The Big Trees (1952)

Kirk Douglas once said, “I've made a career of playing sons of bitches.” The role he plays in this western is one of them.

Plot. Here he plays a lumberman in 1900 who takes advantage of a new federal law that permits him to legally jump timber claims in California. There he has his eye on the old growth giant redwoods. And nothing stands in his way but a religious community of Quakers, who regard themselves as stewards and protectors of the trees.

Spokesperson for the community is one of the faithful, a woman (Eve Miller) who attempts to persuade Douglas to harvest as much of the forest as he wants but to save the beloved sequoias. He is in no mood to make a deal until he has to fend off the schemes of determined competitors, and only then does he reluctantly come around.

The Indian Fighter, 1955

This western has a lot going for it. Shot in beautiful wooded mountains, and resplendent in Technicolor and CinemaScope, it’s a story about whites and Indians. Kirk Douglas stars, with Walter Matthau and Lon Chaney cast as villains.

Douglas is the Indian fighter of the title, tough and well muscled, and showing it by taking off his shirt for a while. Though he has a reputation as an Indian fighter, he mainly occupies himself with attempts to broker a peace between Indians and whites. Playing the self-assured kind of character he patented, he often delivers lines with a gleeful leer.

Matthau and Chaney are plausible as clumsy and not-so-bright outlaws. Elsa Martinelli is the statuesque daughter of the chief, and Diana Douglas (Kirk’s former wife) is a widow headed for Oregon in a wagon train with a small son. She’d like to persuade Douglas to settle down with her there and plant fruit trees.

For added value, Ben Hecht had a hand in the script, which may account for the few moments of humor. In an exchange between Douglas and Eduard Franz as Chief Red Cloud of the Sioux, Douglas explains that whites have been recently occupied fighting a Civil War.

Red Cloud: We were hoping you’d kill off each other.

Douglas: Didn’t last that long.

Red Cloud: Too bad.

Douglas and Martinelli, romancing

The film is pretty to look at—the Sioux in their feathered headgear are particularly impressive. But as the story involves some steamy relations between Douglas and the chief’s daughter, Onahti, it begins to run aground.

Plot. The main action of the film concerns the safe conveyance of a wagon train of settlers across Sioux territory in Wyoming. The Sioux are willing to be reasonable about the intrusion of whites, as long as they don’t hang around corrupting the natives with whiskey or go digging up the landscape for gold.

This is exactly what Matthau and Chaney are up to, however, and they cause enough trouble on their own to precipitate what turns into a near massacre. The Indians’ first overtures to the whites are a peaceful attempt to do some trading. But the nervous whites panic, and before long they are holed up in the cavalry fort, the chief’s brother has been killed, and the fort is under attack.

Douglas has to bring peace somehow, or the whites will be annihilated. And this is where the whole film gets sticky. Douglas has seduced and forced his attentions on the chief’s daughter, who finds his handsome white self and rough lovemaking irresistible. The couple is particularly drawn to water, and one scene finds them threshing around amorously in a flowing mountain stream.

The Last Sunset (1961)

Start with two men in a Texas town, facing off at sunset for a gun duel. Then imagine a story about both of them that leads up to it. This one involves a cattle drive, the soon-to-be widow of the cattle owner, and a teenage charmer of a daughter. The cattle drive has Indians, bad weather, Mexican vaqueros, and three brigands with human trafficking in mind. It’s a full house.

Writers. This one was written by Dalton Trumbo, after his return to credited work, which followed over a decade of uncredited screenplays as a blacklisted Hollywood writer. The story is based loosely on a novel Sundown at Crazy Horse (1957) by Vechel Howard Rigsby.

A reading of the synopsis of the novel (found here) reveals some interesting differences. The film sets the story in Mexico, with the end of the trail on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, a far cry from the Texas-to-Wyoming trek in Howard’s novel.

Of the two men who meet at sundown in Rigsby’s novel, one is a gunman with a modified firearm to accommodate the lack of a trigger finger. A kind of Billy the Kid, he’s a devil-may-care sort, ready to sing and joke. The other man, dressed in black, is a sheriff with a warrant for the killing of his kid brother.

Smitten by the ranch owner’s wife and two young children, both men declare a temporary truce and agree to help drive the cattle to market. And so events are set in motion. 

The film. The filmmakers dress the gunman in black, slick back his hair, and give the role to Kirk Douglas. All ten fingers are intact. The man with the warrant is played by stalwart and dependable Rock Hudson. The victim of the killing, we learn, was the husband of his sister, and there were further consequences. Grief-stricken, she hanged herself.

The ranch owner’s wife is the gorgeously blonde Dorothy Malone, and her two young children have morphed into the pretty and headstrong Carol Lynley. Douglas and Malone have some history, we learn. They were teenage sweethearts. Meanwhile, her daughter, about to turn sixteen, falls head over heels for Douglas herself.

Hudson also takes a tumble. As soon as the ranch owner (Joseph Cotten) has met an untimely end during a dispute in a taverna, Hudson offers a soft shoulder to the not-very-grieving widow. Rescuing her and her daughter from three hired hands (Jack Elam, Neville Brand, James Westmoreland), who try to abduct them, Rock wins her heart.

The alliance between Douglas and Rock remains an uneasy one. Like a card game, each plays his trump cards and seems to hold the advantage for a while. When Douglas shoots an Indian, Rock saves the day by trading away cattle instead of taking on casualties in a firefight. Finding Rock and his horse sinking into quicksand, Douglas rides off at first, only to return with a rope to drag him out. We lose the horse, though.