REVIEWED BY JONATHAN LEWIS:


FIRECREEK. Warner Brothers/Seven Arts, 1968. James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Inger Stevens, Gary Lockwood, Dean Jagger, Ed Begley, Jay C. Flippen, Jack Elam, James Best, Barbara Luna, Jacqueline Scott, Brooke Bundy. Screenplay: Calvin Clements. Director: Vincent McEveety.

   You can see the rage in his eyes. Burning, passionate, unbridled rage – the type of rage that makes a decent man able to kill. That’s what you see in Jimmy Stewart’s eyes in the latter part of Firecreek, a slightly better than average Western from Warner Brothers-Seven Arts.

   Stewart portrays everyman Johnny Cobb, a farmer and part-time sheriff who, when pushed to the emotional breaking point by a gang of outlaws who have holed up in his small town, turns tough as nails and determined as hell to uproot the criminality that has taken root in his midst.

   Henry Fonda portrays the film’s villain, Bob Larkin. But Larkin’s not so much evil as he is a victim of circumstance, a passive actor in life who has become the brains of a mercenary outfit. When Larkin and his crew arrive in the small town of Firecreek, it’s not long before they discover they can have their way with the town. A town that Cobb eventually thinks is worth fighting for.

   But he’s fairly alone in that sentiment. Even the town’s shopkeeper, a former lawyer by the name of Whittier (Dean Jagger) thinks the town is filled with losers, himself among them. And truth be told, he’s got a point. There are quite a few social misfits and outcasts in Firecreek, including an Indian woman with a white baby and an overly flirtatious blonde girl living with her cruel, vindictive mother.

   Much like Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952), Stewart finds that the townsfolk are reluctant to stand up to the evil that is slowing eroding the social fabric of their community. But unlike that classic work of cinema, Firecreek aims for a greatness that it is unable to achieve.

   Part of this is due to the overly obtrusive score by Alfred Newman, one that was surely meant to heighten the emotional sentiment of certain scenes, but ends up overwhelming them in a saccharine haze. Furthermore, the movie, particularly for the first hour, feels more like an extended television melodrama than a feature film.

   A final note: Firecreek was released in 1968. It’s not that it’s a bad movie – Stewart and Fonda are such fine actors that they can carry nearly any vehicle – but that the movie appeared in theaters at a time that America and American cinema were rapidly changing. There’s something very 1950s about the whole production and most of all with Stewart’s character’s moral purity.

   Read one way, his character may have been (unintentionally or otherwise) meant to represent the old order standing up to a wild and out of control counterculture that didn’t respect traditional bourgeois values. After all, the following year, audiences watched Henry Fonda’s son Peter cruise the American road with Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969). Johnny Cobb may have won the battle in Firecreek, but by the 1970s, American cinema wasn’t too keen on showcasing the simple, morally pure Johnny Cobbs of the world.