bunch a decade later; he thought that violence was more effective if it was over quickly as in real life, instead of glorifying it in extended slower sequences.

Hawks was known for stealing from himself, re-using material that had worked in his other films. The Chance-Feathers relationship is very reminiscent of the middle-aged Bogart and young Lauren Bacall in Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944). Even some of Feathers’ lines are virtually the same, and she shows a very similar aggressiveness in the relationship. Walter Brennan was also a principal supporting character in To Have and Have Not. There are similar pop musical touches in both movies, with Hoagy Carmichael in To Have and Have Not and Martin/Nelson in Rio Bravo.

Director Hawks and Angie Dickinson

Later, Hawks would remake Rio Bravo twice more, with diminishing success each time. 1966’s El Dorado featured Wayne again, with Robert Mitchum in the Martin role and a young James Caan in the Nelson role. It worked, but not as well as Rio Bravo. Rio Lobo in 1970, again starring Wayne, used many of the same plot elements. It was Hawks’ last film and not one of his more successful in a number of ways. John Carpenter took the plot as the basis for his 1976 urban action film Assault on Precinct 16.

Some credit for the enduring success of Rio Bravo should go to excellent screen-writing by two frequent Hawks collaborators: Jules Furthman (a screenwriter since 1915, with Mutiny on the Bounty, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, The Outlaw, Nighmare Alley) and Leigh Brackett (The Big Sleep, Hatari, El Dorado, Rio Lobo, The Empire Strikes Back). As with most great films, however, a number of elements worked together well to produce something worth remembering.

Great Western Movies

An In-Depth Guide to Westerns