THUNDERHOOF. Columbia, 1948. Preston Foster, Mary Stuart, William Bishop, Thunderhoof. Director: Phil Karlson.

   Phil Karlson scored solid hits with films like Walking Tall and The Silencers, but he started out at Monogram with Charlie Chan and the Bowery Boys, and when he won his critical spurs, it was in the “B” unit at Columbia with a seldom-seen film called Thunderhoof (1948) — a minimalist Western about the hunt for a dream and what happens when you get it.

   This one is lean: Three actors, maybe one or two sets, and the rest filmed outdoors against a barren backdrop, as befits the allegorical story. The hunters are Preston Foster as an aspiring rancher, tough as a horseshoe, but possessed of a soft heart, which has led him to marry saloon gal Margarita (Mary Stuart, who achieved greatness of sorts on The Guiding Light) and befriend/adopt a young wastrel known as “The Kid” (William Bishop, whose career remained undistinguished despite his talent.)

   That’s the cast, and the story is equally pared-down; no sub-plots or complications as the three of them track down and capture a legendary stallion with which Foster hopes to start his ranch. But right from the start, it becomes apparent that his avuncular attitude to his wife and buddy is growing irksome to the two, who apparently have some kind of past. And when he breaks a leg, prolonging their return from the wilderness, the tension grows — among the characters and in the gut of the viewer, who feels something dark and disturbing looming above the sagebrush.

   What’s looming is emotional reality; the characters in Thunderhoof don’t talk like cowboys in a B Western, they talk like people in real life. They talk about frustration, jealousy and envy, and when they speak you can feel the weary pain of a heart seeking peace. Not that Thunderhoof is talky. There’s plenty of action to fill the brief hour-and-a-quarter of its running time, and the pace never lags. But by the time the plot resolved itself and left two survivors to carry on, I wasn’t sure if I was watching a Western or some incredibly draining tale of emotional violence. Whichever the case, it’s a film you won’t forget.

JUBAL. Columbia, 1956. Glenn Ford, Ernest Borgnine, Rod Steiger, Valerie French, Felicia Farr, Basil Ruysdael, Noah Beery Jr., Charles Bronson, Jack Elam. Director: Delmer Daves.

   Segueing to Classical Tragedy, there is Jubal, from a novel by Paul Wellman, based loosely on Othello. I liked the way director Delmer (The Hanging Tree, Destination Tokyo, Dark Passage) Daves managed to view all the characters in this moody melodrama of passion and murder with a certain amount of sympathy, even Valerie French’s trampy temptress and Rod Steiger’s bitchy cowboy.

   Glenn Ford’s acting in this is uncannily similar to James Dean; he shifts shyly from people, smiles uncomfortably and tries to sound like he’s joking when be reveals his feelings, and even rubs his face in James Dean style. I’m probably the only moviegoer in the Free World who would get this impression, but I still think it’s a fine performance in a great western.

   Bret Harte wrote “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” sometime around 1870 and it’s been around in one form or another ever since, a harsh, ironic slice of life that prefigures Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” “Outcasts” sketches out the fates of a group of ne’er-do-wells who get run out of town in a general clean-up after the bank is robbed, and tells the tale with a terse irony that exemplifies the best in short fiction.

   Not surprisingly, it’s been filmed several times, and (equally unsurprising) each time the filmmakers felt they had to abandon the spare quality that makes the story so memorable and add more plot to pad it out to an acceptable length for a movie. I caught a couple of these recently and was impressed by their complementary nature.

   THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT (RKO, 1937) spends most of its hour-plus running time detailing the events that lead up to the ouster of the outcasts, with Preston Foster as a gambler, Jean Muir and Van Heflin as the schoolmarm and preacher who want to reform him, and a host of familiar character actors like Billy Gilbert, Si Jenks and Al St. John as barflies. There’s also a trio of rather likeable bad guys played by Bradley Page, Richard Lane and Monte Blue, all quite good in parts written a bit out of the ordinary, but pride of place here must go to Christy Cabanne’s direction.

   Cabanne was a prolific director (165 films from 1912 to 1948!) mostly of B features, best remembered for things like THE MUMMY’S HAND (1940) and THE LAST OUTLAW (1936, with Harry Carey and Hoot Gibson in a story by John Ford.) Here he imparts a kind of awkward realism to the proceedings, possibly because of the modest means at his disposal, but whatever the case, OUTCASTS unfolds with a rough-edged authenticity you don’t see often in the movies. For example:

   In a scene early on, Oakhurst (Preston Foster) hides a derringer up his sleeve to surprise an opponent. And for the next several minutes he goes around like a guy hiding a gun up his sleeve, stiff and tense as he waits for his chance and we wait to see him take it.

       

   When the bartender kills a drunken Indian shooting up the place, he does it by hauling a buffalo gun out from under the bar, taking his time to aim and fire—an act of violence all the more impressive for being so slow and careful.

   And as Oakhurst and the bad guy get ready to duel, they pull their guns first, then approach each other warily; none of that quick-draw-on-Main-Street stuff you see in other westerns, just plain ordinary killing.

   All of which is just a preliminary to the exile forced on Oakhurst and the other outcasts—the crux of Harte’s story — which takes up about ten minutes of an hour-long film, and still has a haunting effect on the viewer. This one, anyway.

   Fifteen years later, Fox dusted off the story and did it again (1952), and this time they placed the emphasis on what happens after the eponymous outcasts begin their forced exile. Dale Robertson stars as Oakhurst, and gives a tough, thoughtful interpretation of a man at the end of his string, playing his cards out as best he can. Cameron Mitchell and Anne Baxter add a touch of noir as the murderous bank robber and his reluctant moll, with Miriam Hopkins thrown in as a madam and Billy Lynn as a rather pathetic drunk.

   This OUTCASTS is a dark, edgy affair—it even opens like a film noir, with a long, slow track down a dark urban street, and Cameron Mitchell, years before his embarrassing horror films, delivers a fine performance, sadistically bullying everyone around and gradually losing control as he realizes he can’t kill his way out of a blizzard. Or as Robertson succinctly puts it, “why don’t you go out and shoot yourself some snow?” Anne Baxter and Miriam Hopkins lend just the right touch of hard-boiled pathos to their fallen women, and director Joseph Newman, who had his moments, puts the whole thing over with pace and precision.

   I should add a note about Barbara Bates, who plays one half of a pair of innocents sheltering from the storm on their way into town. She plays off her naïve character very capably against Hopkins and Baxter, and actually makes a place in a film mostly devoted to the more colorful types. This was in fact her second film with Anne Baxter; they share the final scene in ALL ABOUT EVE.

             

NEVADA. Paramount, 1927. Gary Cooper, Thelma Todd, William Powell, Philip Strange, Ernie S. Adams, Christian J. Frank, Ivan Christy, Guy Oliver. Based on a novel by Zane Grey. Director: John Waters. Shown at Cinevent 38, Columbus OH, May 2006.

   Gary Cooper is “Nevada,” a wandering cowboy with a tendency to get into trouble, who, with his sidekick Cash Burridge (Ernie S. Adams), seeks refuge on a ranch whose owner’s sister (Thelma Todd) quickly develops an interest in Nevada that’s not welcomed by Clan Dillon, her suitor, played by a polished (as always) William Powell. Ranches in the vicinity are being victimized by cattle rustlers and Nevada goes undercover in an attempt to ferret out the secretive mastermind whose identity is known only to Cawthorne (Ivan Christy), foreman of the ranch owned by Todd’s brother.

   It’s good to see Todd in a leading dramatic role and she and Cooper make a highly combustible pair of lovers. The unmasking of the villain and the rehabilitation of the trouble-prone Nevada come together in a fast-paced climax that wraps up this fine Western drama in a most satisfying fashion.

   The touch I most enjoyed was a meeting between Nevada and the still unidentified villain, with the villain’s face masked by a light shining into Nevada’s eyes, a nice variation on the masked villains of the ever popular chapter plays of the ’20s and ’30s.

LUCAS TODD – Showdown Creek. Macmillan, hardcover, 1955. Toronto Star Weekly Novel, newspaper supplement, Saturday 19 November 1955. Permabook M-3044, paperback, 1956

FURY AT SHOWDOWN. United Artists, 1957. John Derek, John Smith, Carolyn Craig, Nick Adams, Gage Clarke, Robert Griffin. Screenplay: Jason James, based on the novel Showdown Creek, by Lucas Todd. Director: Gerd Oswald.

   Showdown Creek is the kind of spare, gritty tale that Westerns should aspire to. Researching this, I can find no other book attributed to Lucas Todd, the author, nor any bio/bibliographic background on him, but perhaps that’s as it should be for a book that celebrates the outcast as this once does.

   As the story opens, Brock Mitchell is trying to ramrod a one-horse ranch for his broken-legged Uncle Ben and live down a reputation as a smart-ass hellion. Uncle Ben has arranged financing to get him through lean times, but the deal’s hit a snag, and nobody seems to know what the delay is —- until Mitchell learns that Chad Deasey, an ex-con with a grudge against him, has hit town and put up a respectable front, tied in with the most prominent local lawyer (soon to turn up dead) and persuaded the town banker to put the brakes on Uncle Ben’s deal, apparently just to ruin him and repay Mitchell for killing Deasey’s brother in a fair fight back in Brock’s gun-toting days.

   It’s pretty standard stuff for a Western: crooked banker, shady lawyer, upright hero handy with a gun, honest ranchers and even a purty blue-eyed widder woman trying to understand it all. Author Todd seems to know something about moving cattle around (not all western writers do) and he puts it across as he ladles out the more standard ingredients into his prairie stew, giving Peters a hot-headed sidekick and adding something about the railroad coming through.

   But he also tinges all this with an almost intangible feel for the dilemma of a flawed man painfully misunderstood. Every fight, shoot-out and unsolved crime echoes not only in physical violence but also in the looks Brock gets from the good citizens of Showdown Creek: the rumors, conversations broken off when he enters a room, and his increasing isolation from a community he needs.

   It’s intriguing stuff, and if it never quite rises to the level of Camus, the sense of alienation is still strong enough to lift this above the run-of-the-range shoot-’em-down and linger in the memory.

   Showdown Creek was filmed, appropriately enough, by Gerd Oswald, himself something of a Hollywood pariah, who was given only five days and a cast of unknowns and no-talents to do the job —- the only two players you ever heard of in this movie are John Derek and Nick Adams, so you see what I mean about the acting.

   The marvel is that Fury at Showdown emerges as a tight, deeply-felt tale of guns, cattle and youthful angst.

   Given the low budget and tight schedule, Fury at Showdown is necessarily a town-bound western, rarely leaving the claustrophobic confines of office, saloon and jail for the free range that now seems more like a false promise than the reality of the West.

   Somehow, though, that only helps convey the sense of constriction felt by the hero (or supposedly felt; this is John Derek acting, remember) as he struggles to reach some wide open plain of the soul, free of the town’s censure.

   That sounds like tall boots for a B Western to fill, but writer Jason James tweaks the story significantly — in his version, Chad Deasey has always been a respectable citizen and it’s Brock Mitchell who’s the ex-con, just released from jail for killing Deasey’s brother — and director Gerd Oswald puts it across with well-judged camera work and a sense of pace that never falters.

   Fury at Showdown never got much attention, and it’s far from ideal, but definitely worth your time.

THE RAINBOW TRAIL. Fox, 1925. Tom Mix, Anne Cornwall, George Bancroft, Lucien Littlefield, Mark Hamilton, Vivian Oakland, Doc Roberts, Carol Halloway, Diana Miller. Screenplay by Lynn Reynolds, based on the novel of the same name by Zane Grey. Cinematography by Dan Clark. Director: Lynn Reynolds. Shown at Cinevent 38, Columbus OH, May 2006.

   A sequel to the film of Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (Fox, 1925) in which Mix played the role of Jim Lassiter, a Texas Ranger pursued by an outlaw posse who evades his pursuers by sealing himself in a remote valley with a young woman he has rescued from the villain who held her and her mother captive.

   Now, some years later, Lassiter’s nephew John Shefford (played by Tom Mix) tracks his long-missing uncle to the valley into which he had disappeared, with the only road to the refuge leading through a “rough frontier settlement” controlled by surviving enemies of Lassiter.

   This handsomely photographed and exciting film is climaxed by an assault on Lassister’s cabin in Paradise Valley that takes great scenic advantage of the treacherous terrain. This film may lack some of the visual poetry of Riders but it’s an exceptional Western with a splendid performance by Tom Mix in top form.

WHEN A MAN’S A MAN. Atherton / Sol Lesser Productions, 1935. Based on the novel by Harold Bell Wright. George O’Brien, Dorothy Wilson, Paul Kelly, Harry Woods, Richard Carlyle. Director: Edward F. Cline.

   Here’s a western with a story line that’s as standard as they come, at least as far as Hollywood is concerned – that of one cattle rancher diverting an area’s water supply from a neighboring ranch to his own – but in this case, it’s also one that’s a whole lot more entertaining than anything in the first part of this sentence might suggest.

   There are two reasons for this, and one of them may be that the movie’s based on a novel, rather than one dreamed up by a hack of a script writer, no offense intended. The other, though, may be the star, George O’Brien, who is not your typical B-western movie star. Not in When a Man’s a Man, he isn’t.

   He’s chunky, he’s from the East (an engineering school, as I recall, where he majored in football), he may be a little naive or idealistic, and when he’s hired by the rancher whose cattle are now dying (see above) he discovers that he’s accidentally become part of a love triangle, the other two being the rancher’s daughter (Dorothy Wilson) and the rancher’s foreman (Paul Kelly). Reluctantly but admirably, he’s willing to stand aside, and stand aside he does.

   He’s almost but never quite a comic figure. I don’t think there is any western actor other than George O’Brien who could pull off a role like this and make it succeed.

   There is, of course, more to the story than an ill-fated romance – for one of the two men, that is – and that is how to deal with the scheming evil rancher, played by Harry Woods (also see above). This involves a lot of digging, some dynamite, and some last minute rescuing.

   All in all, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had from watching this old western movie, more than you might think if you come across it with no advance notice. Which is what happened to me, and I’m glad it did.

NOTE:   There was a second movie that was made based on the same novel, that being Massacre River (1949) starring Guy Madison and Rory Calhoun, but you know how that goes. I’ve read the description of that movie written by someone on the IMBD website, and I don’t see much resemblance between the two films at all.