The Violent Men

Although the main characters in The Violent Men are small rancher Mr. Parrish (Glenn Ford) and neighboring cattleman Mr. Wilkison (Edward G. Robinson), this movie could just as aptly be named The Violent Woman.  That would be Barbara Stanwyck who, as Mrs. Wilkison, steals the show.

And Brian Keith plays a love interest!  Jack Kelly (Dr. Chauncey Beauregard in Night of the Red Dog) has a supporting role as a hand on Parrish's ranch and Frank Ferguson (the undertaker Mr. Billings in Bad Night in Big Butte) has an uncredited role; neither actor was recognizable and it was only by reading the credits that I discovered they were in this movie.

The film moves at a slow pace for the first 45 minutes, taking its time to introduce all the characters, but then it picks up speed and does so with a vengeance.  Glenn Ford is the hero but he is very much a milquetoast until one incident forces his hand.

After that, there is plenty of action and the remaining 51 minutes pass quickly.  The main plot of The Violent Men concerns a rich cattleman who’s forcing the smaller ranchers and the farmers out of “his” valley, but a secondary plot involving his wife and her machinations is much more gripping.

Interestingly, this movie is based on a book by Donald Hamilton, who wrote the Matt Helm spy series, and there are traces of that reluctant hero in the character of John Parrish.  This is not Ford’s best work but Stanwyck, although at times veering into caricature, shines.  Robinson does not have as much to do as the other actors in this 1955 film.  The Violent Men is only an adequate B-Western but as a character study in greed, it works very well.

Gun Street

Sometimes it’s hard to see how a movie got made, and Gun Street is one of those movies.  Opening with a shot of a deputy sheriff, played by John Clarke, practicing his fast draw—which isn’t anywhere near the caliber of Kid Curry’s—the sheriff of the unnamed town, played by James Brown, observes, “That fast draw business is over-rated.”  A good line, but from there, the movie goes downhill.

The plot of Gun Street revolves around an escaped convict by the name of Gary Wells who killed a guard during his getaway, and who now seems to be headed for his old hometown.  The audience gets his backstory as the sheriff, who grew up with the man, tells his deputy all about the dastardly fellow. 

Next we see the two lawmen visiting, in turn, the ex-wife of the criminal, who is married to the town doctor; a sister, married to a lout of a husband; and another sister, who runs a saloon.  There’s also an overbearing mayor and a scared witness from the trial that convicted Wells and sent him to prison for six years.  That allows the movie to show the audience a cross-section of how the townsfolk react to the news of the escape.

Gun Street—and I have no idea why the movie is named that, for there is no showdown on the main street, nor is there any gun play at all to speak of—then spends the rest of its time dithering over how to track down Wells, with the sheriff periodically stating how much he doesn’t want to be the sheriff anymore.  There are several scenes that show the sheriff and his deputy interacting with the townspeople and riding off to various locations as they endeavor to capture the escaped convict.

The only connection to ASJ that I could find was that in the ex-wife’s house and a sister’s house, there were “rope curtains,” similar to the one in the Porterville saloon in the Pilot.   Certainly, the sheriff in Gun Street was nothing like Lom Trevors (in any of his incarnations) or even any of the more comedic sheriffs in the show.  The only interesting feature of this movie was that there were telephones in the sheriff’s office and the doctor’s home, and when those people used them to communicate with each other, they did it so matter-of-factly it was obvious the instrument was no longer a novelty.

But overall, this 1961 black and white movie was more like a bad TV show than a feature length film.  Fortunately, Gun Street was only 67 minutes long.

The Outlaw Josey Wales

Watching The Outlaw Josey Wales solidified my appreciation of Clint Eastwood as a great Western actor.  He does a terrific job as the eponymous main character, creating a role that is very much a pretty good bad man.  He’s a farmer in Missouri whose family is slaughtered by a band of Kansas Red Legs (see link below) during the Civil War.  Sounds kinda familiar, right?

One day while sitting at the grave of his wife, Bloody Bill Anderson, played by John Russell (Lom in The Day the Amnesty Came Through and Witness to a Lynching and Deputy Marshal Bart in Which Way to the O.K. Corral?) and barely recognizable with a beard and mustache, appears with his guerrillas.  Josey joins them on their murder spree until the war ends, with scenes of skirmishes between North and South shown in a blue tint.  All this happens before the end of the opening credits.

The movie reverts to full color when the men are offered pardons by the Union—an amnesty, one man calls it—and all but Josey accept.  He watches the ceremony from afar and the audience learns that Terrill, a Red Leg who opposes Wales, is dispatched to hunt him down and bring him to justice.  Terrill is played by Bill McKinney (Lobo in the Pilot, Return to Devil’s Hole, The Man Who Murdered Himself, and The Biggest Game in the West), who appeared in several Eastwood films.  This section of The Outlaw Josey Wales sets up the remainder of the movie, which lasts 135 minutes in all.

Chased by soldiers and bounty hunters who want the $5,000 reward out on him, Josey at first rides with a young bushwhacker who decided at the last minute that he didn’t want the pardon offered by the Union.  Josey encounters many people on his journey south to Indian Territory, where he thinks he will be safe.  Among them are a quack doctor selling an elixir, who is much slimier than Dr. Snively in The Day the Amnesty Came Through; an old Cherokee who was forced to travel the Trail of Tears—he makes a great political speech about the history between whites and Indians; a heavy-handed trading post owner and a young Navajo woman who works for him and doesn’t speak English; various bounty hunters and soldiers; and finally two pioneer women, one elderly and the other rather young, who were attacked by Comancheros as they travelled by wagon to a better life. 

The former Southern bushwhacker is a veritable Pied Piper as he just tries to stay alive!  Throughout these scenes, The Outlaw Josey Wales does an excellent job of showing how tough the living conditions of the period truly must have been.

Josey lives in a violent time and he is a violent man who knows only one way out when he’s pinned down, which happens on a fairly regular basis.  After meeting the two white women, The Outlaw Josey Wales shifts and becomes slightly more homespun, as viewers see all the people whom Josey has collected to him settle down on a homestead by a stream outside of Santo Rio, Texas.  They are threatened by Comanches but Josey resolves that situation.  However, serenity doesn’t come easily to Josey and there is a climactic shootout before this 1976 movie reaches a satisfactory conclusion.

There are some interesting bonus features on the DVD of The Outlaw Josey Wales.  The first comprises several screens of text describing the evolution of the movie: its origin from the book to its production by Clint Eastwood.  The second bonus feature, titled “Eastwood in Action,” is seven minutes of explanation of how Eastwood made the movie; the narration is pretty corny but since it’s short it doesn’t matter. 

The last bonus feature is the most interesting; titled “Hell Hath No Fury,” it’s a half hour “making of” featurette that shows the cast and crew behind the scenes as they filmed the movie.  It also includes interviews with the stars of the movie, including Bill McKinney, and it was very interesting to see him as a much older man as this bonus feature was made in 1999.  Immediately following the credits for this bonus feature are scenes of Josey Wales spitting tobacco, which he does throughout the movie, and Eastwood explaining the meaning behind the actions; it’s quite funny and worth waiting for.  And definitely completely different than Kyle Murtry chewing tobacco!

A couple other notes: Part of The Outlaw Josey Wales was filmed in Kanab, Utah, which apparently filled in for Texas, just as Moab, Utah, filled in for Wyoming in ASJ.  The soundtrack really enhanced the period atmosphere and links to two of the songs showcased in the movie, the Rose of Alabama and The Sweet By and By, are provided below.

Listen to The Rose of Alabama:
http://www.civilwarheritagetrails.org/American_Civil_War/Rose_of_Alabama.html

Listen to In the Sweet By and By, recorded in 1908:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgBQuUrcKUA

Article about the Kansas Red Legs:
http://www.legendsofkansas.com/redlegs.html

Will Penny

I don’t know why it took me so long to watch this — Will Penny is a very good movie!  Starring Charlton Heston as the title character and Joan Hacket (Alice Bannion in The Legacy of Charlie O’Rourke) as Catherine Allen, this 1968 film also introduces Lee Majors (Joe Briggs in The McCreedy Bust: Going, Going, Gone) in his first credited film role.  His face was immediately recognizable. 

Another co-star is Slim Pickens (Mike the bartender in Exit from Wickenburg; and three sheriffs in The Man Who Murdered Himself, The Day They Hanged Kid Curry, and The Strange Fate of Conrad Meyer Zulick), whose voice is recognizable anywhere, plays a chuck wagon cook.

The beginning of Will Penny was very reminiscent of 21 Days to Tenstrike: We first see Will on a cattle drive; then at dinnertime around the chuck wagon, where the cook’s personality reminds me of Gantry; the trail boss—who seems to also be the ranch owner—offers the drovers a bonus if they can get the herd to their destination by a certain time; and there’s a fight among some men over nothing important.

But the plot of Will Penny was primarily concerned with what happens after the cattle drive ends.  Will and two friends decide to ride together and encounter some very unfriendly people in the form of a mad preacher, played by Donald Pleasence, and his three sons.  Later Will, who is not a young man, goes his own way and ends up working for a cattle outfit as the caretaker of a line shack for the winter. 

But there’s a surprise: Joan and her young son, H.G., who were abandoned by the guide who was taking them to Oregon to join her husband, are squatting there and refuse to leave.  The remainder of the film is about the burgeoning relationship between Will, Catherine, and H.G..  It is not a spoiler to say things do not go smoothly.

Catherine is a civilizing force on Will, just as Alice was on the boys in ASJ; she even wears her hair in much the same way although otherwise in Will Penny she looks different.  There’s a funny scene where she tries to get Will to take a bath.  He replies that he bathes eight or nine times.  Catherine asks, “A month?”  Will says, “A year!  Well, what’s wrong with that?  It’s as much as anybody.”  To which Catherine retorts, “Well, not everybody.”  Clearly, not all men in the Old West were as fastidious as Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry!

How Will Penny ends is an unexpected surprise but it is a stronger movie as a result.  In one of the two bonus features, the 20-minute long Remembering Will Penny, Charlton Heston says this was the best Western he ever made; other people interviewed also had high praise for the movie.  The other bonus feature, The Cowboys of Will Penny, was much shorter and included reminiscences of the actors who played cowboys in the movie.

The scenery in Will Penny was beautiful and the ending credits stated that part of the movie was filmed in the Inyo National Forest in northern California.  The music was very 1970s; it reminded me, in a good way, of the song Take a Look Around in Return to Devil’s Hole.  At 98 minutes, this is a film not to be missed.

Duel in Durango

In Duel in Durango, Will Sabre, played by George Montgomery (Curt Clitterhouse in Jailbreak at Junction City), is an outlaw who wants to go straight.  He wears a black hat with silver conchos, was known as the fastest gun around, and was the leader of an outlaw gang which robbed banks and stagecoaches throughout the West.  The other gang members, however, don’t approve of Sabre’s decision to get out of the business.

But at the start of Duel in Durango, the audience does not know this.  What viewers see is a man who finds a young boy beside a covered wagon, his pa dead.  Then the scene shifts to a group of men interrogating a homesteader about the whereabouts of outlaw Will Sabre and, once they get the information, one of the men, apparently the leader, shoots the homesteader dead.  Boyd “Red” Morgan (Augie Helms in The Fifth Victim) has a small role as one of the outlaws and also does some stunt work, according to the credits listed on IMDb. 

Meanwhile, the stranger who found the boy helps him bury his father and when a posse composed of Texas Rangers shows up asking about Will Sabre, both man and boy recognize the name as that of a famous outlaw but they plead ignorance as to ever having seen him.  Shortly after that, the other group of men shows up and finds Will Sabre, who is the stranger helping the boy.  They present him with an ultimatum: Return to the gang within thirty days or else…

Will Sabre adopts the alias of Dan Tomlinson and takes the boy Robbie (played by Bobby Clark) to Durango, where he used to have a girl.  Judy (played by Ann Robinson) is a successful rancher who, although initially angry at Will for leaving her, eventually softens up enough to acquiesce to his request to look after Robbie.  Unlike Clementine Hale, Judy is serious and not at all flighty in her demeanor.  Her home is a lot nicer than Clem’s cabin, too.  Duel in Durango spends a fair amount of time showing the domestic life of this trio that somehow becomes a family.

Dan gets a job as a teller in the local bank.  Before hiring him, the manager asks, “Have you ever done any banking?”  “Well, not your kind,” Dan replies.  Definitely shades of Hannibal Heyes here!  And Kid Curry, too, for Dan tells Robbie, “By the time you grow, [people] won’t be wearing guns.  They’ll live by the law.”  So not exactly an echo, as Duel in Durango was released in 1957, some fourteen years before the premiere of ASJ, but perhaps an ancestor.

But not everything is perfect forever.  Sabre’s old gang catches up to him; there’s a bank robbery and a gun battle on the main street of Durango.  Dan comes under suspicion—the sheriff, played by Frank Ferguson (Mr. Billings, the undertaker, in Bad Night in Big Butte), always did seem to have reservations about him.  And then, something happens to Robbie.  Sabre seeks out his former gang members at their hideout, which is called a “shack” in Duel in Durango and is much more rustic than Devil’s Hole.

Although this film is also known as Gun Duel in Durango, I think Duel in Durango is a better title because the duel refers to more than just the gunfight that occurs about two-thirds of the way through the movie.  Will Sabre duels with his alternate persona, Dan Tomlinson, who is meek as a mouse, as he continuously faces challenges in his attempt to go straight.  He also duels with Judy and with Robbie over matters of the heart and home.  Even Sabre’s verbal parrying with the sheriff was a duel between the law and outlaw. 

Ultimately, though, all these struggles come to a satisfying, if abrupt, end which fans of Alias Smith and Jones will cheer.