THE REDHEAD FROM WYOMING. Universal International, 1953. Maureen O’Hara, Alex Nicol, William Bishop, Robert Strauss, Alexander Scourby, Palmer Lee, Jack Kelly, Jeanne Cooper, Dennis Weaver, Stacy Harris. Director: Lee Sholem.

   For the first twenty minutes or so, I thought that The Redhead from Wyoming was going to be a much better movie than it ultimately turned out to be. There was something particularly dynamic about Maureen O’Hara’s screen presence, including her brightly colored clothes that gave me reason to think that this Universal International release might be something of a minor forgotten gem.

   Sadly, that didn’t turn out to be the case. Although it’s not without its charms, the movie is simply just another lackluster 1950s Western that ends up playing it on the safe side. The result being that the movie is likely to languish in relative obscurity.

   In many ways, the plot is less a cohesive whole than a mishmash of tropes. Range war between the local cattle baron and homesteaders (check); drifter with a tragic past turned lawman (check); the flamboyant female saloon proprietress with a dark past and heart of gold (check); the power mad villain who wants to catapult himself into the governorship (check). You get the picture and can fill in the blanks from there.

   What makes The Redhead from Wyoming somewhat interesting is the rather overt proto-feminist messaging. O’Hara portrays Kate Maxwell, a strong-willed saloon owner caught between three powerful men: Sheriff Stan Blaine (Alex Nicol), cattle baron Reece Duncan (Alexander Scourby), and local power broker Jim Averell (William Bishop). What these three men don’t realize is that Kate has more than good looks. She’s got brains and she’s willing to use them. She’s pretty handy with a gun too. Sadly, the supporting cast, let alone the lifeless male characters and plot, doesn’t do her character justice.

WYOMING. MGM, 1940. Wallace Beery, Ann Rutherford, Marjorie Main, Leo Carrillo, Bobs Watson, Joseph Calleia, Lee Bowman, Paul Kelly, Henry Travers, Addison Richards, Chill Wills, Richard Alexander. Screenplay: Jack Jevine (his story) and Hugo Butler. Director: Richard Thorpe.

   When outlaws Reb Harkness (Wallace Beery) and partner Pete (Leo Carrillo) hold up a train in Missouri and find the cavalry waiting for them they decided it is time to move on, complicated by the fact Pete gets greedy and steals the money and horse, leaving Reb afoot and being hunted.

   Luckily for Reb he meets Dave Kincaid (Addison Richards), a rebel soldier returning home to his ranch in Wyoming, and the two team up with Reb planning to head out for California as soon as he can steal Kincaid’s horse, which he finally does not far from Kincaid’s ranch in Wyoming. But when he hears gunshots, he returns only to find Kincaid murdered by men stealing from his ranch. The dying man extracts a promise from Reb that he will see to his children, Lucy (Ann Rutherford) and Jimmy (Bobs Watson), thus plunging Reb into a range war between the small ranchers, evil John Buckley (Joseph Calleia), and George Armstrong Custer (Paul Kelly) and the 7th Cavalry.

   Whether you like this or not will likely depend on your tolerance for Beery in full ham as a not-so-bad but not-quite-good-yet-badman, a role he played in most films, varying between being semi-reformed (The Champ), not reformed at all (Treasure Island), and a backstabbing bastard (China Seas). Of course being a Beery film, there is the inevitable crying child (Bobs Watson, who could cry on cue as well as any moppet in Hollywood if not quite in the Jackie Cooper or Jackie Coogan class) to moisten Beery’s leery eye and the inevitable tough masculine woman for him to romance, here Marjorie Main as female blacksmith Mehetabel.

   Shot on location in Wyoming near Jackson Hole, the film is good to look at, and moves at a crisp pace with more than enough to keep you watching. Rutherford has a romance with Sgt. Connelly (Lee Bowman) of the 7th, Henry Travers is a meek cowardly sheriff with a crush on Mehetabel. Chill Wills is her no good layabout but loyal brother, Richard Alexander Buckley’s backshooting henchman Gus, and Paul Kelly a somewhat bemused Custer, who knows Buckley is a no good crook and has no compunction about using Reb, a good badman. to solve his problems in the territory.

   Meanwhile an apologetic Pete has shown up having thrown away the stolen money out of guilt — and because it was Confederate — with promises to save his dear friends life. Like Beery’s, Carrillo’s mugging is kept to a minimum as well.

   There is no lack of shooting and fast riding, the big gunfight between Reb and Buckley and henchman Gus suspensefully played off camera, and there is an exciting Indian raid on the Kincaid ranch during a party at night with Reb riding to the rescue and the defenders driven into the open as the ranch house burns just as Custer arrives.

   No surprises here. The Beery/Watson business isn’t overdone so it doesn’t really have time to grate too much, the scenes with Main show the two could have made a decent screen team, the Rutherford/Bowman romance is just enough for plot development without ever really getting in the way of the flow of the action, and Travers comedy relief is kept within bounds.

   A lot of familiar faces like Dick Curtis, Clem Bevans, Donald MacBride, Chief Thundercloud, and Glenn Strange are among the cast, and the film never asks much more of you than that you go along for the ride, the movie ending with Bowman out of the army and tied up with Rutherford, Beery serenading Main on his unharmonious harmonica, and Custer riding off to the the Little Big Horn to put down a small Indian problem assuring us he won’t be around to arrest Reb or send him back to Missouri for the trial the Code insists be mentioned in the screenplay.

   All in all, a good hard-riding, hard-shooting, and only occasionally cloyingly hard-crying Western enhanced even in black and white by the genuine Wyoming exteriors, and more restrained Beery, Carrillo, and Main than usual.

THE HILLS RUN RED. C.B. Films S.A., Italy, 1966. United Artists, US, 1967. Original title: Un fiume di dollari. Thomas Hunter, Henry Silva, Dan Duryea, Nando Gazzolo, Nicoletta Machiavelli, Gianna Serra. Screenplay by Dean Craig (Piero Regnoli). Directed by Lee W. Beaver (Carlo Lizziani)

   Imagine a Spaghetti Western without the jangling percussive score or the arty cinematography and directorial flourishes and with a more or less standard Western plot from an average lesser A Western of the fifties, and you pretty much have this. The Hills Run Red is a decent minor Spaghetti Western from producer Dino De Laurentiis shot handsomely in color and on more or less classical revenge Western lines, despite some over the top bits you expect of the sub genre.

   I would warn you of spoilers from here on, but honestly if you can’t figure this one out you have never seen a Western.

   Jerry Brewster (Thomas Hunter) and Cam Siegel (Nando Gazzolo) are ex Confederate soldiers, you can tell by their over the top Southern dubbed accents, who have stolen $600,000 from the U.S. Army and are on the run from pursuing soldiers when just north of the border the Army catches up with them. Brewster loses a game of high card draw and agrees to lead the Army away while Siegel will take the money and promises to take care of Brewster’s son and wife if the latter is captured.

   If you don’t see where this is going, you haven’t been paying attention all these years.

   Sure enough, Brewster is caught and sent to prison where he spends five years in hard labor and inhuman conditions well illustrated during the titles. When he is finally let go he heads home to find his home deserted (and no wonder he needed the money it is pretty palatial for the post Civil War West) and is promptly ambushed by two killers sent by his old pal Siegel who has been waiting five years. He is saved by the timely help of Winnie Getz (Dan Duryea), an out of work drifter who happens to be sleeping in the remains of Brewster’s barn, and learns from a dying killer that his wife died four years earlier never knowing Jerry Brewster was in prison as Jim Houston or had stolen the money and his son was taken in by Siegel, now known as Milton, who let poor Mary starve to death rather than share the money.

   This is accompanied by a half decent song about a golden haired woman.

   Either quite a few scenes of connecting material are cut from the film or the screenplay was written during a weekend binge, because no one ever asks questions like what is an aging man doing sleeping in the deserted Brewster barn in the middle of the day in the first place, or why the gun he provides the unarmed Brewster during the battle with the killers only has two bullets.

   For that matter why didn’t Duryea’s character just kill the two killers himself? There is an answer, but you have to fill it in for yourself because the screenplay leaves you to guess all the stuff most writers would take the time to fill in. I have to wonder if the screenwriter was a son-in-law or nephew or some other relation of Di Laurentiis, if not I hope he wasn’t allowed to write anything after this.

   Brewster swears revenge, and Getz, seeing a chance to get money out of it (exactly how is never explained, but turns out not to matter because … but then I don’t want to give away the big non-surprise), convinces him to play dead while Getz claims to have killed him and gets a job on Milton’s ranch in Austin. There is a fairly nasty scene where they get proof Brewster is dead by carving a tattoo off of his forearm and cauterizing it, but as Spaghetti Westerns go, it is pretty tame. I’ve seen much rougher stuff in American Westerns from a decade earlier. Hell, Gary Cooper lancing the boil on Karl Malden’s ass in Hanging Tree is more disturbing, and its played for laughs.

   From there, it is off to Austin where Milton has his ranch, and is pressuring the other ranchers trying to take all the land in standard Western bad guy fashion, aided by his chief henchman Garcia Mendez (Henry Silva) a sadistic hyena of an assassin and ranch foreman in black who covets Mary Anne (Nicoletta Machiavelli) Milton/Siegel’s sister. Apparently it has never occurred to Mary Anne to ask her brother why they had to change their last name, but she frankly never seems very bright anyway. Even by the standard of Spaghetti Westerns, Mary Anne is dumb as a rock.

   I won’t even bother with the fact this film is supposed to be taking place in at most the 1870‘s yet everyone is carrying hand guns not in common use for another decade. Those are pet peeves of mine and not really fair to the genre under discussion here.

   Brewster, now calling himself Jim Houston, the name he used in prison, shows up and promptly kills two of Mendez men aligning himself with the ranchers and a saloon owner. We are told the sheriff is dead, which still doesn’t explain where the Texas Rangers and Army are, since Austin is the capital of Texas — sorry, keep forgetting it is a Spaghetti Western and they don’t have books in Italy to use for research.

   In short order Brewster finds his son Tim (Loris Loddi), living in poverty working for a brutal smith on the Milton ranch, and after proving himself by beating up about eight of Mendez men is befriended by Mendez the cheerful laughing psychopath — you have to wonder Duryea didn’t keep suspecting he was cast in the wrong role, as Silva seems to be playing a Dan Duryea part but as a Mexican bandit.

   Of course Milton’s sister has eyes for Brewster (who keeps lingering on the Mary part of her name so we get the connection in case we are as dumb as she is) almost as soon as she sees him setting up a rivalry with Mendez that the screenplay lays on but then promptly forgets to follow up on as it hurries to the finale. Silva tries hard but can’t quite master the Duryea leer — or even the Jack Palance leer. I kept wondering if some of the laughing was directed at himself stuck with this screenplay.

   There are a number of big twists in the film that are only twists because the director and screenwriter weren’t familiar enough with the genre to properly set them up. At times it feels as if Di Laurentiis himself must have been shouting at them that they had a movie to make and not to bother with the plot. Quite a few things are never explained and never connected.

   Skipping some of the details of the plot, eventually a big gunfight takes place and the two men wipe out Mendez men in one of those over the top Spaghetti Western blood bath gunfights rather dully staged, save Duryea is enjoying not getting killed for once. He, or his stunt man, even gets to jump off a roof onto a bad guy on a horse. You know Duryea must have wanted to be the jumper and not the jumpee in that scene at least once in his career. Brewster then chases Mendez back to the ranch where Henry Silva gets a ridiculous death scene, involving enough lead to sink the Titanic.

   We have to hope he was getting paid a ridiculously high salary for this.

   Meanwhile a whore (Gianna Serra, who gets the single worst musical number I have ever seen in a Western early on in the film) who helped Mendez trap Brewster by waylaying Tim, has shot Mary Anne when Mendez tried to kidnap his bosses sister and ride away, Mendez has killed the whore/dance hall girl (once you hear her song you know where her talents lie and it an additional motive for Mendez to kill her), and Brewster comforts the wounded Mary Anne before, dressed as Mendez (and I wouldn’t have put those clothes on after putting six or eight holes in Henry Silva), he finally confronts and kills the cowardly Milton (we know he is a coward because earlier he nearly faints at the sight of his own blood) in a decently shot interior gunfight in the dark.

   At this point we discover Mary Anne is alive and it looks like she will end up with Brewster and his son Tim (what’s a dead brother among friends), the ranch is turned over to the Army to make up for the lost $600,000, the Army is told Brewster is dead and the now Jim Houston gets a reward and a badge as sheriff of Austin. (But wait, you say, the Army never knew who Brewster was and thought Jim Houston did the crime and the time so why … better still try not to think about it, it’s one of those uncrossed t’s or undotted i’s which abound in this films screenplay.) It’s a happy ending, shut up and enjoy it.

   Then there is a twist involving Winnie Getz that is never even hinted at in the film, Getz is Colonel Getz, an undercover Army officer trying to recover the stolen money all this time, explaining quite a few things which the screenplay finds so obvious it leaves for us to guess on our own. Most importantly this allows for possibly the only time in his long career of Westerns for Dan Duryea to not only be proven to be a total good guy, but get to literally ride off into the sunset as a bona fide hero. I admit I wanted to tear up a little at the prospect. It’s one of the few films where he even gets out alive, much less a hero.

   Got me right here — I’m tapping my chest, and it isn’t heartburn, though with this film it is hard to tell.

   Hunter overacts terribly at times — screaming his dialogue at other actors is his specialty, and it is a wonder Silva didn’t gain weight, he chews so much scenery, come to think of it he looks a little stuffed here, probably all that pasta, those cheekbones are positively rosy. Duryea seems happy to be getting paid for very little and not getting killed for once.

   The film is not in a class with any of the Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef films, certainly not most of the Django, Sartana, Nobody or other series, but it is not a bad Western, more like a classic Hollywood type than the ultra violent, cartoonish, and at times psycho sexual Spaghetti Western we know and love. It’s just above a passing grade as such things go, a bit like a shaggy puppy that wins you over by wagging its tail harder than it has to despite knocking over a few lamps in the process.

   Jack Elam claimed Henry Fonda called him when they were filming Once Upon a Time in the West and told him to come to Italy, they were paying them for doing nothing. You have to imagine someone told Duryea the same thing.

   But for me The Hills Run Red is worth seeing just to see Dan Duryea get to ride away into the sunset. It was a long time coming, and he honestly seems to be enjoying it, I know I did. Way to go, Dan, you made an entire Western without once shooting anyone in the back.

THE MAN FROM LARAMIE. Columbia Pictures, 1955. James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Cathy O’Donnell, Alex Nicol, Aline MacMahon, Wallace Ford, Jack Elam. Based on the novel by T. T. Flynn (Dell, paperback original, 1954). Director: Anthony Mann.

   The final collaboration between Anthony Mann and James Stewart, the gritty and taut Western The Man from Laramie has a lot to recommend it. Filmed on location in New Mexico in CinemaScope (one of the first Westerns to do so), the film has some absolutely beautiful Southwestern scenery.

   So much so that, despite the Shakespearean drama unfolding before your very eyes, you nevertheless are attuned to the relative insignificance of man’s petty foibles in the midst of Nature’s bountiful horizons and mountains. Be it menacing cliffs or a dusty frontier town, Mann captures the color, mood, and the very spirit of the myriad outdoor settings.

   Indeed, the crisp and memorable visual aspect of the film overshadows what is essentially a rather quotidian Western revenge story. Stewart, more than capable of playing a stoic man with torrents of rage gurgling under an outwardly jovial demeanor, is really very good. Even those who don’t particularly find Stewart to be on the same level as Wayne and Scott will find much to appreciate here.

   He portrays Will Lockhart, a former Army captain from Laramie, Wyoming, who is determined to find the man he holds indirectly responsible for his brother’s death at the hands of Apaches. This is what brings him to Coronado, a small dusty border town with a significant Pueblo Indian presence.

   It is here that he gets caught up not only in his own psychological desire for revenge, but also enmeshed in a range feud between the local power broker and cattle baron, Alec Waggoner (Donald Crisp) and local holdout, Kate Canady (Aline MacMahon). Complicating matters further is a menacing drunk portrayed by Jack Elam; Waggoner’s spoiled and violent son, Dave (Alex Nicol); and Waggoner’s devious foreman, Vic (Arthur Kennedy) who is set to be married to Waggoner’s niece, Barbara (Cathy O’Donnell). The plot veers from Greek tragedy to soap opera, never exactly finding a comfortable middle ground.

   But it’s not really the plot that matters in The Man from Laramie as much as the visual means by which Mann tells a story of a lone man set out for revenge in the midst of an expansive Western landscape. There are some extremely effective moments of violent retribution and menace. One gets the sense that Mann was trying very hard to say something about what happens when one gets the chance to peek behind the façade of self-made men.

   It’s also as if all that the frenetic activity that transpires in the movie has happened before and will happen again, all petty squabbles taking place in the shadows of mountains that will outlast the different human civilizations that will come and go in their majestic presence.
   

THE BOUNTY KILLER. Embassy Pictures, 1965. Dan Duryea, Rod Cameron, Audrey Dalton, Richard Arlen, Buster Crabbe, Fuzzy Knight, Johnny Mack Brown. Producer: Alex Gordon. Director: Spencer Gordon Bennet.

   A while back, I commented to someone or other that a producer named A. C. Lyles spent the late 60s killing the B Western with Kindness, making incredibly dull, plodding oaters with casts of well-loved veterans of the genre. I also mentioned that at the same time, Alex Gordon was putting out a handful of equally cheap Westerns, with about the same casts, that were, if not exactly classics of the form, at least interesting to look at. I saw one of these again the other night, and while I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly, it deserves at least a passing comment.

   The Bounty Killer is ninety minutes of Western Stalwarts going through their well-worn paces at a reasonable clip, for their collective ages, with some surprisingly good acting, in spots, and a decent script for a change. Dan Duryea (in bad need of a face-lift) stars as an unworldly traveller who befriends a Saloon Gal (Audrey Dalton) and the Village Idiot (Fuzzy Knight) and eventually turns to Bounty Hunting, which takes a grim toll on his character.

   Along the way, he runs up against the likes of Rod Cameron, Buster Crabbe, Richard Arlen, Bob Steele, “Bronco” Billy Anderson, Johnny Mack Brown, and a host of even lesser-known but familiar faces from the golden age of Cheap Thrills, all of whom seem delighted at getting decent, if small, parts for a change.

   In particular, Dalton, Knight and Crabbe add a Little Something Extra to their hackneyed roles as Whore-with-a-Heart, Comical Sidekick and Knife-wielding Nasty, and Richard Arlen, as Dalton’s father, gives a very nicely-judged reading of a line that would have been easy to over-do; Quoth he, disapprovingly to Duryea, “I’m just helping you (milli-pause) out.”

   As for Dan Duryea, well, a lot of folks (just about everyone in North America, in fact) disagrees with me about him in this movie; they all think we’re supposed to Like him. Unh-unh. One of the wonderful things about Duryea as a performer was that he never once made a serious bid for Audience Sympathy, and he doesn’t start here. He goes right from Sanctimonious Naivete to snarling, lethal Self-Pity without ever once engaging our affections.

   Until the Climax. When, with a few deft Directorial Touches — courtesy of Spencer G. Bennett, himself a veteran of the B-Western and Serials — we suddenly wonder if this guy we never liked really deserved to meet such a sorry end. And when you think about it, that’s a pretty interesting concept to build a Western around. Even a B-Western.

THE VILLAIN. Columbia Pictures, 1979. Kirk Douglas, Ann-Margaret, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ruth Buzzi, Jack Elam, Mel Tillis, Paul Lynde, Strother Martin, Foster Brooks. Directed by Hal Needham.

   The most amazing thing about this laughless painful attempt at a live action Road Runner cartoon is just how plodding and unimaginative it is. Kirk Douglas is oily Cactus Jack Slade, an inept outlaw whose horse, Whiskey, has all the brains, and the best lines. He is hired by crooked banker Jack Elam (his comedic talents wasted) to steal the money he has loaned to miner Strother Martin from Martin’s daughter Charming Jones (Ann-Margaret) so he can foreclose and take control of the mine. Arnold is Handsome Stranger, the inept and brainless hero Martin persuades to accompany his daughter.

   That is pretty much it. Kirk plays Wily E. Coyote to Arnold’s clueless Road Runner in an endless series of gags as Cactus Jack finds more and more imaginative ways to fail in his attempts to steal the money and assault Charming’s virtues, which are on display for everyone to admire, while Handsome and Charming go their wearying way never noticing.

   This could have been fun. It is not. Every gag is set up by long tracking shots, and drawn out to the point every non laugh is telegraphed. No, telegraphed, telephoned, emailed, snail mailed… this film has all the pace of a high school documentary on how a bill passes through Congress. Even the stunts are done in endless slo mo and dragged to their death by Needham’s static camera, and apparent belief that the audience needs them spelled out as if they were pre schoolers.

   Look, look, see he’s grabbing that branch, he’s leaning out over the canyon, the branch is going to break off, see, see…

   The one-liners, delivered by a top notch cast, are also done as if the actors were waiting for the laugh track to kick in. This film has more pregnant pauses than a maternity ward full of premature labor patients. Paul Lynde has a few decent lines but his weird accent as Native American chief Nervous Elk and the dead slow delivery every actor gives their lines kills them. Every line is delivered with that strange other worldly slowness we recall from friends in college so stoned they were experiencing out of body phenomena. It’s as if the sound track was out of sync with the film, or maybe had been put with the wrong film entirely.

   I will be honest, I downloaded this for free off YouTube, and it wasn’t worth the cost. I am grateful I paid nothing to see this dog’s long painful death.

   I will single out the horse playing Whiskey, Douglas’s steed. The horse is a fine comedic talent with impeccable timing and an easy grace on screen. Sadly he is defeated by the incredibly inept direction, acting, stunts, papier mache boulders (you can actually see the seams), laughless screenplay, and over all gormless stupidity of the proceedings. When Ann-Margaret’s considerable charms are on such obvious display and I still can’t keep my eyes on the screen, the film is indeed hopeless. This one is worse than that.

   The villain here is the studio for not burning all the copies of this deadly dull thud ear film. It’s escape into theaters surely qualifies as some sort of war crime.

CALIFORNIA. American International Pictures, 1963. Jock Mahoney (Don Michael O’Casey), Faith Domergue (Carlotta Torres), Michael Pate (Don Francisco Hernandez), Susan Seaforth (Marianna De La Rosa, Rodolfo Hoyos, Nestor Paiva. Story & Screenplay: James West. Producer-Director: Hamil Petroff.

   I didn’t realize they were still making low budget black-and-white westerns like this as later as 1963, which is when I first started grad school. The stated ambition of the film, according to a short prologue, is to tell the story of California’s fight for independence.

   All the fighting, though, except for a well-choreographed sword fight between leading man Jock Mahoney very near the end of the proceedings, is the stock footage of Mexican soldiers marching their way up the coast to wreck havoc on all the disloyal landowners who stand in their way.

   Once the movie itself begins, it settles down instead to your basic four-sided romantic triangle. Half-Irish half-Spanish Don Michael O’Casey is in love with heiress and black-eyed beauty Carlotta Torres, who is engaged to be married to sinister Don Francisco Hernandez (who not so incidentally was responsible for the death of O’Casey’s father), who spends his time and kisses with cantina owner Marianna De La Rosa.

   The story is mediocre at best — I kept wishing that Zorro would show up — not that Jock Mahoney (looking very much like Yancy Derringer, for some reason) is not very nearly the next best thing, or he would have been, had the story taken a turn for the better that way.

KIT CARSON. United Artists, 1940. Jon Hall (Kit Carson), Lynn Bari, Dana Andrews (Captain John C. Fremont), Harold Huber, Ward Bond, Renie Riano, Clayton Moore, C. Henry Gordon. Screenplay: George Bruce. Director: George B. Seitz.

   First of all, let me reassure you that I did not take a single word or scene from this movie as a meaningful reflection of anything that ever happened in the real world. I won’t go into it further, but I really doubt that Kit Carson used the help of a troop of the US Cavalry, lead by John C. Fremont, to guide a wagon train of settlers headed for California. And all the time vying for the hand of of beautiful Dolores Murphy (Lynn Bari), daughter of the owner of a large hacienda already in place there.

   They run into all of the usual problems on the journey, of course, challenges mostly caused by Indians, Shoshones in particular, all riled up and supplied with rifles by General Castro (C. Henry Gordon), the governor of California with designs of becoming the dictator of the entire territory as well as Mexico, and American are most decidedly not welcome.

   But included in this movie is one of the best filmed circle-the-wagons scenes I’ve watched in a while, while at the same time the soldiers are trapped in a dead-end canyon with Indians shooting at them from atop the cliffs on either side. Life was tough back then.

   Miss Murphy is also first aghast at the sight of Carson and his fur-trapping buddies torturing a Mexican who has been spying on them, then repulsed by Fremont (following the rule book) summarily calling up a firing squad and executing the prisoner right in front of her.

   Which one of the two will she choose after this incident? I’ll give you a hint: What’s the title of the movie?

   Even though his ways are uncouth and he is barely literate, and he seems determined to do what’s best for her and not himself, her heart belongs to Kit. What struck me right away was how much Jon Hall’s performance seemed to channel Randolph Scott, down to the latter’s soft southern drawl. I didn’t learn until later that the role was actually intended for Scott, before things didn’t work out.

   This is a strange movie in another way, besides being a biopic with not much emphasis on the “bio.” It’s a large scale production, running nearly ninety minutes long, but (and you can correct me if I’m wrong) the people in it are far from being A level stars, even in 1940.

MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE. United Artists, 1969. Clint Walker, Vincent Price, Anne Francis, Paul Hampton, Craig Littler, Mike Henry. Written by George Schenck. Directed by Robert Sparr.

   In the wisdom of my advancing years I find myself wondering more and more where films like this come from. At the tail end of the “Spaghetti Western” cycle this film appears, written and directed by talents completely undistinguished, yet brought off with style and imagination, carried through by a well-used cast.

   Perhaps I should have said “almost completely undistinguished;” the cinematographer here was Jack Marquette, who worked in the B-movie sub-basement back in its 50s/60s hey-day, with films like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Creature from.jpg the Haunted Sea to his credit, and he does serviceable work here. But to get back to the Movie, as they say:

   Clint Walker stars as Cain (aka:“Killer Cain”) a notorious gunman with twelve notches on his pistol, released from Prison after an 18-year stretch… possibly for thwarting bad-guy Mike Henry’s effort to spring his brother from jail in a bloody but abortive break-out attempt.

   At any rate, Cain finds himself at loose ends in a society that has moved past him, much like the aging lawmen in Ride the High Country, periodically tormented by the sadistic Mike Henry and unable to find a steady job because of his reputation. Like Randolph Scott in Country, he settles uncomfortably into employment in a shabby Wild West show run by Vincent Price (a marvelous performance) where his notoriety brings him dubious stardom.

   It also brings him into conflict with the show’s former star (Paul Hampton, of whom more later) a superior gun-artist now reduced to supporting-player status. The movie becomes an interesting study of the three-way relationship between Walker, Price and Hampton, with Walker’s easy assurance matched perfectly by Price’s show-biz savvy while Hampton knocks himself out on the sidelines like a moth batting into a light bulb, torn between jealousy and hero-worship.

   Writer Schenck also throws in Anne Francis, every bit as bewitching as she was back when she sported about on the Forbidden Planet, and Craig Littler as a good-humored young attorney dogging Walker’s footsteps like a benevolent counterpart to Mike Henry’s outlaw. Things run to a surprise finish after a satisfying set-to between Walker and Henry—two screen antagonists who seem perfectly matched against each other.

   But I should put in a word here about Paul Hampton as the would-be gunslinger: his performance has come in for a lot of ridicule — I particularly like the reviewer who called him the Ultimate Method Actor — but I find his playing energetic and daring. Equal parts James Dean and Leo Gorcey, he agitates, cries, and visibly deflates as the part requires, and his scene with Mike Henry is incredibly visceral.

   One thing puzzles me, though: according to Wikipedia, Paul Hampton is a highly-regarded singer and composer, but the only actual credit I can find for him is as the writer/performer of My Mother the Car. So either I’m missing something important or it’s pretty easy to be “highly regarded” in the Music Industry.

   Hey, maybe I should give it a try….
   

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THE VIOLENT MEN. Columbia Pictures, 1955. Glenn Ford, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Dianne Foster, Brian Keith, May Wynn, Warner Anderson, Basil Ruysdael, Lita Milan, Richard Jaeckel, James Westerfield, Jack Kelly, Willis Bouchey, Harry Shannon. Based on the novel Smoky Valley by Donald Hamilton. Director: Rudolph Maté.

   Sometimes the formula works. That’s what I thought when I finished watching The Violent Men, a taut, emotionally wrenching Western starring Glenn Ford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson.

   The plot, a standard one about a range war, follows former Union soldier John Parrish (Ford) as he gradually becomes embroiled in one with local land baron and petty tyrant, Lew Wilkenson (Robinson). Parrish initially is more than willing to sell his land to Wilkenson and head East with his fiancée. But when he realizes just how thuggish Wilkenson’s brother, Cole (Brian Keith) is and the lengths to which the Wilkenson clan are willing to go in order to consolidate their power, Parrish shifts gears and decides to launch a violent confrontation with the brothers.

   But behind these eponymous violent men there is a devious, scheming woman with blood as cold as ice: Martha Wilkenson (Barbara Stanwyck), Lew’s wife and Cole’s lover. Her duplicitousness and hidden contempt for her husband serve to fuel the fire that both literally and figuratively consumes Anchor, the family’s estate.

   With its tragic underpinnings and intense focus on family drama, there is something operatic about The Violent Men. That may help explain why the movie makes such extensive use of its score in pivotal scenes, so much so that the music occasionally overwhelms the visual presentation.

   This has the opposite effect of what the director likely intended, making scenes a bit too melodramatic for their own good. But with a solid cast and some beautiful outdoor scenery, this Western is something I imagine Tennessee Williams could have written, had he worked in the genre. It remains an above average film that, despite its forced upbeat ending, is well worth seeking out.