Tue 8 Sep 2009
A Western Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: THE VIOLENT MEN (1955).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[6] Comments
THE VIOLENT MEN. Columbia, 1955. Glenn Ford, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Dianne Foster, Brian Keith. Based on the novel Smoky Valley by Donald Hamilton. Director: Rudolph Maté.
The Violent Men, basically a B-western dressed up in A-western trappings, is based on a novel by Donald Hamilton and directed by Rudolph Maté, who distinguished himself with the photography on Vampyre, Lady from Shanghai and others, but made a rather routine director.
This finds Maté working through the standard plot in star-studded fashion, with Edward G. Robinson as the grasping cattle baron, Barbara Stanwyck as his even-more-grasping wife, and Glenn Ford as the little rancher who gets in his way.
Dianne Foster, an actress who never really got her due, stands out as Ford’s love interest, but it’s Brian Keith as the heavy who steals the show. Surprisingly lean, villainously mustached, he draws our attention first in a scene where everyone talks about how they want to settle this thing without violence while he sits in a corner quietly loading his gun, and caps things off near the end by publicly spurning his Mexican mistress in the middle of Main Street as he rides out to gun down Glenn Ford — an enterprise which, in movies like this, could be charitably termed ill-advised.
September 8th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I like this and Mate’s film a good deal better than Dan does, and consider this one to border on Western noir.
Admittedly there is nothing really new here, but the level of Stanwyck and Keith’s scheming is a bit more psycho sexual than anything outside of Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller’s westerns, and once prodded into action Ford makes a memorably cold blooded protagonist.
Robinson plays his crippled old hellion as Lear, and the action scenes are well staged — especially when Ford essentially murders Richard Jaeckel in a ‘fair fight.’
Hardly Ford, Wellman, Hawks, Boettecher, or Mann, but a first rate western whose sheer competence raises it above the average, and with a few dark touches worthy of Mate’s better work. Hard to believe that there was a time a film this good was average in Hollywood.
September 10th, 2009 at 4:04 am
I actually liked it quite a lot–when I say it’s basically a B-western, that’s not a term of appropriation or even a put-down — it’s just to say I’ve seen the plot with Hopalong Cassidy, the Trail Blazers and other icons of the “B”.
Yeah, the scene where Ford murders Jaeckel is quite nice, though Anthony Mann would have done it better, but what really caught me was the overwhelming machismo of Keith ditching his girlfriend in front of the whole town as he rides out to get himself killed, a moment worthy of Boetticher at his best.
September 10th, 2009 at 6:02 am
Dan, we are in essential agreement here, but then many great westerns are made up of elements seen in B westerns a million times.
I’m not comparing The Violent Men to films like Shane, The Big Country, High Noon, or 3:10 To Yuma, but in it’s defense their plots were pretty standard B western fodder, just handled better and with depth and psychological understanding.
The whole ‘adult western’ movement was about taking those older stories and retelling them with a deeper understanding of human behavior.
I do agree about that ‘cold’ scene when Keith dumps his girl though. Reminds me of an interview veteran heavy Morgan Woodward once did, about one of his roles where in an early scene he killed a child’s pet dog. As Woodward said when he read that scene he knew he was going to have a great death scene at the film’s end.
I think it was Ernest Borgnine who said he used to ask whenever he was handed a new script, “What page do I die on.”
September 10th, 2009 at 6:14 am
I would argue that Mate handled that scene with Jaeckel very well. I agree Mann would have done it differently, but I don’t think he would have done it quite as coldly as Mate does.
Ford comes in, prods Jaeckel, and executes him without raising so much as a sweat, which for me made the scene all the more powerful since both the book and the film emphasize that Ford’s character is a professional in violence, a trait that makes him more than a match for anyone else in the film.
And I’d would argue if you want to see how Mann would handle the scene just check out the scene when James Stewart kills Dan Duryea in Winchester 73. Great scene, and almost the same point about the character, but I think Mate was trying to show us just how coldly Ford approached the business of violence contrasted with the passion of Keith or Jaeckel’s usual psycho sexual sadism.
But no argument — Mann is by far the better director — though I’m not sure Mate ever made a film as bad as Serenade.
November 8th, 2010 at 6:43 am
This is one of my all time favorites, and various members of my family have watched it 20 times or so. It has every element you are looking for, and it’s also not too long.
December 22nd, 2010 at 10:19 pm
[…] while ago on this blog I mentioned a pleasing little Western called The Violent Men (Columbia, 1955), and last month I […]