The Far Country (1954)

James Stewart and director Anthony Mann made several westerns together, and this one is unusual for being not all that great. The location photography in the snowy mountains of Alberta is impressive, but the casting seems often wrong, and credibility gets a painful stretch if you know much about geography and the Klondike gold rush.

Plot. The film opens in Seattle in 1896, where Stewart arrives with a herd of cattle he has driven from Wyoming to deliver by steamer to Skagway, Alaska. There, he and his sidekick (Walter Brennan) plan to take them over a difficult trail to Dawson in the Yukon. They expect the cattle to sell for enough money to buy them a ranch in Utah.

The whole journey is fraught with difficulties and obstacles. On the way from Wyoming, Stewart has already shot two drovers who attempted to make off with some of his herd. For that he’s wanted for murder and is hidden aboard the departing steamer by a Skagway saloonkeeper (Ruth Roman).

Skagway, Alaska, 1897

In Skagway, his herd disrupts a public hanging, and he’s brought up before a crooked judge (John McIntire, in a role that may have been modeled after Soapy Smith) for disturbing the peace. The fine is his herd of cattle, which Stewart and Brennan steal back under cover of darkness and spirit across the border into Canada. But there’s more trouble before reaching Dawson, as the two men are witness to the robbing and killing of miners returning from the gold fields.

Roman relocates in Dawson to open another saloon, and McIntire follows her there, along with his gang (Jack Elam, Robert J. Wilke). Both Roman and an Austrian ingénue (Corinne Calvet) take a romantic interest in Stewart. He is polite to each but not one to complicate his life with a woman.

Stewart and Brennan try their hand at placer mining and accumulate enough gold to buy that ranch in Utah. Attempting to avoid arrest in Skagway, they take another route out of the Yukon. But they are ambushed as they start to raft down a river to Juneau. Brennan is killed and Stewart is disabled.

The Westerner (1940)

There are laugh-out-loud moments in this often-comic film about Judge Roy Bean (Walter Brennan) and an accused horse thief (Gary Cooper), a drifter who claims to have met Lily Langtry. From the details, you can tell the screenwriters did some homework, but they have not let facts get in the way of a good story.

Plot. At the heart of the film is the friendship that grows between Bean and the drifter, Cole Harden. When the jury finds him guilty, Bean sentences him to hang, then suspends the sentence when Harden says he can produce a lock of Lily’s hair. The two actors get many scenes together in the film, and they are a genuine pleasure.

Meanwhile, there’s a range war going on between cattlemen and a community of homesteaders busy putting up fences. Bean sides with the cattlemen and Harden tries to be a peacemaker, but to no avail. He stops an armed confrontation between the settlers and Bean, but he can’t stop the cattlemen from setting fire to the settlers’ crops and farmsteads.

Romance runs a respectable third among the storylines as a homesteader’s daughter (Doris Davenport) attempts to rein in drifter Harden. She wants him to settle down proper; he wants a lock of her hair. The one of Lily’s he’s promised to give to Bean is, of course, a fiction. 

Judge Roy Bean

Action and realism. Besides a shootout and a hanging at the opening of the film, a couple fistfights, the fire, a chase on horseback, a gunfight in a theater, and several additional fatalities, the film is fairly low-keyed. Director William Wyler paces the dialogue slowly to linger on reaction shots, which Brennan and Cooper produce with relish.

Much of the film was shot on location, near Tucson, and the ramshackle town, the desert and mountains give the film a nicely realistic feel. The effect is heightened by Gregg Toland’s black and white photography, which captures dramatic skies and is often in deep focus.

There’s a remarkable fistfight between Cooper and one of the homesteaders, which is played in almost complete silence, just the sound of body blows. As the two men trade punches, they stir up a cloud of dust. Finally the camera focuses on the shadows of the two men on the ground, until one of them drops into the frame, beaten.

Cooper, in a later scene, shows the marks of the fight on his face. Then he gets painfully into his saddle, acknowledging that a man who’s been in a fight will have some aches from it afterwards. Knocked from his horse in another scene, he walks stiffly with a limp when he finally gets back on his feet.

There’s dust and dirt aplenty in some scenes. The actors’ clothes and hats are often thick with dust. The streets of town show the marks of much use, with bits of trash and what could very well be horseshit.

Besides Cooper’s 1940s-era red-tag Levi’s, lapses in verisimilitude come mostly with the “homesteaders,” and I put that in quotes because I believe there was never any federally administered homesteading in Texas. The roomy log house where some scenes take place seems lavishly furnished for dirt farmers who’d only recently arrived.

Wrapping up. This film is a must-see for Walter Brennan fans. In his mid-forties when the film was made, he already has the gravelly old-man’s voice and ragged beard that were his trademarks. In many ways, the film is his, and he received a well-deserved Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance. Also in the cast are Chill Wills and (briefly) Dana Andrews, both early in their screen careers.

Jo Swerling and Niven Busch get credit for the screenplay, which was based on a story by Stuart N. Lake. Busch’s script for the noir western Pursued (1947) was previously reviewed here. Lake wrote a biography of Wyatt Earp, on which My Darling Clementine (1946) was based, and he provided the story for Winchester ’73 (1950).

The Westerner is available at netflix and amazon. Overlooked Movies is a much-appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Sources: imdb.com 

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Cornell Woolrich, Waltz Into Darkness (1947)

The Proud Ones (1956)

Robert Ryan was a helluva actor. He was especially good at portrayals of tormented men able to fly into a murderous rage. Howard Hughes put him opposite cool, unflappable Robert Mitchum in noir classics like Crossfire (1947) and The Racket (1951). He’s also good as a rogue cop in On Dangerous Ground (1952).

Here he plays a marshal in a western town, tormented again, this time by an incident he didn’t handle well in the past. He “ran away” after shooting down a man everyone believed was unarmed. Now, as chance would have it, the man’s son (Jeffrey Hunter) has shown up in town, and it’s not clear what the young man’s intentions are.

The town seems to be somewhere in Kansas in the early days of the cattle drives. The first bunches of trail cowboys are arriving, and business is already booming. Prices on consumer goods are doubling, and a big new saloon opens up with tables for gambling. The owner, Barrett (Robert Middleton) is a smiling but tough businessman and keeps a few goons on the payroll to intimidate anyone who gives him trouble.

Virginia Mayo is the feminine presence, the keeper of a hostelry. You get the idea from the staff and some asides that not so recently they were all working as prostitutes. Serving up steak and potatoes is apparently more lucrative.

Mayo is Ryan’s sweetheart, and early in the film he somewhat indirectly pops the question. Looks like she’s been waiting a long time for it. But the ring he’s bought her has to go back to the jeweler because it’s too small, which could be a bad sign. Soon after, in an exchange of gunfire in Barrett’s saloon, the marshal sustains a head wound that causes his vision to go haywire at inopportune moments. Luckily he finds a nearby frontier ophthalmologist who seems to have an uncommon knowledge of optic medicine. But the symptoms persist.

Fast forward. So that’s the set-up. And when we get to the last reel, Jeffrey Hunter has signed on as deputy, having overcome his distrust of Ryan. One of Barrett’s goons has been shot dead trying to kill Ryan. And when an altercation over some cheating at Barrett’s saloon ends in the demise of a customer, the marshal tosses three of the employees into jail.

Alas, a deputy (Walter Brennan) is killed during a daring jailbreak, and there’s a final shootout in a hay barn. The voice of reason (as women usually are in westerns), Mayo wants Ryan to come to his senses and get out of harm’s way. But he tells her, “I’m not a coward. A man can’t live a lifetime being ashamed.”