Sat 16 Apr 2016
A Western Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: A MAN ALONE (1955).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[15] Comments
A MAN ALONE. Republic Pictures, 1955. Ray Milland, Mary Murphy, Ward Bond, Raymond Burr, Arthur Space, Lee Van Cleef, Alan Hale Jr. Director: Ray Milland.
What begins as a remarkably bleak and gritty Western noir eventually undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis and transforms into a rather standard melodrama – a Eugene O’Neill family drama in the American Southwest, as it were.
And it’s a darn shame, for A Man Alone, a movie both starring and directed by Ray Milland, certainly had the potential to be a much more offbeat, rough around the edges, Western than it turns out to be. This is especially true given that Ward Bond, Raymond Burr, and Lee Van Cleef all portray men engaged in a criminal enterprise that is suffocating a small Arizona town.
The movie begins as bleak as can be, with scant dialogue and the sound of desert winds. Gunfighter Wes Steele (Milland) is literally a man alone in the hot, dusty Arizona desert.
After stumbling upon the site of a brutal stagecoach massacre, he makes his way to Mesa where he first engages in a shootout with the local deputy and then holes up in the town bank.
It’s there that he learns that a man named Stanley who runs the Bank of Mesa (Burr) and his henchman, Clanton (Van Cleef) were behind the massacre. In noir fashion, however, it is Steele who is blamed for the crime, leading him to seek refuge in the home of Nadine Corrigan (Mary Murphy).
Problem is: Nadine’s dad (Bond) is not just overprotective. He’s also the local sheriff and a corrupt one at that. He has his reasons, of course. (Don’t they all?)
But this promising setup ultimately doesn’t pay off. What could have ended up as Western noir classic instead turns into instead standard Hollywood fare, complete with a relatively upbeat ending.
Wes Steele may be a gunfighter (Spoiler Alert), but he ends up defeating the bad guys and getting the girl. Perhaps had he ended up as an elegiac, tragic figure like Gregory Peck’s world-weary gunslinger, Jimmy Ringo, in Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), A Man Alone would be more widely known film than it is.
April 16th, 2016 at 2:33 pm
Jonathan,
While I would love to see the film you discuss my guess is that Milland could not have sold so downbeat a Western to any studio. Maybe if he had done it as an independent on a scant budget with no stars and in black and white … as it is it ended up filmed at Republic which was pretty down list for Milland.
And it isn’t as if actual noir doesn’t have some imposed happy endings. I agree this one devolves into a standard Western, but I suspect that was the only film the studio would have produced, it was Republic after all and Westerns were their specialty, not film noir.
April 16th, 2016 at 3:07 pm
Milland produced and directed Lisbon, with Maureen O’Hara and Claude Rains, at Republic the year before.
April 16th, 2016 at 4:33 pm
I reviewed LISBON here on this blog a couple of months ago. Here’s the link:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=38565
I didn’t care for it all that much. This one was better, even though I agree with Jon that the ending could have been greatly improved.
But as David points out, if they’d tried to make the movie Jon and I would have rather they had, it probably wouldn’t have been made.
April 16th, 2016 at 4:37 pm
A few months have passed since I have seen this film (the review was in a backlog of my writings and just got posted now), I have to say that I remember Ward Bond’s presence in the movie more than Milland’s.
As for LISBON, I found it to be an epic bore with some nice scenery
April 16th, 2016 at 5:14 pm
Steve and Jon, my point was related to Milland, and other important people, players, writers and directors at Republic. No more. I thought both films by Milland wanting.
April 16th, 2016 at 5:36 pm
No Barry, I wasn’t trying to be argumentative or contrary in any way, nor do I think Jon was either. It’s just that any mention of LISBON automatically brings up memories of a very bad film. For me, at least!
April 16th, 2016 at 5:56 pm
One thing that bothered me a little in both films, and I know it happens all the time, but there is a huge age difference between Milland and Mary Murphy in MAN ALONE, some 26 years. He was only two years younger than Ward Bond, who played her father.
In LISBON he was 15 years older than Maureen O’Hara and 23 years older than Yvonne Furneaux.
Cary Grant is someone who could carry it off. I don’t think Ray Milland did.
April 16th, 2016 at 6:32 pm
At least in MAN ALONE the age difference was not historically out of context. Older men and women routinely married younger in the 19th Century, especially since 40 was old for a woman with so many dying in childbirth. Somewhat ironically to this my own great grandfather, a gunfighter by the way, was thirty years older than my great grandmother and no one thought anything of it.
This sensitivity to older man younger woman is a recent development. Culturally it is only a few decades since it became noticeable. It was, in fact, the norm for centuries. It is still the norm in much of the world, including first world countries like France, Italy, and Spain.
And no, I’m not mentioning this because my wife is thirteen years younger than I am.
Reading our contemporary values into works from the past skew things is the only point I’m making. At the time Milland’s age, or onrushing middle age, was an issue for no one.
April 16th, 2016 at 7:37 pm
Steve,
Not at all contrary, just that on most boards Republic is regarded with grudging respect, and I think my comment went to something David had written. But, at Republic, while B westerns was the menu they grew up on, some pretty great, as in successful, people spent time there. To name a few: John Wayne, Maureen, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy and Robert Mitchum in The Red Pony, Raoul Walsh, Frank Lloyd, Orson Welles, and a second tier including John Payne, MacDonald Carey, Sterling Hayden, Adolphe Menjou, and more. No argument about anything.
April 16th, 2016 at 8:02 pm
Barry, That’s quite a lineup of stars. Here’s what I remember. Every time when I was young the Republic logo came on the screen to start a movie, all of the kids in the audience started to cheer. Those were the westerns, of course, but I’ve been a fan of Republic movies of all kinds ever since.
April 16th, 2016 at 8:10 pm
David, Comment #8.
Regarding age differences between married couples, I wasn’t thinking of contemporary values or how it has been viewed over the years, or not consciously at least.
I was thinking more of movie-making and what makes for romantic leading couples. Cary Grant, as the example I chose, made believers of everyone in the audience, I’m sure, and so could quite a few others over the years, such as Gary Cooper, Michael Douglas and maybe Liam Neeson from today’s crop of actors.
When I saw Ray Milland involved romantically with much younger actresses on the screen, I found it hard to swallow. To me, he simply looked too old.
April 17th, 2016 at 12:44 pm
David caught my eye with reference to a recent sensitivity to younger women being with older men. I trust it exists but I’m too busy & old school to have noticed. My partner is 15 years my junior and it works just fine. Heck, it’s a law of nature. You can see it acted out in high school when the freshman girls go out with the senior boys, while the senior girls are going out with the guys who graduated and have a job or are in college, etc. Doubt I’d do well in a politically correct environment. Happily, PC seems to be an aberration of the young and the over educated, and I belong nor cater to either group.
April 17th, 2016 at 3:48 pm
Barry,
I wasn’t knocking Republic considering how many of John Ford’s films were made there. I simply meant that to get that film and LISBON made Milland had to go a step below the majors, and if he had tried to make a Western as dark and downbeat as Steve and Jonathan envision I suspect he would have had to self produce as an independent and struggle to find a studio to release it.
I would never knock the studio that gave us THE QUIET MAN, KING KONG, and Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy among others, but it is still a step down from Paramount, Columbia, or Warners where Milland had also done films.
All reviewers fall into the trap of reviewing the film they would like to have seen without always taking into account the practical problems involved. What gets on the screen is much less an artist vision than what was left after an artists idea was strained through a committee all with their own agenda. Without reading Milland’s original work it is almost impossible to know how much of what goes wrong with this film was him and how much imposed on him.
Since he had a penchant for playing absolute rats in films like DIAL M FOR MURDER and SO EVIL MY LOVE I suspect his original idea may have been more like the film Steve and Jonathan would have preferred. He did play the bad guy or bad guys in other films he directed.
Steve,
I understood your complaint was specific to Milland at that time, I just sort of ran with it. As Stephen said, ‘it’s a law of nature.’
It’s ironic you mention Cary Grant though, because he had real concerns about playing opposite Audrey Hepburn in CHARADE. Ironic too that one of Milland’s big hits was THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR where he finds himself attracted to Ginger Rogers who is pretending to be 12. I’m trying to recall if is character brings up the age difference in X THE MAN WITH X RAY EYES, I think he may?
You may recall I reviewed SUSAN SLEPT HERE where a very middle aged Dick Powell has Anne Francis as a virtual mistress on one hand and an actually underaged Debbie Reynolds living with him and falling for him on the other. We discussed then that it would likely be impossible to even make the film today since it is in part a comedy about a man being investigated for inappropriate behavior with an underage girl. I recall a Ben Gates novel by Robert Kyle too where Gates is hired by a politician to keep his sixteen year old daughter out of harms way during a rough election with much of the plot Gates trying to resist being seduced by the young precocious woman — who turns out to be of age, but still much younger than his mid thirties.
I know this just struck you that Milland was too old, but the older man thing has been around in Hollywood as a staple for quite a while and I doubt anyone thought anything of it making this film. I still think people notice it today who wouldn’t have noticed it or commented on it then.
My current wife is 13 years younger, the three previous were all 5 older so I am just averaging out.
April 17th, 2016 at 6:32 pm
Mr. Vineyard:
I, too, would never knock the studio that gave us KING KONG and the Ford Cavalry trilogy – but that studio was RKO, under the auspices of Merian Cooper.
And RKO was always considered at least a “minor major”.
While Republic was considered the “major minor” – sort of like “Poverty Drive” …
April 18th, 2016 at 4:00 am
Very perceptive, Mike.
MAN ALONE is off-beat (at first anyway) just enough to make it worthwhile.