WYOMING OUTLAW. Republic Pictures, 1939. John Wayne, Ray Corrigan, Raymond Hatton, Donald Barry, Pamela Blake. Directed by George Sherman.
The Three Mesquiteers ride again in George Sherman’s Wyoming Outlaw, a surprisingly effective entry in the Republic Pictures series about the three Old West adventurers. John Wayne, just on the cusp of stardom, portrays Stony Brook, the titular leader of the outfit. Ray Corrigan reprises the role of Tucson Smith, while Raymond Hatton plays the third Mesquiteer, Rusty Joslin.
When the three adventure heroes drive their cattle through dustbowl country, they stumble upon a small town where Joe Balsinger (LeRoy Mason), the local corrupt government boss, is doling out jobs for campaign contributions. Worse still, he’s extremely vindictive and has driven the Parker family into poverty.
This explains why tempestuous, politically radical Will Parker (Don Barry) has been illegally poaching animals on government land and even went so far as to steal one of the Mesquiteers’s cattle! Circumstances get even rougher and Parker eventually goes on the lam, hiding out from the sheriff and the Cavalry alike. He becomes the titular Wyoming outlaw with a rifle and a willingness to kill.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. An comparatively early John Wayne movie from Republic? Must be clunky and dated. Let me assure you: it isn’t. Although the story is simple, it’s delivered in a sophisticated manner that isn’t dumbed down for mass consumption or a young audience. There are no silly songs or goofy humor here. With fistfights aplenty and Wayne’s rugged charm, this somewhat downbeat programmer is hard not to like.
SIX BLACK HORSES. Universal, 1962. Audie Murphy, Dan Duryea, Joan O’Brien, George Wallace, Roy Barcroft, and Bob Steele. Produced by Gordon Kay. Written by Burt Kennedy, Directed by Harry Keller.
Sometime in the late 1950s, a producer at Universal figured out how to make a good Audie Murphy Western: Hire a capable character actor to steal the show.
This resulted in some enjoyable outings, as Audie tangled with Walter Matthau, Barry Sullivan, Stephen McNally, and here Dan Duryea, as a somewhat weathered rogue who saves him from being wrongly hanged, then partners with him escorting an enigmatic woman on a journey across Indian Country (popular terrain in this genre) to join her husband.
Director Harry Keller was trained up in his craft at Republic, the cradle of the B Western. So was producer Kay for that matter, so the locations are scenic, the action fast, and Duryea’s character is a bit more complex than usual—he sees this job as a welcome respite from his usual vocation as a killer-for-hire, and maybe even a path to redemption—until his past comes crashing down around his ears.
With so much fine work from producer, director and stars, it’s just a shame that writer Burt Kennedy let us down. Kennedy was doing some promising work about that time, with scripts for Seven Men from Nowand Ride Lonesome to his credit, but in this case he simply loots and pillages his best stuff, “borrowing” big chunks of dialogue, characters from his own work, and even a bit of Borden Chase’s script from Bend of the River.
The result is not so stale as it is unsettling. They say those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but we remember films like The Tall Tand Gun the Man Down with genuine affection for their depth of feeling and taut drama. To see their best parts here sliced-and-diced for a quick buck, somehow cheapens our regard for them.
DENVER & RIO GRANDE. Paramount Pictures, 1952. Edmond O’Brien, Sterling Hayden, Dean Jagger, Kasey Rogers (as Laura Elliott), Lyle Bettger, J. Carrol Naish, Zasu Pitts. Screenwriter: Frank Gruber. Director: Byron Haskin.
Although admittedly a minor film within the grand scheme of things, Denver & Rio Grande nevertheless punches well above its weight and remains a solidly entertaining thrill ride. Filmed on location in Colorado with some spectacular natural scenery, the movie stars prolific actor Edmond O’Brien as Jim Vesser, a construction foreman on the Denver & Rio Grande railroad.
Vesser is tasked not only with building a brand new railroad in the wilderness, but also with protecting the enterprise from its primary rival, Cañon City & San Juan Railroad. Leading that unscrupulous outfit is the criminally-inclined McCabe (Sterling Hayden) and his henchman Johnny Buff (a wide grinning Lyle Bettger). Complicating matters is a love-hate relationship that O’Brien develops with his railroad’s secretary, Linda Prescott (Laura Elliott).
Written by pulp writer Frank Gruber and directed by Byron Haskin, Denver & Rio Grandecarefully balances grit with some romance and (in my estimation, unnecessary) light comedy. At its core, it’s a fast-paced action movie set against a perilous part of the American landscape. While one might not necessarily think of O’Brien as a leading man for westerns, he in fact did appear in numerous movies in that genre. That includes Warpath (1951) and Silver City (1951), both also directed by Haskin. I haven’t seen either of those two, but would be curious to see if they exist on physical media.
Rounding out the cast are two supporting actors I always appreciate: Dean Jagger, who portrays the bearded railroad boss and J. Carrol Naish, who portrays the project’s seemingly ethnic lead engineer. Overall, a decidedly fun, if occasionally uneven, movie that doesn’t require too much mental effort.
Final note: there’s a breathtaking train crash toward the end of the movie that you won’t want to miss! Good stuff.
RAWHIDE. Fox, 1951. Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward, Hugh Marlowe, Dean Jagger, Edgar Buchanan, Jack Elam, and George Tobias. Written by Dudley Nichols. Directed by Henry Hathaway.
Not to be confused with the Television series, though I suspect there will be plenty of comments about it anyway, and if anyone here feels compelled to talk about Clint Eastwood rather than Henry Hathaway, all I can say is, “Go ahead, spoil my day!”
Westerns aren’t generally popular with women, but Kay watches them with me, and the other day we had a nice talk about “Town Westerns” and “Range Westerns.”
In Town Westerns the action is generally confined to a modestly-built community, and may be more concerned with social interactions than physical conflict. The best-known Town Western is High Noon; more noteworthy examples include Fury at Showdown, Rio Bravo, Fury at Gunsight Pass, Star in the Dust and Day of Fury. — does this suggest a certain pent-up hostility?
Anyway, “Range (I use the term loosely, to include any wide-open space or spaces) Westerns” take place largely outdoors (Ride Lonesome has no interiors at all.) and though passions may be deep, and resolutions complex, they are generally expressed by physical action. Think Winchester 73,The Big Trail, Wagonmaster, The Naked Spur …
There are hybrids, variations and freaks of cinema, of course: Day of the Outlawstarts as a Town Western and turns into a Range Western. The town of Terror in a Texas Town barely exists; cattle drives and Conestoga caravans cross the studio sets of Showdown and The Prairie …
… which brings me to the “Room Western” and — at last! — Rawhide.
There are plenty of exteriors in Rawhide, evoking the endless wastes and the fragile isolation of a stagecoach swing-station, but all the important action takes place in two rooms of a single building: the main room/dining hall where the bad guys quarrel, plot mayhem, and gull the unwary; and a single bedroom where Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward quarrel, plot escape, and try to turn the tables on their captors.
This is a film of masterful tension, ably framed by Dudley Nichols’ teetering screenplay and Henry Hathaway’s firm direction. I should also mention Milton Krasner’s stunning deep-focus photography, capably limning a distant horizon without missing a single snaggled tooth of Jack Elam’s maniacal grin in the foreground.
Jack Elam is even more villainous than usual here, but he’s only part of a very effectively used cast. Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward convey fear, frustration and convincing strength quite well, and Dean Jagger is engagingly funny as an outlaw who’s only crooked because he’s not smart enough to go straight.
But pride of place goes to a surprisingly intense Hugh Marlowe, best remembered for dull parts in exciting films like The Day The Earth Stood Stilland Night and the City. But here, as the head of a makeshift gang of inept and unreliable outlaws, coping with unwilling hostages, desperately trying to hold his plan of robbery and murder together, he’s… well you just can’t take your eyes off him, he has that kind of Screen Presence.
I’ll end by saying this is sometimes considered an unofficial remake of a 1930s gangster movie, Let ’Em Have It. Well maybe, but the finished product resembles it no more than Stagecoachlooks like Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif.”
INTRO. Jon and I went to see this as the first film of a Randolph Scott double feature last night. It was showing at the New Beverly Theater in Hollywood, the one owned by Quentin Tarantino. While tempting we didn’t stay for the second feature, but I think a large number of the audience did. The theater wasn’t jam-packed, but as a rough estimate, it was filled to sixty percent capacity, maybe more.
It was good to see the film on the big screen in an actual theater, with an audience that came to see the movie, not to have a party. It also made me wonder if anyone involved in making the film back in 1957 had any idea that here and now, some 65 years later, the movie would still be around to keep fans watching an enjoying.
The review below was first posted on this blog on 19 January 2015.
THE TALL T. Columbia Pictures, 1957. Randolph Scott, Richard Boone, Maureen O’Sullivan, Arthur Hunnicutt, Skip Homeier, Henry Silva, John Hubbard, Robert Burton. Screenplay by Burt Kennedy, based on the story “The Captives,” by Elmore Leonard, published in Argosy, February 1955. Director: Budd Boetticher.
To start off with, let me tell you that this is one of my favorite Western films of all time. I won’t tell you that it’s number one, because I’ll be honest with you as well as myself and say that it isn’t, but it’s in the top five.
In part it’s the actors. Randolph Scott isn’t a lawman doing his job with professional dignity and humor, a common role he had in westerns. In The Tall T he’s a struggling former cowhand, no more than that, but he was good at his job. But now he’s living alone and struggling to make a go of his own small ranch, as honest with himself and others as the day is long.
Richard Boone is the villain of the piece, who along with a pair of low-life outlaws he rides with (Skip Homeier and Henry Silva) holds up a stage only to find that it’s not the regularly scheduled one, but one chartered by the man who married the plain-looking daughter of the richest man in the territory, a rabbit of a man who gives up his wife as part of a ransom scheme to save his own hide. Scott, who just happens to be on the stagecoach, is caught up in the plan and as chance would have it, is made a captive too.
As their captors, Richard Boone and his two cohorts are as murderous and vicious as they come. For some reason, though, Boone lets the yahoos he associates with do all the shooting, and as he confesses to Scott over an open fire, he has a wish to have a piece of land himself. Only Richard Boone could have played the part. A killer who aches with the need for someone intelligent to talk to.
I don’t know how they managed to make Maureen O’Sullivan so plain looking, but she is, and at length she admits that she her knows exactly why her new husband married her. But it’s Randolph Scott who makes the movie work. Rugged, steely-eyed and quiet-talking, but with little ambition more than to make a living on his own, he’s also more than OK with a gun, a fact that in the end turns out to be rather important.
Other than the actors, though, it is the storytelling, the combination of script and directing, that simply shines. The budget probably wasn’t all that large, but the story simply flows, with no wasted moments, every scene essential to the story. This is a movie that’s down to earth and real, and made by professionals on both sides of the camera.
As for Elmore Leonard’s story, the one the movie is based on, you don’t have to read more than two or three pages before you know where the timing and the pacing of the movie came from.
Most of the movie is taken straight from the story, at most only a long novelette, with only a couple of substantial changes. The campfire scene between Scott and Boone referred to above was added, and the way Scott and the woman defeat their captors was re-orchestrated, both changes for the better.
Everyone agrees that Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction was always the best around, but to my mind, his western fiction, which came along earlier, is even better. That includes “The Captives,” beyond a doubt, and the movie is even better yet. To my mind, near perfect.
THE GUNFIGHTER. 19SO. Gregory Peck, Helen Westcott, Millard Mitchell, Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Skip Homeier, Richard Jaeckel. Director: Henry King. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).
Jaeckel’s part is small but a key one. He’s a young squirt who taunts the famous Jimmy Ringo into a gunfight. When the boy gets killed, it’s obviously self-defense, but the kid has three brothers who won’t believe it. Ringo’s past just won’t let him be.
A classic, if you ask me. The plot’s an old one, but here it’s done well. The town where Ringo tries to find his former wife looks real, and feels real. Peck has a mustache in this movie, and it gives him a different look, weather-beaten, and weary. Just right.
LONELY ARE THE BRAVE. Universal, 1962. Kirk Douglas, Gena Rowlands, Walter Matthau, Michael Kane, Carroll O’Connor, William Schallert, and George Kennedy. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, from the novel The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey. Directed by David Miller.
This is not a review, because I haven’t seen Lonely Are the Brave in its entirety. Nor do I intend to. No, this is more of a reminiscence and reflection on what I HAVE seen of it, and not to be taken for a serious evaluation.
Lonely aired on the 9 PM Saturday night movie back in 1972. I remember the approximate date, because I was working 3rd shift that night and had to leave for work at 10 PM. I wasn’t particularly keen on watching it, because I knew how it ended –
(PARENTHETICAL NOTE AND !!!WARNING!!
Indeed, every reviewer in the Free World seems to have felt duty-bound to reveal the ending of the film, and if I mention it here, well you got your !!!WARNING!!! )
–and I had no taste for the pre-fab defeatism of a story like that. But this was in the days of very limited choices, before cable, VCRs, and all that, so I settled in to watch the first half of Lonely Are the Brave.
And it wasn’t half bad! Kirk Douglas stars as a shiftless cowboy who wanders in to visit his old buddy (Michael Kane) and learns from his wife (Gena Rowlands) he’s in jail for helping out some migrant workers. There’s real power in this scene, what is commonly and conveniently called Chemistry between the actors as they convey longing, frustration, and rueful passion between them. So Kirk, being soft of heart and head, decides to spring his old buddy from jail.
A terrific (and quite brutal) bar fight lands him in the pokey with his friend and a file to cut away the window bars (No, I didn’t believe it either!) Come to think of it, Kirk gets three nasty thumpings in this movie, and ends up with nothing worse than a few scratches and makeup-man-made bruises, but I digress; things don’t go as planned because his childhood buddy is too mature for anything as dumb as a jail-break.
Which leaves Kirk at loose ends and looking kind of childish. Also, he should get out of town pretty quick. But he makes a final stop to see Gena, reflects thoughtfully on old times, his inability to grow up with them, and the love that might have been… Then saddles up his horse and rides off into the sunrise, down the way to Mexico. At which point I had to buckle on my gunbelt and head into Night Shift.
But the more I thought about Lonely, the more I liked it right there, ending with that image of the sadder-but-wiser hero on his way to some mythical fade-out always just beyond the end credits.
And so I have been content to leave it that way. I know the ending of Lonely Are the Brave, and it just doesn’t interest me.
FOUR FAST GUNS. Phoenix/Universal, 1960, James Craig, Martha Vickers, Edgar Buchanan, Brett Halsey, Paul Richards, Richard Martin, and Blu Wright. Written by James Edmiston & Dallas Gaultois. Directed by William J. Hole Jr.
There ain’t much to it, but what there is works pretty well.
James Craig, looking a bit dissipated since his days battling Satan at RKO, stars as Tom Sabin, a gunfighter kicked out of Abilene by a town-taming marshal. When they both head off to the distant town of Purgatory – the marshal to take on a new job, Sabin just to get along — they meet by chance and Sabin guns down the town-tamer in a fair fight.
In one of those coincidences reserved for pulp fiction and B-movies, Sabin arrives in Purgatory, is mistaken for the town-taming marshal, and decides to take the job. Whereupon the local dress-heavy (Paul Richards) summons three fast-gun dog-heavies to end Sabin’s career before it starts.
(PARENTHETICAL NOTE: “Dress Heavy†is a term used by Western fans to describe the bad guy in a Western who wears a fancy vest, runs a bank or a saloon, tries to buy the heroine’s ranch or swindle the locals, and says “Have the boys meet me at the hideout.†to nearby underlings. This as opposed to the “Dog Heavy†who does the grunt work and can usually be spotted somewhere on the trail, hiding in the rocks with a view to ambushing somebody. Dog Heavies look mean, but rarely win fist-fights and show remarkably poor aim when shooting from behind rocks.)
Getting back to the movie, Sabin encounters the three adversaries separately, and writers Edmiston & Galtois do a fine job differentiating them, investing each potential killer with a distinct personality, subtly expressed by the actors themselves. It’s a lot more care than is normally taken with Dog-Heavies, and I found it pleasantly surprising.
The result is a low-budget Western with plenty of action, and a bit of thoughtfulness – of Humanity, if you will – that goes down easily and stays on the mind longer than most.
GONE ARE THE DAYS. Lionsgate, 2018. Lance Henricksen, Tom Berenger, Billy Lush, Meg Steedle, Steve Railsback and Danny Trejo. Written by Gregory M. Tucker. Directed by Mark Landre Gould.
A metaphysical western. And not bad at all.
Lance Henricksen, looking appropriately mummified, plays Taylon, a dying — or possibly already dead — outlaw on a journey to Durango, accompanied by a black-clad former cohort who keeps vanishing at odd moments.
The ostensible reason for the journey is that old chestnut, the One Last Bank Job, but it turns out Taylon has another motive for going, involving another old chestnut, the daughter he hasn’t seen in years.
This could have turned out very ordinary, but Writer Tucker and director Gould put a unique spin on it all; there are no answers awaiting Taylon, only more mystery. No dignity in death or aging, only fresh indignities, as he finds that it’s certain we can take nothing out of this world when we go.
All of which contrasts very effectively with Tom Berenger as an aging but robust ex-partner of Taylon’s, an outlaw turned lawman who finds himself up against an old buddy (another stock situation well-handled) and meets it with grim irony.
Gone Are the Days dances at the edge of self-importance like a drunk on roller skates, but manages to remain merely thoughtful — and easy to watch.
TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN. United Artists, 1958. Sterling Hayden, Sebastian Cabot, Carol Kelly, Eugene Martin, Ned Young. Screenplay: Dalton Trumbo (fronted by Ben L. Perry). Director: Joseph H. Lewis.
I watched Lewis’s Terror in a Texas Town again the other day, a film I have reviewed before. It’s a splendidly cheap thing, with Sterling Hayden as a Swedish whaler coming to help out his Dad on the besieged Ranch they bought, Sebastian Cabot as the dress heavy, and blacklisted Ned Young as the Ultimate Hired Gun, who looks like they coined the term”walking dead” just for him: He’s overweight, over-age, over-indulged, and with every gesture he conveys the feel of a deadly working stiff who long ago forgot what he’s doing all this for.
Lots of fine camera work, surprising characterization, and a few scenes that stay in the mind a long time, such as Young begging Hayden to take a few Steps closer so their final gunfight will be fairer — to Hayden.
— Reprinted from A Shropshire Sleuth #76, March 1996.