The Westerner

Gary Cooper in The Westerner is the epitome of the movie Western hero: a loner, taciturn yet able to persuade others to follow him, slow to draw his gun but deadly when he does, a reluctant love interest who gets the girl in the end.  Walter Brennan (Silky in The Day They Hanged Kid Curry and Don't Get Mad, Get Even, Gantry in Twenty-One Days to Tenstrike), on the other hand, is the epitome of the Western bad guy: surrounded by lackeys, takes the law into his own hands, greedy and ultimately overreaching, a bachelor with lots of cronies but no woman to soften all the rough edges. 

In an Oscar-winning role, Brennan was almost unrecognizable in this movie.  Chill Wills (Bixby in The Biggest Game in the West) plays one of the cronies and Forrest Tucker (Harker Wilkins in the Pilot) plays a homesteader; they also were virtually unrecognizable.  Interestingly, Jo Swerling, the father of Jo Swerling, Jr. who was the associate executive producer/producer of ASJ, co-wrote the screenplay for this film.

Set in Texas shortly after the Civil War ends, The Westerner is the classic story of farmers versus cattle ranchers.  Gary Cooper, as Cole Harden, rides into town but, unlike Shane, is under arrest and likely to be sentenced to hang by Judge Roy Bean, played by Walter Brennan.  However, noting that the walls of the saloon-cum-courtroom are plastered with pictures of Lily Langtry, Harden uses his silver tongue—much like Heyes would--to talk himself out of the death sentence.  From there, an unlikely friendship develops between him and the judge.

And then there are the sodbusters, as Bean refers to them, reminding me of Joe Briggs in The McCreedy Bust: Going, Going, Gone.  In fact, the judge and his friends torment the farmers just as Briggs and his friends do in that ASJ episode.  Harden, attracted to the strong farm girl who stands up to the judge, tries to work a compromise between the two opposing sides.  The end of The Westerner reveals who the winner is. 

Ultimately, The Westerner is about the meaning of friendship and love and what a man will do for it.  There are no bonus features but this 102-minute long black-and-white film from 1940 is briskly paced and contains enough flashes of humor among the action scenes to raise it substantially above the average movie Western.

Hell To Pay

The plot sounded intriguing: Two brothers, one a Northern soldier and the other a gambler with a noticeable Southern accent, try to win favor with the same young lady shortly after the end of the Civil War; something happens and they find themselves opposing each other. 

But not even the presence of James Drury (Lom in the Pilot) and Lee Majors (Joe Briggs in The McCreedy Bust: Going, Going, Gone) could overcome the deficits of Hell to Pay, which resembled a TV movie of the week more than a feature film.  Actually, I never even saw Lee Majors in this 2005 movie as I stopped watching after about twenty minutes -- I just couldn’t take the extremely poor acting any longer.

A seven-minute bonus feature promoted SASS, the Single Action Shooting Society, and was mildly interesting.  Another bonus feature called "Blast from the Past" profiled Buck Taylor, Peter Brown, William Smith, Stella Stevens, and Andrew Prine about their careers; unfortunately, it also interspersed scenes from Hell to Pay among the interviews with the actors.

Even at only 89 minutes, that was one hour more than I wanted to spend on Hell to Pay!

Texas (the movie)

Texas, a 1941 black and white Columbia Pictures production, stars 23-year-old William Holden and 25-year-old Glenn Ford as two appealing friends who experience a series of escapades before settling into roles on different sides of the law.  Claire Trevor stars as the love interest of both men.  Edgar Buchanan plays a dentist, and the manner in which he practices his profession makes me very glad I live in the 21st century!

The plot of Texas involves how to move cattle from there to Kansas without them being intercepted by rustlers; a crawler at the beginning of the movie sets the scene as Abilene in 1866, which is where Danny and Todd, the characters played by Holden and Ford, respectively, first appear.  Similarities to ASJ abound:  After the opening credits, there’s a scene in which a man says, “A little previous, ain’t ya?”, echoing almost word for word the same question asked by the station agent (Robert B. Williams) in Return to Devil’s Hole.

When Danny and Todd can’t afford to pay a court fine, a respectable citizen of Abilene offers to pay it for them, just as Amy Martin (Shirley Knight in The Ten Days that Shook Kid Curry) does in Ashford. There is a boxing match between Danny and a professional boxer, which bears little resemblance to the fight between Kid and Jim Stokely (Monte Markham in Something to Get Hung About).

Then, reversing the sequence of events in The Ten Days that Shook Kid Curry, when Danny and Todd are subsequently being chased by a posse, they decide to separate and meet up later, just as Heyes and Curry do.  At one point in the second half of the movie, the dentist sings Buffalo Gals and the boys sing along, reminding me of Michelle Monet (Claudine Longet in Journey from San Juan) except that in Texas, the singing by Edgar Buchanan was actually fun to watch and hear.

The relationship between the two main characters reminded me of the bond between Heyes and Curry but the chemistry that was evident between Pete Duel and Ben Murphy was not so noticeable in this film and the banter was not as sharp.  Nevertheless, Texas was a very enjoyable ninety-three minute film.

Pete Seeger sings Buffalo Gals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S92bWBB0ymo

Outlaw Tales of Wyoming

What better way to celebrate the New Year than to review a book about Wyoming outlaws?  Alas, even though Charles Morgan (played by Peter Breck in The Great Shell Game), who was a member of a gang of horse thieves and not a con man as posited in the ASJ episode, and Frank Canton (played by Ed Nelson in What Happened at the XST?), who went to Texas on behalf of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association to hire gunmen for their war against small ranchers and wasn't the sheriff of Buffalo as the ASJ episode characterized him, are included in Outlaw Tales of Wyoming, Hannibal Heyes and Jedediah "Kid" Curry are not.  It really wouldn't have been too difficult to mention those two notorious outlaws, now would it???

Written by R. Michael Wilson and subtitled True Stories of the Cowboy State's Most Infamous Crooks, Culprits, and Cutthroats, this short, 125 page book contains fourteen chapters, twelve of which are about individual outlaws or outlaw gangs.  Two other chapters describe the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) and the Johnson County War, which played roles in the plots of Bushwhack!, What Happened at the XST? and Witness to a Lynching.  Photos and drawings of all the outlaws chronicled in Outlaw Tales of Wyoming are included, as is an extensive bibliography.

Each chapter begins with a short introduction that explains the location and time period where the crimes occurred.  It then proceeds to describe the upbringing of the outlaws and how, and sometimes why, the men--none of the criminals in Outlaw Tales of Wyoming are women--committed their crimes.  All the chapters end with an accounting of the fate of the outlaws.  Suffice it to say, none except the leaders of the WSGA escaped justice.

Outlaw Tales of Wyoming (ISBN 978-0-7627-4506-7) is a fascinating look at the period of Wyoming history in the second half of the 19th century.  Most of the men presented in this book were pretty bad men, some were very bad.  So I guess it's just as well that those two pretty good bad men, Heyes and Curry, are not included in this collection of outlaws after all.

Belle of the Yukon

The voice-over that reads the text on-screen as Belle of the Yukon begins says not to expect a movie filled with violence or one that is like the works of Robert Service.  He is the poet who wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee—see the link below—and it seems to me that the text at the start of this film is trying to imitate the style of that poem.  If that text had also said to expect a movie filled with musical numbers and improbable plot twists acted in overly broad comic fashion, I probably would not have watched it.  Fortunately, this 1944 movie was only 84 minutes long.

In Belle of the Yukon, Randolph Scott stars as Honest John Calhoun, proprietor of a saloon and dance hall in Malamute, Alaska, during the gold rush days.  With a name like Honest John, of course the man is not on the up and up.  The daughter of his manager, named Lettie, is played by Dinah Shore; she is in love with the piano player who has a seemingly shady past.  Gypsy Rose Lee plays Belle, who was John’s love interest in Seattle; she and her troupe of dancers have just arrived to work at the Emporium, as Honest John's place of entertainment is called.  The main plot points revolve around these four characters but there are several secondary plots as well.

The name Honest John reminds me of the name of the character Pete Duel played in The Young Country, Honest John Smith.  The con games played by John Calhoun in this film remind me of those pulled by Oscar Harlingen (played by Severn Darden) in Never Trust an Honest Man and by Heyes himself in Don’t Get Mad, Get Even. 

Like those ASJ episodes, there are double crosses in this movie as well and the only reason I watched Belle of the Yukon to the end was to see how they were resolved.  At one point, John Calhoun remarked, “You can carry this honesty thing too far”, and I can definitely envision Heyes saying something like that!

What I enjoyed most about Belle of the Yukon were the outrageous hats worn by Belle and her dancers.

Website about Robert Service:
http://www.robertwservice.com/