Sat 27 Aug 2016
A Book! Movie!! Western Review by Dan Stumpf: WILL C. BROWN – The Border Jumpers / MAN OF THE WEST (1958).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction , Western movies[8] Comments
WILL C. BROWN – The Border Jumpers. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1955. Dell #878, paperback, 1956. Reprinted as Man of the West, Dell #986, paperback, 1958.
MAN OF THE WEST. United Artists, 1958. Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O’Connell, Jack Lord, John Dehner, Royal Dano, Robert Wilke. Screenplay by Reginald Rose, based on the novel The Border Jumpers, by Will C. Brown. Directed by Anthony Mann.
Lincoln Jones, on an uncomfortable train journey from Crosscut to Fort Worth, finds himself beset by Beasley and Billie: a tin-horn gambler and a saloon chanteuse trying to separate him from $600 the citizens of his small town have scraped together for him to hire a schoolteacher. But that’s the least of his worries as the train is robbed at a wood stop, speeds off, and he finds himself abandoned in the wilderness with the two con artists.
Even that pales, however, when it develops that the train robbers, still close by, are the remains of an outlaw clan run by the notorious killer Dock Tobin — Linc’s uncle.
We quickly find that Linc was raised by his Uncle Dock; raised to be a killer like the rest of the family, until the day he escaped and started making what’s known in Westerns as a decent life for himself. That life is shattered now as the demented (and still very lethal) old man takes him back into the fold, despite his glowering cousins Claude and Coaley, who would as soon kill Linc and Beasley (“I say we open ‘em up and leave ‘em here.â€) and indulge themselves with Billie.
It’s a situation rife with tension and dramatic potential, and author Brown develops it with the speed and precision of an able pulp-writer, fleshing out characters and background colorfully and adding bits of unexpected excitement to keep us off-balance — there are two brutal and unsettling strip-tease scenes — until he wraps the thing up a bit too patly. But it’s even more fascinating to see how director Anthony Mann and screenwriter Reginald Rose turned it into a piece of Pure Cinema.
Gary Cooper brings his graceful authority to the role of Linc, along with a certain aging melancholy perfectly suited to the situation. He’s matched evenly with Julie London, projecting that sexy disenchantment she could do so well. Surrounded by murderous degenerates, she shoots them a look that seems to take it as just another bad hand in a crooked game. Arthur O’Connell, on the other hand, is delightful as a scrabbling, scheming angler, frightened and desperate, his agitation pitched perfectly against Ms. London’s weary composure.
Among the bad guys, Lee J. Cobb has the showiest part as mad Dock Tobin, but I prefer the typecast meanness of Robert Wilke, Royal Dano’s off-beat lunatic and Jack Lord’s wolfish juvenile delinquent. Best of all though is John Dehner as Claude, the smartest and most dangerous member of the clan. There’s a really fine scene where Linc and Claude have a quiet talk and Coop tries to make him see the insanity of living like this while Dehner insists on loving and protecting the crazy old man. It’s a moving and sensitive moment (much like the one between Robert Ryan and Terrence Stamp in Billy Budd a few years later), and it lends dramatic weight to the shoot-out when the characters have to confront each other.
Said shoot-out is a high point in the work of a director who excelled in complex action scenes, as the characters maneuver through a ghost town, running, jumping and throwing shots back and forth as they jockey for position until, weary and near death, they pause for a final sad exchange before finishing it off.
This confrontation is set in a ghost town, the perfect visual metaphor for the waste and emptiness confronting our hero. And where the book wraps things neatly, the movie leaves a lot of emotional loose ends to dangle intriguingly in the viewer’s mind. Indeed, as the two survivors make their way to the fade-out through a bleak landscape, one recalls the tension, brutality and emotional rawness of this thing and asks, “What the hell just happened?â€
What happened was a great movie.
August 28th, 2016 at 11:34 am
I haven’t had a lot of time to do a lot of research, but I have discovered that Willl C. Brown was the pen name of Clarence Scott Boyles, Jr.. Before he started writing novels, mostly as paperback originals in the 1950s, he was quite prolific in the western pulps, beginning with “Purgatory Pardners, which appeared in Big-Book Western Magazine, May 1946.
When I have some more time, I’ll see about putting together a list of his western novels, but unfortunately I don’t think it will happen in the next few days.
August 28th, 2016 at 11:39 am
I have surprised myself. Doing a quick Google search for Christopher Scott Boyles, Jr., I discovered that he was one of Robert E. Howard’s classmates in the graduating class of Cross Plains High School for 1922.
There is quite a lengthy biography of him here:
http://www.rehtwogunraconteur.com/the-other-writer/
August 28th, 2016 at 8:01 pm
“the two survivors make their way to the fade-pout”
Isn’t the fade-pout reserved for the audience after they’ve suffered through a lousy movie? — which, by the way, MAN OF THE WEST definitely ISN’T.
August 28th, 2016 at 8:06 pm
I guess something needs to be fixed, and just I’m the guy who can do it. Thanks, Mike!
August 29th, 2016 at 3:44 pm
I kind of like fade-pout. Suits a lot of films.
I never could find the book, but I love the movie. Cooper projects a world weary melancholy attitude behind steely determination, and while the film is suspenseful, part of the suspense derives from at what point Cooper is going to be forced to kill the old man and the man he grew up with.
I can’t speak for the novel, but Mann used the story to comment on the anarchic nature of the West and its death as civilization intrudes. Cooper is a man standing astride two worlds, and for all the appeal of the old days he is all too aware that world is gone and holding on to it can only mean death.
The film has one scene that never fails to shock me, and that is the humiliation of Jack Lord’s character by Cooper, who not only beats him half to death, but as revenge for what Lord did to London humiliates him, stripping him virtually naked as the others hoot and howl.
The cold and calculated way Cooper does it, virtually without anger, destroying Lord’s character willfully and ruthlessly is the one time in the film we glimpse what Cooper might have been and might have repressed with his civilized life. With the possible exception of his fight with Cameron Mitchell in GARDEN OF EVIL and his virtual execution of Karl Malden in THE HANGING TREE it is the most brutal scene in Cooper’s long career.
August 30th, 2016 at 3:39 am
So true, David! This, and the unexpected closeness with Claude, give it a rare emotional charge.
November 12th, 2016 at 7:05 pm
Here under a bibliography of Will C. Brown:
Guns Along the Chisholm, NY Popular Library, 1955
The Border Jumpers (aka Man of the West after the movie directed by Anthony Mann, starrin Gary Cooper), NY Dutton, 1955
Trouble on the Brazos, NY Popular Library, 1956
Laredo Road, NY Dell 1959
Sam Bass & Co., NY New American Library, 1960
The Nameless Breed, NY Macmillan, 1960 (recipient of the Spur award as Best Western Novel of 1960)
Think Fast, Ranger!, NY Dell, 1961
Caprock Rebel, NY Macmillan, 1962
The Kelly Man, NY Dell, 1964
And a lot of stories for the pulps. One of the best is “Red Sand” reprinted in The Texans, Edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, NY Fawcett, 1988
November 12th, 2016 at 7:34 pm
Thanks, Tiziano. This should prove to be very useful.