Rage at Dawn, (1955)

A Randolph Scott western rarely gets a lukewarm review here at BITS, but this will be one of those times. Rage at Dawn is a fictionalized account of the Pinkertons’ efforts to bring to justice the Reno Brothers’ gang in southern Indiana shortly after the Civil War.

Precursors of the James and Younger gangs, they had a large outlaw following and gained notoriety as the nation’s first train robbers, operating over a large area of the Midwest. Some were put to a stop by vigilante citizens, who hanged them before they could face trial.

Plot. The film focuses on four of the Renos, including the leader Frank (Forrest Tucker), Simeon (J. Carrol Naish), and Clint (Denver Pyle). Another sibling, Laura (Mala Powers), is their put-upon sister, who shelters them at her farm. Pyle plays the only Reno brother who is a law-abiding member of the community, where the Renos dominate local politics by intimidating voters to put their own men in office, notably the judge (Edgar Buchanan), the chief prosecutor, and the sheriff.

The gang's last robbery (Scott at right)

We don’t meet Randolph Scott until well into the film as a Pinkerton man assigned by the agency to infiltrate the gang and set them up for arrest. The scheme is improbable at best, and it involves his befriending the Renos’ sister Laura, who falls for the handsome, amiable Scott in a big way. The brothers are finally tricked into a train holdup that ends in a lengthy shootout. The citizens of their hometown take the law into their own hands, breaking into the jail where the brothers are being held. Scott arrives too late to save them from hanging.

Abilene Town (1946)

This post-war western comes wrapped in the American flag. In a story about conflict in a Kansas frontier town between cattlemen and homesteaders, it celebrates the defeat of lawlessness and the triumph of democratic articles of faith. In the end, the battle is literally taken to the streets as trail-hardened cowboys wreak havoc on private property and farmers and peace-loving citizens march against them to the rousing chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Instrumental in the defense of law and order is the town marshal (Randolph Scott), who negotiates the hostilities of all the interested parties. He is a pragmatist and avoids making enemies. As played by Scott, he exhibits intelligence, patience, and a lack of fear. He is also tall, lean, and handsome in a role that brings to mind lawman and peacekeeper Wyatt Earp.

Randolph Scott, Ann Dvorak, Edgar Buchanan

Scott dutifully enforces a town ordinance that keeps the saloons doing business on one side of town and the providers of goods and services for law-abiding, church-going citizens on the other. He also monitors the surrender of firearms in the interest of public safety.

Plot. The year is 1870, a key moment in frontier history, as cattle drives from Texas to the railways in Kansas are reaching a peak. Homesteaders are crowding in from the east, introducing barbwire to fence off the open range. The merchants of Abilene have divided loyalties. The cowboys spend freely when they arrive in town, and accommodating the homesteaders threatens to disrupt the cash flow.

Ride Lonesome (1959)

This Budd Boetticher western filmed from a Burt Kennedy script is a classic. Shot in Cinemascope entirely in the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California, it’s a low-budget movie that looks as high-gloss and polished as any 1950s western.

Plot. Like their other films, e.g. Seven Men From Now (1956), the storyline is spare. Four men and a woman cross an arid landscape to get from point A to point B. One of the men (Randolph Scott) is a bounty hunter, another is his prisoner (James Best), and two others (Pernell Roberts, James Coburn) are partners with an outlaw past. The woman (Karen Steele) is the widow of a stagecoach relay station agent.

They are followed first by Indians, who have killed the woman’s husband and seem bent on making more trouble. Then they are being followed by the prisoner’s brother (Lee Van Cleef) and his gang, determined to rescue the young man before he is turned over to be hanged. That’s it.

Characters. The marvel about a script like this is how much tension and suspense these two filmmakers could create with so few elements. The film illustrates perfectly the dynamics of a story driven more by character than plot.

Randolph Scott

At first the differences between the characters seem only to do with temperament and personality. Then as the story unfolds, we learn that each of them has some key incident in the past that accounts for what they are doing at this moment in their lives and what they want.

This rounds them out as characters and also puts them at uneasy cross-purposes. The more we learn about them, the harder it gets to predict what they will do, as when the prisoner surprises Randolph with a rifle he’s taken from Roberts. While he holds Randolph at gunpoint, Roberts draws his sidearm and persuades him there’s no shell in the firing chamber. For a long moment, we don’t know whether it’s a bluff, whether the prisoner will believe him, or even Roberts’ real intentions.

The economy of the scene is so uncomplicated and simple, but it’s turns like this in the plot that build tension and uncertainty. And the source of the uncertainty is in the characters themselves, Scott being a prime example.

The Spoilers (1942)

This 1940s gold-rush western is jaw dropping. For one thing, it has John Wayne in black face swapping “colored” jokes with African American actress Marietta Canty. What was probably meant to be cheeky and rib-tickling in 1942 looks just plain racially insensitive today.  For another, the movie has Randolph Scott as a slick crook. And it’s no fun watching him use his patently pleasant and winning persona to trick honest folks into trusting him.

Another thing. Veteran actor Harry Carey is more or less wasted in a small two-dimensional role. And while that makes three strikes, The Spoilers isn’t quite out. It has the saving grace of Marlene Dietrich as a sultry and spectacularly dressed saloon owner. Her scenes with both Wayne and Scott are steamy with flirtatious bantering and sexual innuendo.

Plot. Another point in the film’s favor is its plot. Based on a bestselling Rex Beach novel of the same name, published in 1906, The Spoilers tells a ripping story of claim jumping in the Alaska gold fields. John Wayne and Harry Carey are mine owning partners whose claim to their mine is being challenged in court.

Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich

A crooked judge (Samuel S. Hinds) promises to clear up the cooked-up dispute and puts the mine and all its assets into receivership. He’s in cahoots with the local gold commissioner (Scott), who takes a safe full of gold from the mine’s offices as soon as they can lay hands on it.

Wayne is first trusting that the case will be settled fairly, while Carey trusts no one, and the two men part company for a while. When it’s clear they are being had by a bunch of “spoilers,” they engineer a bank robbery and, after dynamiting the front door, make off with their safe.

But during the robbery, the town marshal is accidentally shot dead by another man, and Wayne is blamed for the killing and thrown in jail to face murder charges. Scott arranges with the jailer to allow Wayne to escape, intending to have him shot dead as he attempts to ride off. But Dietrich foils that plan and gets Wayne safely out of jail herself.

To take back their mine, Wayne and Carey drive a train locomotive through the barricades set up around the perimeter and shoot it out with the armed men on guard. That leaves only a matter to settle with Scott, and the two men have a knock-down-drag-out fistfight that demolishes most of the saloon. When it’s done, Scott lies battered in the street, and Wayne comes around in the arms of Dietrich, bloody but smiling.

John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich

Romance. At the film's start, Dietrich and Wayne have been an item of long standing, but there’s trouble between them as he arrives in town on a ship from Seattle. On board, he’s befriended the judge’s daughter (Margaret Lindsay), unaware that she knows of the plot against him. Dietrich suspects him of being untrue, and the scenes between the two are less than sanguine.

Wayne plays tough with her, hoping she’ll relent, but he’s disappointed her once too often. She tosses him out of her apartment, a comfortably furnished retreat upstairs from the saloon. One of her employees, a gambler by the name of Bronco (Richard Barthelmess) has romantic hopes for her himself, but she keeps putting him off.

Enter Scott, who sets his eye on her, too. She strings him along for reasons of her own. As an investor in Wayne and Carey’s mine, she has an interest in keeping the mine in their hands. While Wayne is in jail, she pays a call on Lindsay, the other woman. By this time, father and daughter know the jig is up and are packing their bags to get out of town.

Why are you running away, Dietrich wants to know. A woman sticks by the man she loves. And that’s exactly what Dietrich does, breaking Wayne out of jail. Having learned of Scott’s scheming, she pretends to grant him some privileges. Thinking Wayne is dead, he is quick to take advantage.

Gunfighters (1947)

This is one of those westerns that might have been dreamed up by a 14-year-old. The plot is a far-fetched configuration of just about every convention of the genre. Based, as the credits tell us, on a novel by Zane Grey called Twin Sombreros (1940), it has that writer’s general disregard for history, reality, and geography.

That said, the film has the saving grace of a starring role for Randolph Scott, some excellent color cinematography, a few breathtaking stunts, and well-edited action scenes. If you ignore the worn conventions, the contrived plot, and the perfunctory romance, there’s enough to enjoy.

Plot. Scott is a gunfighter who is giving up his guns. Arriving at a ranch, where he hopes to take an honest job as a cowpuncher, he is moments too late to prevent the shooting death of an old friend. The two killers are already riding off in a cloud of dust.

Big-time rancher Mr. Banner (Griff Barnett) sees to it that Scott is arrested for the killing, and the posse nearly hangs him before he is rescued by another, friendlier rancher (Charley Grapewin). Taken to the sheriff in town, Scott clears himself and leaves again a free man.

Barbara Britton, Randolph Scott, Dorothy Hart

Determined to find the killers, he returns to the Banner ranch, where it turns out there are two sisters (Barbara Britton, Dorothy Hart) who take an interest in him, though one of them is only pretending. She’s covering for her true love, the ranch foreman (Bruce Cabot), who is the villain of the story.

Back at Grapewin’s ranch, Scott meets an aspiring young gunfighter (John Miles). He gives the boy some tips on fast drawing while warning him away from gun fighting as a profession.

Cabot and a deputy sheriff (Grant Withers) keep taunting Scott to put on his guns. Meanwhile, Cabot hires a shady character (Forrest Tucker) to do some dirty work. Tucker ambushes Grapewin, Withers provokes Scott into a long fistfight in the street, and Miles is chased by a posse and shot dead.

Borrowing a pair of sidearms to settle an old score with the deputy, Scott finds Withers at the sheriff’s office and gets a confession from him at gunpoint. The deputy admits that Banner was behind the killing of Scott’s friend in the opening scenes.

Forrest Tucker, Bruce Cabot

When it becomes clear to Hart that her father has been guilty of a long series of misdeeds, she begs Scott to go easy on him. He’s had to be tough to build his empire, she says. But Scott begs to differ. The old man has to be stopped. She angrily tells him, “You’re just a killer, you’ll always be a killer.”

Well, yes and no. When he arrives at the ranch, first Tucker and then Cabot draw on him, and the two men bite the dust. Hart, fed up with it all, has packed her saddlebags. Seeing her father draw on Scott, she picks up a revolver and levels a mortal shot at the old man.

The villains’ days now over, Scott decides to give an honest life another go, gets rid of his guns again, and rides off across the desert. Hart jumps on a horse and chases after him. They ride off together as the music swells.

Death. Scott is his handsome self, congenial and smiling, happy to banter with the two women in the story. He’s good for a kiss or two. But you never buy him as a gunfighter. He’s too clean cut and untouched by the string of deaths he’s been responsible for.

Forrest Tucker’s bushwhacker comes a good deal closer to the kind of cold-blooded and remorseless personality you would expect of a killer. Sullen and irritable most of the time, he relishes the moments as he draws a bead on Grapewin. He waits to pull the trigger, almost letting the man get away. Then he smiles like a kid with a new pony as he squeezes off a shot and sees his victim struck down.

For that matter, death itself is hardly worth anybody’s fuss. As in a video game, it occasions no one’s grief. Bodies are never buried. At the demise of her sweetheart, one of the sisters (Britton) slumps and turns away from the camera, as if to say, “There go all my plans.”

Albuquerque (1948)

A western is like watching a chess game. It’s black vs. white, the board is the western landscape, and you know all the pieces, their moves, and the overall objective. And like chess games, each western is a little different.

Albuquerque is a Randolph Scott and Gabby Hayes vehicle, colorful and action packed. Scott is his usual handsome and even-tempered self, and Hayes is his comic foil, in some ways the rodeo clown who gets laughs but has a serious purpose. He pitches in with a six-gun when the going gets tough.

Plot. Scott arrives in Albuquerque to take a job with his uncle (George Cleveland), a wheelchair-bound robber baron who wants to monopolize the freighting business. Quickly discovering the man’s lack of scruples, Scott goes to work for his uncle’s only competitor, a freighting company run by a brother and sister (Russell Hayden, Catherine Craig). Hayes is their head muleskinner.

Randolph Scott, Gabby Hayes, Barbara Britton

Cleveland owns the local sheriff (Bernard Nedell) and has a stable of henchmen. Most menacing of the bunch are Lon Chaney, Jr., and Dan White, who gets jailed for a stagecoach holdup. White knows too much and when the sheriff arranges a jailbreak, Chaney shoots him before he can get out of town.

Cleveland plants a mole (Barbara Britton) in Hayden and Craig’s operation. He soon learns that the brother and sister have won contracts to freight ore from two mines situated on a nearby mountain ridge. One is mysteriously dynamited before freighting can get started. The other, called Angels Roost, is accessed by a narrow, dangerously steep road and considered inaccessible by most everyone except Hayes.

Scott discovers that Britton has been in league with Cleveland and confronts her with the evidence. But when a fire breaks out at Cleveland’s offices, Scott is blamed and faces trial for arson. His only alibi is that he was with Britton at the time, but chooses for his own reasons not to disclose the fact. A witness, however, saw him coming from her place—a little girl (Karolyn Grimes), who takes the witness stand and clears him. When Britton confirms her story, the case is dismissed.

Gabby Hayes, Karolyn Grimes

Romance had begun to bloom between Scott and Hayden, but she now suspects him of fooling around with Britton. All bets are off for the two of them. Craig not only gets shot in the leg by an assailant. He’s gotten sweet on Britton and now learns that she has betrayed him.

The trial judge makes Cleveland and Scott put up a peace bond to maintain a truce, but Chaney picks a fight with Scott, who beats him to a pulp. Scott is then about to leave town, believing he’s been the cause of enough trouble, but Hayes stops him. He wants to attempt bringing down the ore from the Angels Roost mine.

Despite further efforts to sabotage them, they are successful. But before they can say mission accomplished, they have to face a gun battle with a gang of hired gunmen brought to town by Cleveland. Scott, Hayes, and the others pick off all the villains, including Chaney, and Britton puts a bullet into Cleveland as he watches from a window.

In the denouement, wedding bells are back in the offing for the two couples. And Hayes is about to get a shave and a haircut from his heartthrob, Pearl, who runs a tonsorial parlor.

The Nevadan, 1950

Randolph Scott plays a greenhorn in the opening scenes of this 1950s western, and his act is convincing enough to the shady characters who inhabit this scenic stretch of what is supposed to be Nevada. We first see him in a three-piece suit and narrow-brim hat, with a manner too ingenuous to be what he seems. Giving up his clothes at gunpoint to swap outfits with an escaped criminal (Forrest Tucker), he begins to look more familiar.

When he rides a bucking saddle horse without being thrown, it’s clear to the rest of the men that he’s no ordinary greenhorn. Decking himself out in store-bought duds and a western hat, he becomes the handsome hero we know from a score or more of his westerns. It takes the others in the movie quite a while longer to discover his actual identity.

Plot. The item on the props list that moves all the action is $250,000 in gold hidden by robbers somewhere in the snow-peaked mountains. Tucker, the one robber who knows where to find the loot, escapes from a law officer escorting him to prison. A saloon operator (George Macready) is after Tucker for the gold and employs several goons to do the necessary dirty work.

Swapping clothes, Forrest Tucker and Randolph Scott

That includes getting Macready’s alcoholic partner (Tom Powers) bumped off, and when Scott gets involved, having his men beat him unconscious. Macready’s daughter (a young Dorothy Malone) meets Scott as she sells him a horse at her father’s ranch. She takes a shine to him when he tells her she seems “pretty sure of herself.”

Malone eventually shifts her allegiance to Scott during the course of the film, as she confronts her father for being greedy and a miserable husband to her mother. When he slaps her down for defying him, he doesn’t do much to get on her good side either.

Scott joins Tucker in an uneasy alliance as they band together against Macready. Macready’s chief henchman (Jock Mahoney) tries to supervise the feisty Malone, but she gets away from him.

Dorothy Malone, Randolph Scott

There follows a trek into the mountains as Tucker and Scott head into the high country to get the gold, while Macready and two brothers (Frank Faylen and Jeff Corey) follow them. In a standoff outside an abandoned mine shaft, the villains get picked off one by one.

Matters aren’t resolved, however, until Tucker learns why Scott has become his partner, and a furious fight ensues inside the old mine, which begins to collapse around them. When all is said and done, Scott has delivered Tucker back into the hands of the law, and Malone, still pretty sure of herself, says Scott will be back some day--to get his horse.

Randolph Scott and Jock Mahoney

Parallels. The story is structured in a way that plays out some ideas about partners. There are three sets of partners in the film. Scott and Tucker make one pair, as they work together to retrieve the gold, neither fully trusting the other. “Don’t ever turn your back on a partner,” Tucker tells Scott. 

Macready and Powers have been business partners for many years, before Macready decides that Powers is expendable and gets him into a fatal ambush. Also of interest is the bond between the two brothers, Faylen and Corey. Though they bicker and quarrel, they are dead loyal to each other. When Faylen is mortally wounded, he dies in the arms of the emotionally stricken Corey.

National Day of the Cowboy

When a colleague offered to make me one of his famous-person portraits as a retirement gift, he was already prepared for me to pick Randolph Scott as a subject. The two of us had spoken often of Scott’s cowboy roles. I remember the day he encouraged me to see Seven Men From Now (1956), a Budd Boetticher western that continues to be one of my favorites.

A lot of western fans will pick John Wayne as their consummate cowboy actor, but Scott has been a personal favorite of mine for a long time. He kept his chiseled good looks to the end of his career, not to mention his lean, six-foot-two bearing, always walking and riding with an easy, square-shouldered grace. The craggy face as he aged suggested a lifetime spent in the sun and wind. It was a western face.

I’ll give Wayne his grin and his warmth when the role called for them, but Scott could also be coolly stern and reserved in a way that could bring a chill to a scene. The rage behind his steady gaze in Seven Men From Now gives a depth to his character that you might only see in Clint Eastwood, for whom it has been a trademark.

Scott didn’t just play himself in his westerns. He was equally good in different kinds of roles. In Buchanan Rides Alone (1958) he’s the man who gets by with a smile and a wry comment when he’s outnumbered by a town full of miserable crooks. You believe him in roles like this that call for his character to stand up for himself, alone and with no one else to depend on — but often with people depending on him, as in another Boetticher film, The Tall T (1957).

In The Man Behind the Gun (1953), he’s a man of more than one identity, pretending to be an easy-going tenderfoot while he’s really on a mission to stop a vicious plot to arm secessionists. In Riding Shotgun (1954), he is a fugitive from a lynch mob, wrongly believed to have held up a stagecoach. And before his retirement from the screen, he left fans with a memorable performance as an aging ex-lawman in Sam Peckinpah’s classic Ride the High Country (1962).

So that’s my cowboy western hero for National Day of the Cowboy. Fortunate for me, he made a whole bunch of westerns, and I look forward to seeing them all, and then seeing them all again.

Image credit: Artist, Bill Feuer

Coming up: Tom Lea, The Wonderful Country (1952)

When the Daltons Rode (1940)

History is complicated, and movies like to make sense of it by fitting it to stories already familiar to the audience. Thus the complicated history of the Dalton Gang was retold as a Depression-era fable about good men turning to crime because corrupt moneymen have driven them off their land.

Plot. Bob Dalton (Broderick Crawford) is sheriff in a Kansas town when a land and development company sends in surveyors to determine that the deed to his family’s farm is invalid. An altercation leads to the accidental death of one of the surveyors, and one of Crawford’s three brothers, Ben (Stewart Erwin), is arrested for murder.

During the trial, Crawford frees his brother at gunpoint, shouting, “Why should we obey the law that’s been twisted to fit the needs of thieves and liars?” Along with two of their brothers (Brian Donlevy, Frank Albertson) plus a friend (Andy Devine), they ride off and into hiding. Holed up in a barn, they learn that the newspapers are blaming them for a crime spree of bank and stagecoach robberies.

Cast, When the Daltons Rode

So they decide to live up to their reputation, hoping to put together a defense fund for a trial in another county. They already have a friendly lawyer (Randolph Scott) willing to plead their case.

Brother Ben is captured and nearly lynched before his mother (Mary Gordon) attempts to intervene and Scott spirits him away to the safety of the jailhouse. Crawford and his brothers engineer a jailbreak, but Ben, still pleading his innocence, is shot dead before they can get out of town.

The three remaining brothers and Devine are in business now in a series of holdups ranging over several states. They have to shoot their way out of a town in Oklahoma where armed citizens trap the brothers in a diner. They jump a train that they discover is full of lawmen and make off with loot from the express car. They make a getaway by jumping from the moving train on horses being transported in an open car, Crawford taking a long dive into a lake.

Crawford throws a punch in the courtroom as Scott looks on

Meanwhile, the misuse of the law for private gain goes on. Scott has learned that a local businessman and speculator (George Bancroft) is the chief culprit in the scheme to throw farmers off their land and resell it to the railroad at a tidy profit. Bancroft is smugly self-confident as Scott threatens to take him to court. Lacking evidence, the man says, it will take years for a grand jury to indict.

All ends badly, of course, as the gang decides to rob the bank in the Daltons’ hometown. In a nod to the Production Code, Crawford’s ma finds him first and pleads with him to change his ways. “You can’t make your own laws,” she tells him.

Discovering that the Daltons are back in town, Bancroft warns the sheriff, and their attempt to rob the bank is thwarted in a hail of gunfire. The gang lies dead or dying in the streets as Bancroft draws a bead on Scott from an upstairs window. With his last ounce of life, Crawford spies Bancroft and puts a last bullet through him.

Randolph Scott, Kay Francis

Romance. There needs to be a happy couple at the end of a western, no matter how unfortunate for those who must learn that crime doesn’t pay. All along there’s been a subplot involving friendly, honest Scott and a woman (Kay Francis) who has been Crawford’s fiancée since the story’s start.

Scott has fallen for her, and the feeling grows mutual. But both attempt to remain loyal to Crawford—she because she’s promised to him and Scott because Crawford is an old friend. Finally, their love wins out, and Crawford doesn’t learn the truth until the fateful day of the failed bank robbery. When he kills Bancroft, he dies honorably, having saved the life of the man who has taken away the woman he's loved.

In the final scene, Scott and Francis are newlyweds and all smiles.

Riding Shotgun (1954)

Here’s another Randolph Scott western from the 1950s. Good script and direction by veteran André de Toth make this one a winner. The live oak dotted, grassy hills of Southern California's Santa Susanna Mountains provide an eye-pleasing location for the story. Scott, of course, is at his best.

Plot. A gang of robbers led by bad man Dan Marady (James Millican) hatches a scheme to rob a casino. They first hold up a stagecoach and draw the local sheriff and his posse into a wild goose chase. This trick leaves the town defenseless while the gang returns to rob the casino.

At the start of the picture, Scott is riding shotgun on the stage but is lured away before the holdup by the opportunity to find Millican and settle an old score. Millican’s man Pinto (Charles Bronson) takes Scott prisoner instead, ties him up and leaves him to die.

When Scott manages to escape and gets to town, he finds that the stage has been robbed, the driver and his rider have been killed, and a female passenger wounded. The evidence is circumstantial, but the townsfolk quickly assume Scott is one of the gang and get lynch fever.

Three people attempt to protect him. A Mexican cantina owner lets him take shelter in his place of business. An old friend, now deputy sheriff (Wayne Morris), tries to cool down the mob, which lays siege to the cantina. The daughter of the casino owner (Joan Weldon) has a romantic interest in Scott, believes he’s innocent, and does what little she can to help him.

Suspense builds, and the gang filters into town to find its citizens distracted by their effort to take Scott and hang him. The robbery of the casino proceeds as planned, and Scott manages to escape in time to stop them from getting away with the loot. In the shootout, Millican and Bronson are shot. The rest are surprised to find the cinches cut on their saddles, and they’re quickly taken prisoner.

Scott being manhandled by Charles Bronson

Highlights. The style of this film is much like André de Toth’s Thunder Over the Plains (1953), reviewed here recently. Despite a large cast of secondary characters, who make up the assemblage of townsfolk in the street, the script, camerawork, and editing make them all stand out as individual personalities. This is partly achieved through judicious use of close-ups.

Wayne Morris’ deputy sheriff is a nicely serio-comic role. Called “Tub” for his prominent gut and habit of withdrawing from the action to the town’s Lunch Room for a meal, he struggles manfully to keep the crowd in check. But the hot heads among them eventually force him to “do his job.”

Coming at the height of Hollywood blacklisting, the film invites parallels with the impact of Congressional witch-hunts on the film industry. The bloodthirsty crowd is whipped into a frenzy by the hysteria and rage of the most vocal among them, including one who is a member of the gang (Bronson). They become an unreasoning mob, ready to rush a man to justice without benefit of trial.

Scott, Richard Patrick, and Joan Weldon

Wrapping up. Shot in WarnerColor and standard ratio, the film is only 73 minutes long. In general, after more than fifty years, it holds up fairly well. Its female lead, Joan Weldon has a not very substantial role. The steamy picture of her character on the poster does not go with the properly respectable woman she portrays in the film. Trained as an operatic singer, Weldon played mostly in westerns for both film and TV. For Charles Bronson, it was one of his first credited roles, when he was still performing under his birth name, Charles Buchinsky.

The film's few weaknesses are minor flaws. German-born Fritz Feld, who plays a cantina operator named Fritz, had a Hollywood career that began with the silents and extended through over 200 screen roles, mostly on TV. His overacting as an excitable Mexican with a large family gets wearing. The repetitive rants of the more voluble in the crowd have a similar effect.

Scott can be heard at numerous times doing a voice-over narration that seems unneeded. His escape unnoticed from the cantina, which is supposed to be surrounded, is not too plausible. It occasions one of the few stunts in the film, as his character jumps from the roof onto a man with a rifle passing in the street below.

The script was by Thomas Blackburn and based on a story by veteran western writer, Kenneth Perkins (1890-1951).  FictionMags Index lists more than 70 stories, novels, and serials by Perkins published over a period of 30 years, many of them appearing in Street & Smith publications.

Curiously, the film came near the end of the careers of two of its actors. Wayne Morris, regarded as “the last of the B-western stars,” had been a much-decorated Navy pilot during World War II. Returning to Hollywood, he appeared in a handful of pictures, including Kubrik’s Paths of Glory (1957) before dying in 1959 at the age of 45. James Millican, after an extensive acting career over most of 25 years, died in 1955, also at the age of 45.

Riding Shotgun is currently available on a three-movie DVD at netflix and at amazon and Barnes&Noble. For more of Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies click over to Todd Mason’s blog, Sweet Freedom.

Source: imdb.com

Coming up: Dane Coolidge, photographer

Thunder Over the Plains (1953)

This is a gem of a western. Randolph Scott plays a captain in the U.S. cavalry, stationed in Texas in the aftermath of the Civil War. So-called Reconstruction is a slow process as carpetbaggers and profiteers breed resentment among Texans. Former Confederate soldiers band together as raiders to frustrate their efforts, while the cavalry acts as an army of occupation.

A Texan who fought for the Union, Scott is caught in the middle, as he sees the people he grew up with made victims of injustice. As much as duty allows, he has sympathy for the leader of the raiders (Charles McGraw). However, Scott’s commanding officer (Henry Hull) prefers that he put duty before sentiment.

Plot. The villain of the film is a crook (Hugh Sanders), who works with a tax collector (Elisha Cook, Jr.) to force farmers into selling their cotton to him at a fraction of its value. The raiders, meanwhile, are cutting into his profits, and he puts on the pressure to get more protection from the Army.

Phyllis Kirk, Randolph Scott

Matters are complicated by the arrival of another captain (Lex Barker), a young officer too eager to make his mark. He’s in a hurry to get the job done and return East to civilization. Ignoring orders, he clumsily advances on the raiders’ hideout instead of waiting for Scott and his men to join him. The raiders escape, and one of their men (Fess Parker) is shot and killed by the trigger-happy young captain.

Barker also has boundary issues with Scott’s wife (Phyllis Kirk). Charming her with talk of the social life in Washington, he easily wins her confidence. He rightly guesses that she is lonely and friendless, and he tries to take advantage. Scott discovers him in his parlor trying to get Kirk into a clinch, and the punch-up that follows leaves both men black-eyed and bruised.

Scott is finally ordered to make more of an effort to bring in McGraw or face the consequences. Led into a trap and surrounded, McGraw offers to surrender in exchange for the lives of his men. Scott agrees to the deal, promising to get him a fair trial.

But as Texas is under martial law, there’s no civilian court for this case. Soldiers are put to work building a gallows on the grounds of the fort, and McGraw will get hanged pronto for rebellion and sedition. His men then kidnap Cook and threaten to kill him if McGraw is not released.

Lex Barker

Scott goes out on a limb, acting on his own to rescue Cook, an attempt that is foiled by glory-grabbing Barker, who manages to get Cook killed. The excitement that follows involves nearly every member of the cast. Order is not restored until Scott finds evidence that Sanders has committed a murder and shoots down the vicious carpetbagger in the streets of town.

Five stars. This film has a tight script, good performances, and some excellent cinematography and editing. Exterior scenes are inventively shot, shadow and dim lighting are used well, and sequences are deftly played out for either suspense or excitement. The camera work is especially noteworthy, as it effectively moves from long shots to close-ups in single takes.

In one scene, the raiders waylay a wagon train loaded high with cotton bales and then are descended upon by Army troops who give chase as they ride off. It’s a complex sequence that is nicely put together. It builds suspense by portraying first the stealth of the raiders and then gradually reveals the presence of the watching and waiting cavalry.

Randolph Scott, Charles McGraw

Then comes the action. A modern-day film would cut this part of it like a music video, a rapid montage in which we lose sense of the relative placement of everything and everyone in the scene. But it’s a pleasure to see the use of this old-school style of filmmaking that preserves the scene’s visual continuity. Close-ups and long shots are nicely cut together to give a feeling of being close to individual characters while keeping us aware of the action whirling around them.

Shot in widescreen and WarnerColor, this western is easy to like. Scott’s character is a decent man put into a difficult position, that position being duty vs. sentiment. Given the lack of sentiment in its less likeable characters, it’s clear where the movie’s sympathies lie.

The Man Behind the Gun (1953)

Insurrection in Southern California. Who knew? Actually there was an armed contingent sympathetic to the Confederacy in Los Angeles during the Civil War, and this Randolph Scott western gives a nod to that historical factoid. Just a nod, though. The Man Behind the Gun is basically a political thriller with six-guns.

 

Scott plays a Union cavalry officer masquerading as a wannabe schoolteacher to uncover cloak and dagger intrigue in the city of surf and sunshine. For sidekicks he has two former Army men (Dick Wesson and Alan Hale, Jr.), who provide the humor. Romance is provided by Patrice Wymore, just arrived in the Southland as the bride-to-be of an Army captain (Philip Carey).

Philip Carey, Operation Pacific, 1951

Plot. The sequence of events in this film is so complicated, it would stretch any reader’s patience to summarize it adequately. Let it be said that the cast of characters includes an outspoken advocate for the secession of Southern California (probably an idea that was not new then or since), and a wishy-washy liberal senator who fakes his own death to acquire control of Los Angeles’ water supply. (Yes, you read that right.)

 

Up to her ears in treachery is a chanteuse with the unlikely stage name of Chona Degnon (Lina Romay), who turns out to be the captain’s squeeze. She gets to sing a Latino song or two at a big pleasure palace with stage acts and table service. The basement is filled with guns and gunpowder.

Joaquin Murrieta, artist's portrayal, c1858

In an early scene, a smooth highwayman attempts without success to rob a stagecoach. During the failed robbery, Scott meets and befriends the young, real-life bandit, Joaquin Murrieta (Robert Cabal), who had been appearing as a character in movies since 1927. Murrieta happily switches to Scott’s side of the law and helps fight the bad guys, knifing some and igniting a conflagration that burns down the pleasure palace.

Wymore has shrugged off Carey as a two-timer, and she turns the charm on Scott. But she gets kidnapped and taken by the villains into the hills, where they take their stand against the cavalry, who descend (ascend really; it’s uphill) on them guns blazing. She and Romay have a hair-pulling tussle on the floor as the men stand in an open doorway and gawk. Romay finally takes a round that puts her out of action.

In the lead up to the shoot out, Wesson and Hale play a homesteading couple, Wesson in long dress and bonnet, with a covered wagon full of foot soldiers. This arrangement is milked for laughs, as when Wesson pretends to be offended when Scott strips off his uniform to disguise himself in civilian clothes.

Patrice Wymore with Kirk Douglas, The Big Trees, 1952

And so it goes. The villains are killed or otherwise subdued. Carey tends to the wounded Romay. Scott and Wymore have a big kiss. There’s some physical humor as Wesson and Hale get the last laugh.

Wrapping up. Scott does his usual best in a role that requires him to be quick thinking, confident, and a sharp shooter. Handsome and graceful, he looks good either on or off a horse, in or out of uniform. His wry smile masking his forthright intentions, he’s a stand-up hero.

There’s no room in the busy script for depth of character. The driving intent of the film is to provide plenty of action. Curiously, many of the exterior scenes were effectively shot on the sound stage. Technicolor makes it all look pretty, but the occasional scenes shot outdoors (looks like Simi Valley while it was still ranchland) are less visually interesting.

Old stagecoach road, Simi Hills, near Chatwsorth, California

Character actors Wesson and Hale provide much of the spark in the film. TV fans will remember Hale as The Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island.” Director Felix Feist worked extensively in film and TV from the 1940s into the 1960s. Screenwriter John Twist produced a string of westerns in the late 1940s and early 1950s, going on to write films in other genres, including The FBI Story (1959).

The Man Behind the Gun is currently available at amazon and netflix. For more of Tuesday’s Overlooked Films, click on over to Todd Mason’s blog, Sweet Freedom.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Stagecoach road photo courtesy of PKM

Coming up: Julia Robb, Scalp Mountain

Man in the Saddle (1951)

Randolph Scott is a rancher in this western, with a nasty neighbor (Alexander Knox) who doesn’t like to share. Knox is the biggest rancher in the valley, and he wants the whole valley. That includes Joan Leslie, who tires of waiting for Scott to pop the question and marries Knox instead in the first reel.

From that point on, Kenneth Gamet’s script either runs out of ideas or goes after too many of them. There’s a second woman (Ellen Drew), with a small ranch nearby and a lot of gumption. She is sweet on Scott, but he’s still hankering for the married Leslie. It’s hard to understand why. She’s heartless as they come having married for money, and skip the connubial bliss, as the groom learns on his wedding night.

Plot. Knox and his foreman (Richard Rober) try to force Scott off his ranch, and they get pretty rough. They stampede his cattle and kill first one and then another of two cowboys. When Scott retaliates by shooting up a line camp full of Knox’s men, he and his house get shot up in return.

Ellen Drew, 1939

Leslie, meanwhile, has second thoughts about marriage to Knox and wants Scott to run off with her. But when he takes a round in one leg, he is rescued by Drew, who takes him to a mountain cabin to recuperate. Things are pretty friendly between them, and there’s the suggestion that something’s going on when the lights go out at night.

Enter loose cannon John Russell, who’s been making moves on Drew from the beginning and won’t get the hint that she’s not interested. He follows Scott and Drew to the mountain cabin with the professed intent to finish them both off. There’s a spectacular fistfight that first brings down the roof of the cabin and ends up with both men (then Drew) hurtling down a muddy mountain slope. Russell not only gets a drubbing from Scott but, when he returns to the ranch, is shot dead by Knox, his boss.

Cutting to the chase here, the final settling of scores happens in the hotel and the streets of town during a fierce, tumbleweed-blowing gale. Knox is shot when he steps into the line of fire between his foreman and Scott. The foreman attempts to outdraw Scott but fails. Scott and Drew then ride off together in a buckboard.

Tennessee Ernie Ford, 1957

Added value. The film was shot in Technicolor in the always handsome Alabama Hills of central California, with the snow-clad Sierras as a backdrop. The mountain cabin is located on wooded slopes above the snowline, where spring thaws swell the streams.

Tennessee Ernie Ford with his rich baritone voice appears by a roundup campfire to sing the theme song, “Man in the Saddle.” It was his first film appearance, and with a cowboy hat and a shaved upper lip, he passes easily as a ranch hand.

The presence of wonderful character actor Clem Bevans is a pleasure in the early scenes before he disappears from the plot. Bevans, thin as a rail and sporting a thick mustache, had a career of playing codgers. John Russell, of course, with his chiseled features, went on to star as TV's Lawman (1958-1962). The film also marks an early appearance of Cameron Mitchell, who would later turn in performances on 97 episodes of TV’s High Chaparral (1967-71).

Clem Bevans (right), The Kansan (1943)

Mexican actor Alfonso Bedoya plays Scott’s cook, and while taking a ribbing for his awful coffee, his character is more than an ethnic stereotype. He gets to play in some action scenes, and a running gag about his unsuccessful attempts to acquire a proper hat plays right to the last scene, where he snaps up the dead villain’s Stetson. Not sure how funny that is, but for what it’s worth, Bedoya gets the last laugh.

As for the action, there’s that spectacular fistfight between Scott and Russell. During the cattle stampede, Scott races to jump onto a runaway chuck wagon, which then ignites and bursts into flames behind him. A shootout in a saloon takes place in the dark, and we have to wait until the lights come back on to see who was a casualty.

Wrapping up. The film was based on a 1938 novel by Ernest Haycox, and anyone who has read it can say whether one bears any resemblance to the other. What’s missing for the audience is a clear understanding of Scott’s character beyond his desire to keep his ranch. His stiff upper lip says a lot but not enough.

His adversaries are cardboard characters, with the murderously irrational desire to possess what they can’t have. Leslie’s character is downright puzzling. What does she really want and does she even know? At the end, she seems intent on carrying out the wishes of her dying husband, but where did that come from?

There’s a slap-happy humor in some scenes and outright farce in others that might fit in a B-western but seem somewhat out of place in this film, where the drama seems meant to be taken seriously. The costuming and domestic interiors take advantage of the Technicolor and are so tastefully designed, you know you’re not far from Hollywood and Vine.

In a directing career that lasted from 1939-1987, Andre de Toth brought a number of memorable westerns to the screen, including Springfield Rifle (1952) and Day of the Outlaw (1959) both reviewed here earlier. Man in the Saddle is currently available at netflix and amazon.

For more of Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies, head on over to Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Ridgwell Cullum, The Story of the Foss River Ranch (1903)