The Kentuckian, 1955

Not quite a western—the characters never leave Kentucky—this film made a splash in 1955. A Technicolor CinemaScope production, it was Burt Lancaster’s first movie as both director and star. The film introduced TV actor Walter Matthau, as a whip-wielding heavy, and the cast included John McIntire and John Carradine in supporting roles

Montana writer A.B. Guthrie, Jr., adapted the script from a novel, The Gabriel Horn by Felix Holt. Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, and Irving Gordon’s “The Kentuckian Song” was covered by several recording artists. It was a big hit for The Hilltoppers.

Plot. Lancaster and his young son (Donald MacDonald) are traveling on foot through the Kentucky woods with their dog, headed for Texas. They make it as far as the home of Lancaster's brother (John McIntire), where they meet a young woman (Dianne Foster), who is an indentured servant to Matthau, an innkeeper.

Dianne Foster, Burt Lancaster, Donald MacDonald

Lancaster pays off what Foster still owes to Matthau so she can join them. But he has to go to work in his brother’s tobacco business to raise the money for the fare on the riverboat that will take them west.

A schoolteacher (Diana Lynn) takes a shine to Lancaster, and with pressure from her and McIntire, it looks like Lancaster is going to stick around and forget about Texas. During a brutal fight between Lancaster and the trouble-making Matthau, Lynn realizes that Foster is also sweet on Lancaster. Realizing also that the boy has his heart set on Texas, Foster gamely steps aside.

Lancaster raises the money he needs at a roulette table, but travel plans are interrupted by a couple of enemies, intent on settling an old blood feud. In a suspenseful finish, there are gunfire and casualties before Foster and Lancaster are able to put a stop to them. Man, boy, and pretty young woman are then free to leave Kentucky.

Lancaster, directing

Themes. The storyline is tried and true Hollywood Americana. It offers a sunny, family-friendly 1950s mythology about westward expansion and frontiersmen in buckskin. No big surprise that Holt’s novel had appeared as a Reader’s Digest condensed book in 1952.

The early 1950s also saw Walt Disney’s revival of the folk hero Davy Crockett. That TV series made Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen famous, and coonskin caps were everywhere. In 1955, three versions of  “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” were in Billboard’s Top-10 charts.

It was a time when the HUAC had cleared the communists out of Hollywood, and an Army general was in the White House. The Cold War had nervous folks building bomb shelters. Another movie about a simple, pure-hearted, and self-reliant frontier hero surely helped many sleep better at night.

The story is not without its dark side. Matthau with his whip plays a mean-spirited man, though he’s not nearly so menacing as the two thugs who show up to kill Lancaster. As a portrayal of outright evil, they are thoroughly creepy. They seem capable of the most heartless and mindless cruelty. Real bogeymen.

Yet all ends happily. Even Matthau has to pay his dues. And Lancaster’s boy learns to blow the cow’s horn they’ve been carrying since scene one. After confronting his dad with giving up the dream of going to Texas, his resounding belt from the horn shows that he has become a man in his own right. It's another national myth, which connects the leaving of boyhood with departure westward.

The novel, published 1951

Wrapping up. This is an enjoyable film with a lot of talent both in front of and behind the camera. Shot mostly on location, the wooded vales of Kentucky are warmly captured by Ernest Laszlo’s widescreen cinematography. For screenwriter A.B. Guthrie, Jr., the script was a notable follow-up to his adaptation for the film Shane (1953).

Lancaster directed only one other film, twenty years later, The Midnight Man (1974). MacDonald, who very ably plays his young son, worked onscreen briefly afterward, mostly on TV. Dianne Foster followed The Kentuckian with a busy TV career into the 1960s. Diana Lynn had previously appeared in numerous films and had frequent screen roles on TV in the 15 years following this one.

American painter Thomas Hart Benton painted a portrait of the characters of the film, which can be found online at the LA County Museum of Art website. The slightly daffy but sweet “Song” from The Kentuckian can be heard at youtube. Bernard Herrmann’s majestic score for the film is available at amazon on CD.

The film is currently available at amazon and netflix. For more of Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies, click on over to Todd Mason’s blog.

Source: imdb.com, wikipedia.com

Coming up: George Tower Buffum, Smith of Bear City (1906)

Valdez is Coming (1971)

Spaghetti western style marketing

Shot in Spain, this Elmore Leonard story makes for an absorbing tale of pursuit and justice. The Valdez of the title (Burt Lancaster) is a Mexican-American and former cavalryman, who is now a star-wearing constable of a western border town. In a bungled attempt to secure the surrender of a suspect wanted for murder, he shoots and kills an innocent man.

Valdez wants to compensate the man’s widow and attempts to collect $100 from the man, Frank Tanner, who wrongly accused the victim. Tanner refuses and humiliates Valdez, then has him tied to a cross when he persists. Arming himself, Valdez surprises Tanner in his bed and asks again for the $100. Failing in this attempt, he takes the man’s girlfriend (Susan Clark) as a hostage, and thus begins a long chase.  

Man after man sent after Valdez comes a cropper. By the time we get to the last reel and the final standoff between Valdez and Tanner, eleven men have bitten the dust. We see several picked off by buffalo gun in this clip (click).

Published 1970

The twists and turns and surprises in the plot, all the way to the last line of the movie, are pure Elmore Leonard. The film deftly avoids nearly every western cliché. There are fine, believable performances all around. After the first few minutes, even Lancaster is plausible as a soft-spoken Mexican-American.

The film has a steady level of excitement but is thankfully also interested in character. It’s not just marksmanship with firearms that keeps Valdez going. There’s also a hidden depth of intelligence as he continues to outsmart his pursuers. It’s a battle of wits right to the end.

I really enjoyed this movie. In many ways it beats Hombre (1967), another Elmore Leonard story that picks up some of the same racial issues. (I didn't mention that the man shot at the beginning of the movie is black and his wife is Indian.)

The film was directed by Edwin Sherin, who went on to a lot of TV work, including 200 director and producer credits for Law & Order. Barton Heyman deserves mention as El Segundo, Tanner’s chief henchman. The film is rated PG-13 for violence, brief nudity, and some language. [Lancaster wears a Stetson or a cavalry cap in the movie, not the photoshopped one on the the DVD cover.]

Valdez is Coming is currently available at netflix and amazon. Tuesday’s Overlooked Films is a much-appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Coming up: Mary Austin, Isidro (1905)

The Professionals (1966)

This popular film from the mid-1960s put together three big stars along with Woody Strode as a kind of A-Team sent into Mexico to retrieve a kidnapped wife. Lee Marvin, an artillery expert, leads the group. Burt Lancaster is a dynamiter. At one time, both fought with the revolutionary forces (there were several, Villa, Zapata, and others). Both have become disillusioned and a bit cynical.

Robert Ryan is the horse wrangler, and Woody Strode is skilled at archery. All these actors have lengthy western credits. Writer-director Richard Brooks was better known for dramas like Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. The following year, he’d hit a homerun with In Cold Blood. But he seems right at home with this western adventure.

The structure of this film is almost exactly like Garden of Evil (1954), reviewed here. There’s a perilous journey by a small group of men who perform a mission and then return to safety with a band of adversaries in hot pursuit. A woman joins them, but this time only on the return trip.

Like that movie, most of the action takes place outdoors – about 95%. This time, it’s the arid terrain of northern Mexico, where it’s hot in the day and cold at night. There are desert, rocks, sand, and slot canyons. A movie like this makes the frontier town settings of a film like The Proud Ones, reviewed here last time, hardly qualify as westerns.

The film was, in fact, not shot in Mexico but in Death Valley and Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.

Vengeance Valley (1951)

This Technicolor film, based on a Luke Short novel and released in 1951, is a rare western with actual working cowboys. Burt Lancaster is foreman of a ranch in an unspecified mountain setting (probably the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California, where Hollywood often went on location to shoot westerns), and the action of the film includes a spring roundup of herds of Herefords, with talk of brands and voiceover explanation by one of the characters about what we’re watching. Early on, we see all the ranch’s cowhands gathered at a long table at the ranch house for breakfast, and there’s the usual joshing the cook, who clearly has the upper hand with them all. Later, we see him on the roundup, serving up coffee in the dead of night during a rainstorm. in a scene played for comedy, Lancaster shows his horse sense, as a horse dealer tries to sell him two worthless horses. All of these are authentic details of Old West ranching.

The timeframe of the film is also not specified, but judging by the women’s dresses, it is the late 1900s. But typical for 1950s westerns, the men dress like it’s the present day. Lancaster and the other cowboys wear jeans (Burt’s fit him like a glove), which no self-respecting cowboy would have worn at the time. Jeans were for farmers. Otherwise, Burt’s clothes look lived in when we first see him coming in off the range in his sheepskin coat and handsome Stetson (though a real working cowboy’s hat would be a good deal more worse for wear and sweat-stained). The other hats in the film are straight out of the box from the nearest western outfitters.