Tag Archives: Ward Bond

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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Fort Apache

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 28, 2013

Fort Apache—John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Shirley Temple, John Agar, Pedro Armendariz (1948; Dir: John Ford)

A Custer-esque poster, reminiscent of a print often seen in 19th century saloons.

This is the first of Ford’s cavalry trilogy from the late 1940s, a landmark series and an extraordinary achievement in the western genre. This initial entry revolves around the conflict in leadership between Lt. Col. Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda, with a streak of white in his hair), a by-the-book martinet with no experience in dealing with Indians, and the more reasonable, pragmatic and experienced Capt. Kirby York (John Wayne). The Chiricahua Apaches under Cochise have left their reservation (the leadership of Cochise would place this in the early 1870s) and gone to Mexico. It falls to Thursday’s command to deal with them.

Henry Fonda as Col. Owen Thursday

West Point graduate Thursday rose to be a general in the Civil War, but afterward he was reduced in rank as the military shrank to its peacetime size. He feels that small-time Fort Apache in Arizona Territory isn’t worthy of him, and, Custer-like, he wants to reclaim supposed past military glories in his new posting. He’s overly concerned with insignificant military niceties and too stubborn to accept advice from more experienced subordinates. His highest-ranking subordinates are Captains York, who also saw service as a colonel in the Civil War but has since acquired considerable experience out west dealing with the Apaches, and Collingwood (silent film star George O’Brien, who played older officers in all three of Ford’s cavalry trilogy movies), older than York and with a longer and warmer acquaintance with Thursday. Collingwood is on the verge of retirement, just waiting out the days or weeks in this remote outpost until his final retirement orders come through. Unlike Thursday, York has enough experience to realize the outpost’s vulnerabilities. As York sees it, not everything needs to come to a fight, including the current situation with Cochise. To complicate matters, Thursday’s daughter Philadelphia (an almost grown-up ShirleyTemple) shows up at the post and develops a romantic interest in young West Point graduate Lt. Michael O’Rourke (John Agar). O’Rourke is the son of the post’s Irish sergeant major (Ward Bond)—now a non-commissioned officer, although he was a Medal of Honor winner and a major in the Civil War. To Thursday, that would be a highly unsuitable match.

Wayne as Capt. Kirby York

Thursday shows some signs of being able to learn as he and York discover that the Apaches have left their reservation because they’ve been systematically cheated by a corrupt Indian agent, who’s also selling guns and alcohol to them on the side. York is sent with Sgt. Beaufort (a Mexican and former Confederate major, played by Pedro Armendariz; the sergeant speaks Spanish as does Cochise) on a diplomatic mission to find Cochise and persuade him to come back. In reliance on York’s word, Cochise and his people come far enough back to parley with Thursday. However, Thursday is certain he knows best, and he is grossly and unnecessarily offensive to the Indians, precipitating a battle. He is sure that savages with no training cannot have the military capability of defeating U.S. cavalry, no matter how outnumbered that cavalry might be. Going against York’s advice, Thursday charges into an ambush, with York and young O’Rourke ordered to stay behind with the supply train.

The result is the massacre of all Thursday’s men, including Collingwood and the elder O’Rourke. In the final scene at the post some years after the event, York is now the commanding officer, and not-quite-so young O’Rourke is his second in command, now married to Philadelphia Thursday. Members of the press are asking York about Thursday’s supposedly heroic last stand and a famous painting of “Thursday’s Charge,” and York confirms the glorious myth—“Correct in every detail,” he says of the overblown and obviously inaccurate painting. It’s a foretaste of the Liberty Valance valedictory: “When the legend become fact, print the legend.”

There are the usual Ford cavalry characters here: Irish sergeants led by Michael O’Rourke (Ward Bond), Fergus Mulcahey (Victor McLaglen) and Quincannon (Dick Foran); young, mouthy lieutenants (John Agar); beautiful eastern young women (Temple) inexperienced with the west; savvy long-time military wives (Emily Collingwood and Mary O’Rourke, played by Anna Lee and Irene Rich); noble Indian leaders (Cochise, played here by Miguel Inclan); former Conferates now serving well out west (Armendariz); and scurrilous Indian agents (Silas Meacham, played by Grant Withers). There are names that will recur in future parts of the cavalry trilogy: Quincannon (a stereotypical Irish sergeant played by twice by McLaglen in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande) and Kirby York (played again by Wayne in Rio Grande). No Ben Johnson or Harry Carey, Jr., yet, though; they’ll have to wait for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Young lovers Agar and Temple were in fact married at the time, although they’d be divorced in a couple more years.

Production still: Wayne, Fonda, Agar and Temple

These three movies were not conceived as a trilogy, and, though they all have typical Ford weaknesses (nostalgia, sentimentality, broad stereotypes), they have his strengths as well, including his unparalleled visual sense. This, like the others, was filmed at Utah’s Monument Valley (although the Fort Apache set was located in Simi Valley, California), and is in black and white. In some ways, the plot of Fort Apache is the strongest of the three. It’s based on a short story by James Bellah, “Massacre.”

In addition to Custer, an Arizona inspiration for the story might be Lt. Howard Cushing of the 3rd Cavalry. Cushing led his troopers into an Apache ambush at Bear Spring northwest of Fort Huachuca in Arizona Territory and was killed. He is sometimes referred to as “the Custer of Arizona.”

Hondo

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 21, 2013

Hondo—John Wayne, Geraldine Page, Ward Bond, James Arness, Lee Aaker, Leo Gordon (1953; Dir: John Farrow)

John Wayne plays Hondo Lane, an ill-tempered part-Indian army scout in Arizona territory in 1870. This movie doesn’t have as high a profile as some of the Wayne westerns of the late 1940s and early 1950s (Red River, The Searchers), but Hondo Lane is a quintessential Wayne character.

So why doesn’t it have a higher profile? There are at least three major reasons: (1) The story isn’t as epic in nature as some others. (2) The rights are owned by Wayne’s production company, Batjac, and Batjac kept it largely out of circulation for a few decades. (3) It was made during the brief 3D fad of the early 1950s and bears some of the hallmarks of that specialized kind of moviemaking. Along with Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, it might be the best 3D movie made during that period. It is certainly the best movie made from a story by the best-selling western author Louis L’Amour, although it doesn’t have much good competition for that title.

A stranger from the desert, accompanied by a feral dog.

As the movie opens, army scout and dispatch rider Hondo Lane walks up to an isolated Arizona ranch, looking somewhat the worse for wear, carrying saddlebags and a rifle and followed by a scruffy-looking feral dog, Sam. Lane’s horse was killed when he was attacked by Apaches a few days earlier, and he’s been on foot ever since. At the ranch he finds Angie Lowe (Geraldine Page) and her son Johnny (Lee Aaker). She says her husband Ed is up in the hills rounding up strays, but the place doesn’t show much sign of a man’s upkeep for the past several months. Lane buys a wild horse from her, tames it and does some other tasks to earn his keep. He develops the beginnings of a relationship with Angie and Johnny, and reveals that he once lived among the Mescalero Apaches and was married to one of them. Lane tries to talk Angie into coming back to the military post and safety, but her family has lived for a long time at the ranch originally built by her father. They have always had decent relations with the Chiricauhua Apaches in the area, now led by Vittorio (Michael Pate), and Angie insists on staying.

Lane returns to the army post with the tattered pennant of C Troop that he has recovered from an Apache. He has a couple of run-ins with an unpleasant loudmouth who turns out to be named Lowe (Leo Gordon, who was just getting started in a career as a bad guy and thug). Yes, he’s Angie’s husband, who has abandoned his family on the isolated ranch in Apache country. As Lane leads a pack horse back toward the Lowe ranch, Lowe and a confederate follow at a distance, planning to attack and rob Lane when they find him in a convenient spot. When they do attack, a band of Apache warriors attacks the three white men. They get Lowe’s friend; Lane is forced to shoot Lowe and then tries to outrun the Apaches. He’s not successful and is captured by Silva (Rodolfo Acosta), one of Vittorio’s nastier subchiefs.

Hondo (John Wayne) and Mrs. Lowe (Geraldine Page) survey the situation.

After Lane’s departure from the Lowe ranch, Vittorio shows up with his warriors in a less than friendly mood. However, Vittorio is taken with Johnny’s spirit in his youthful attempts to defend his mother, and he adopts the boy as a blood brother. Now that Lane is a captive of the Apaches, they begin to torture him until they discover in his possession a tintype of Johnny that Lane had taken from Lowe’s body. He is given the right to single combat against Silva. He wins after being wounded, but declines to kill Silva. Vittorio deposits him at the Lowe ranch, where Angie lies and confirms to the chief that Lane is her husband. This saves her from having to take an Apache husband. And she’s starting to wish that the lie were true.

Lane gives Angie the tintype and tells her that he got it from Lowe’s body. There follows an interlude in which Lane bonds with the boy and his mother. Vittorio shows up unexpectedly to extract from Lane a promise that he won’t help the soldiers and will mislead them about Vittorio’s whereabouts. Lane refuses to lie to the soldiers, knowing that the Indians hate lies.

When they do show up, the soldiers are led by Lt. McKay, a recent West Point graduate who won’t listen to the voice of experience, as represented by Lane and his fellow scout Buffalo Baker (Ward Bond). In a subsequent altercation with the Apaches, McKay is badly wounded and Vittorio is killed. With Vittorio dead, Lane knows he and his new family are now in greater danger from the Apaches, and from white men who know that Lane killed Lowe. There is a stirring resolution with a cavalry-Apache battle on the run. Observing the departing Indians at the end, Lane notes, “End of a way of life. Too bad. It was a good way.”

Hondo may not be all that different from other John Wayne western characters, but he’s not identical, either. For one thing, there’s Hondo’s irascibility: “No wonder the Apaches call him Enverrado. It means bad-tempered.” He’s given to saying “A man oughta do what he thinks is best” just when somebody’s about to do something blatantly wrong or stupid. Note the battered hat worn by Hondo throughout the movie; it’s the same one worn by the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, Capt. Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Sheriff John T. Chance in Rio Bravo. It was honorably retired after Rio Bravo in 1959 after 20 years of hard use.

The cast is excellent, and aside from the central role of Hondo Lane, the young Geraldine Page really makes the movie as slightly prissy pioneer woman Angie Lowe. Previously known only for her work on the New York stage, she got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work here. (A political liberal, she was reportedly horrified at the right-wing views of Wayne, Bond, Arness and director Farrow.) Ward Bond, one of the usual John Wayne-John Ford suspects, is also superb as a slightly rougher than usual variation of the rough-hewn frontier character he normally played. Australian actor Michael Pate is credible as Vittorio, more than you’d expect, and he shows up in other movies (McLintock!, for example) as an Indian. The young and blond James Arness plays yet another scout, this one of a morally dubious nature. The overconfident recent West Point graduate, Lt. McKay (Tom Irish), might have stepped out of John Ford’s cavalry trilogy. And Paul Fix as the post commander is good in a small part. Sam, Hondo’s dog, is a good character, very similar to “Dog” in Big Jake.

There are some remaining traces of the movie’s 3D origins, but they’re not too distracting. They include the garish titles, a few lunges at the camera during the knife fight and the battle sequences and a couple of strange camera angles. There is an Intermission card, needed for this relatively short movie so that film could be changed in both projection cameras at the same time.

Garish 3D titles

The movie is directed in a thoroughly professional manner by John Farrow, although there are stories that Farrow was restrained some by Wayne. The movie’s final sequences (including the cavalry-Apache battle) were directed by John Ford when Farrow had to leave before the film was quite finished. The screenplay is by James Edward Grant, whose brand of terse dialogue was particularly congenial to Wayne. It was filmed on location in the Mexican desert, in Camargo, Chihuahua, during the summer months, which no doubt accounts for the authentic-looking dust and sweat. At less than 90 minutes, it’s pretty tight story-telling.

By the time the film was released in late 1953, the 3D fad had already passed, and Hondo was mostly seen in a more normal format. But it was a hit. Based the short story “A Gift of Cochise,” author L’Amour reworked it into a novel that sold 3,000,000 copies, the first with his real name attached. It started him on the road to best-sellerdom, although that mostly arrived in the 1970s and 1980s.

Note that Wayne recycled the names “Lane” and “Mrs. Lowe” twenty years later in one of his last movies, The Train Robbers. It’s not one of his better films, though, unlike Hondo.

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The Searchers

Nicholas Chennault ~ September 16, 2013

The Searchers—John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, Ward Bond, Vera Miles, Harry Carey, Jr., Olive Carey, Dorothy Jordan, Hank Worden, Natalie Wood, Lana Wood, Ken Curtis (1956; Dir: John Ford)

In the movie’s opening shot, the camera sits in the dark interior of a cabin as the silhouette of Martha Edwards (Dorothy Jordan) moves to the door. Both Martha and the camera look out into the bright sunlight at a distant horseman—Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), her brother-in-law. It’s 1868, supposedly on the Llano Estacado of Texas. We can tell, however, that it’s shot in John Ford’s favorite location, the Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona border. Edwards has been away at the War Between the States, and it’s taken him three years after the war to find his way back to what home he has. As he greets his only living relatives, he kisses Martha on the forehead, and we sense that some of his distance is caused by his warm feelings for his brother’s wife. It’s never more explicit than that, though.

Similarly, we’re never really told what he’s been up to for the three years since the war ended, except that he didn’t go to California and he has $180 in freshly minted Yankee gold. The implication is that he never surrendered (“I don’t believe in surrenders”), and he’s been outlawin’ somewhere. Just as he’s getting reacquainted with his family, up rides a band of Texas rangers led by Capt. the Reverend Samuel Johnson Clayton (Ward Bond), with a neighbor whose cattle have been run off by Indians. Ethan and young Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), an Edwards foster son whose parents were killed by Indians when he was small, join the rangers and take off in pursuit.

Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) and Ethan (John Wayne) begin their search.

The cattle raid was just a ruse, though. The Comanches double back and hit the Edwards place, killing the parents and young son and taking captive the daughters, Lucy and Deborah. After the initial chase, the rangers get called to other responsibilities, and then it’s just Ethan, Martin and young Ben Jorgensen (Harry Carey, Jr.), Lucy’s beau, on the trail of the raiders. Early in the chase, Ethan finds Lucy’s body and buries it. When Ethan is forced to tell Ben, Ben goes crazy and is killed attacking the Comanches by himself. Now it’s just Ethan and Martin on an odyssey that will take the next five years.

Periodically they drop back in on the Jorgenson ranch, where it develops that Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles) and Martin have feelings for each other, although Martin’s never around enough to do anything about it and Laurie gets increasingly desperate. Over time, Ethan and Martin figure out which Comanche band has Debby and try to catch up with it. Ultimately they do, more than once. Martin inadvertently acquires a Comanche wife, Look, and she suffers the fate most Indian wives do in westerns (see Jeremiah Johnson and Little Big Man, for example).

The search continues.

This may be a plot centering on how the chase is conducted over five years, but it’s principally a character study of Ethan Edwards, all edges, absolutes and internal conflicts. He doesn’t concede that Martin has any actual relationship to any Edwards, although they’re all the family the boy has known. Martin has some Cherokee blood, which Ethan doesn’t like; he keeps calling the boy Blanket-head. Ethan won’t swear an oath to the Rangers because he’s already sworn one to the Confederacy. When he and Martin are attacked by venal trader Jerem Futterman and two henchmen with robbery in mind, Ethan doesn’t mind shooting them in the back as they’re trying to get away. They’re bad guys and that’s all they deserve. The camera work emphasizes Ethan’s obsessive qualities: When he’s aiming at Comanches with his rifle, he can almost kill them by his look without pulling the trigger. In a winter scene, Ethan and Martin check out white female captives the cavalry has recently taken back from the Comanches. They’re kept in a rough chapel at a cavalry post. None of the rescued women appears to be stable mentally, and as Ethan walks to the door to leave he turns suddenly and looks at them. In the dim room we can barely see his eyes under the brim of his hat, but his look is obsessive and filled with anger and frustrated purpose—excellent acting and a brilliant shot.

Ethan surveys a group of recaptured white women and children.

It becomes more apparent to Martin that Ethan means to kill Debby (Natalie Wood, then 18) when he finds her. She’s been sullied by living too long among the Indians and has been defiled by her relations with them. In one of their brief encounters, Laurie makes Ethan’s case for killing Debby to Martin as she attempts to persuade Martin to discontinue the chase and stay with her. That was likely an accurate attitude for the time, although one that this movie doesn’t really share.

The movie depends on Ethan, and John Wayne plays him superbly—so much so that it’s hard to think of any one else in the role. (Maybe a younger Tommy Lee Jones—Jones can play this kind of implacability, as he did with Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove.) This also has one of Ward Bond’s more colorful parts, and he makes the most of it as he repeatedly rides in and out of the plot. (As he gives the order to attack: “Brethren, leave us go amongst them.” “Mount! M-O-N-T-E, mount!”) Mrs. Jorgensen is played by Olive Carey, widow of one Harry and mother of another, and she’s good in the very limited requirements of the part. At the time Jeffrey Hunter was an up-and-coming young actor, and he’s good enough here. Hank Worden plays Mose Harper, an addled scout, and it’s one of his better roles. A 15-year-old Patrick Wayne makes his significant film debut as a young cavalryman. The clunky note in the cast is Ken Curtis, who plays Charlie McCorry, a young Ranger suitor of Laurie’s. Although his dialect may be authentic, it simply sounds like he’s having trouble talking around his teeth. German actor Henry Brandon as Scar looks very imposing, and Scar is played as an intelligent and courageous leader, if one, like Ethan, filled with and perhaps crippled by hatred.

Ethan changes some by the end, regaining a bit of his humanity. But the closing shot is a bookend of the opening shot. The camera is inside the dim Jorgensen cabin, looking out the front door into the sun-lit landscape. Walking in the sun and through the doorway toward the camera, Mr. and Mrs. Jorgensen take the newly-liberated Debby into their care. Next come Martin and Laurie, moving into the cabin the same way. As they enter the cabin interior and walk past the camera, that leaves only the figure of Ethan standing on the porch looking in, holding his right elbow with his left hand in perhaps the most memorable single image from the film (Wayne said the posture was an homage to Harry Carey). He watches for a moment, seemingly with a touch of longing, then turns and walks out into the bright sunlight—to what future we have no idea. Presumably he has more peace now, but he still doesn’t belong with regular people.

Ethan isolated.

The direction is John Ford at his best: Low camera angles in the Monument Valley emphasize the rock formations, the sky and John Wayne’s looming size. There is brilliant use of light and dark in interior shots. The editing shows remarkable and very effective restraint in the attack on the Edwards cabin; after setting the atmosphere by showing the fear of various members of the Edwards family, the only element of the attack shown is Comanche chief Scar (Henry Brandon) finding the very young Debby (Lana Wood) huddled by her grandmother’s grave. In a current western, it would be hard to imagine not showing the violence, but the effect of doing it Ford’s way here is to emphasize the off-screen violence’s effect on the characters and especially the violence within Ethan Edwards. There’s a lot of information in this movie conveyed without dialogue, so watch closely.

The cinematographer was Winton C. Hoch, who had won back to back Oscars in 1948 and 1949, as well as in 1952. The music by Max Steiner involves the usual Ford Americana themes: Lorena, Bonny Blue Flag, Garry Owen, etc. The participation of the Sons of the Pioneers now seems a bit old-fashioned, like the comic relief. Based on a novel by Alan LeMay, the screenplay was written by frequent Ford collaborator Frank Nugent (nominated for an Oscar for his work with Ford on The Quiet Man). For an extended discussion of both (a) the historical roots of the story (the Comanche capture of Cynthia Ann Parker as a child and her ultimate tragic recapture 24 years later), and (b) the making of the movie in the 1950s, see The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, by Glenn Frankel (New York, Bloomsbury, 2013).

It has been said that another historical influence on this story was Brit Johnson, an African-American teamster who spent years in a successful quest to find and ransom his kidnapped wife and daughter from the Comanches, then almost immediately set off again to find and rescue yet another child kidnap victim. Brit Johnson was killed by the Kiowas.

There are only five westerns on the AFI’s list of the 100 greatest American movies, and The Searchers is the highest-ranked of them at no. 12. (The other four are High Noon, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven. There are six if you count Treasure of the Sierra Madre. See http://www.afi.com/100years/movies10.aspx.)

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