The Law and Jake Wade (1958)

This noir western from director John Sturges is smaller scale than his big films (Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven), but a quietly intense gem. Richard Widmark leads the cast in a role that recalls the grinning malice of the hoodlum he plays in Kiss of Death (1947). Robert Taylor, dressed in black, is the handsome marshal who was once his partner in crime.

Plot. Taylor, in an act of good will, leaves his post in another town to spring Widmark from jail. He expects enough gratitude to let bygones become bygones. But Widmark isn’t easily appeased for what he considers as Taylor’s betrayal when he “ran off” after their last bank job, taking the loot with him.

It is buried now somewhere in the desert, and Widmark isn’t about to let matters rest. He wants the money. He and his gang take Taylor and his girlfriend (Patricia Owens) hostage across mountain and valley to retrieve it. Once that is accomplished, it’s not clear whether he intends to let either of his captives live.

Taylor and Owens manage to make an escape, plummeting down a dusty slope and making off on foot along a ravine, but Widmark soon intercepts them. Then their progress is interrupted when they are stopped by a small company of cavalry, whose lieutenant warns them of a band of renegade Comanches roaming the hills.

Widmark, Owens, Taylor

Undaunted, they continue to their destination, which turns out to be a ghost town, where Taylor has buried the money in the cemetery. With the end game in sight, matters take an ominous turn as the Comanches wage a night attack that has them all fighting for their lives. Morning light brings burial of the dead and there’s a final resolution to be reached between Widmark and Taylor.

Highlights. I’m calling this a noir western because many scenes take place at night. Most of the characters are outlaws, each with his own sinisterly dark persona. Particularly menacing is Henry Silva with the occasional leering comment directed at Owens. There’s a hard-boiled edge to the dialogue, as when Middleton is asked whether any words were said over the graves of the men he just buried. “Yeah, goodbye,” he says.

The performances are fine with Widmark and Taylor well matched as adversaries. The supporting cast is also strong. Besides Owens, who easily holds her own in the company of desperadoes, there is the wonderful character actor, Robert Middleton, as a man with torn loyalties. Shot in Death Valley and the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California, the film is a Cinemascope travelogue capturing the scenic beauty of the Sierras under winter snows.

Two Rode Together (1961)

John Ford brings a light touch to this story of a subject he treated once before in The Searchers (1956). James Stewart is the “searcher” in this film, out to find women and children kidnapped by Indians. But unlike John Wayne’s darkly driven character in the earlier film, Stewart is comically larcenous and unprincipled. His services go to the highest bidder.

Plot. The two riders of the title are Stewart, the town marshal of Tascosa, Texas, and Richard Widmark, an Army lieutenant who enlists the reluctant Stewart in the rescue mission. Several white families are petitioning the Army to find the survivors of Comanche kidnappings. Stewart would rather work alone, but Widmark is ordered by Major Frazer (John McIntire) to go with him. The two are to make a deal with the Comanche chief, Quanah Parker (Henry Brandon), to exchange money for captives.

Richard Widmark, James Stewart

Among the many obstacles, including Stewart’s cynical distaste for the Army and his lack of regard for Widmark, there is a more troublesome fact. The children they are commissioned to find were lost many years ago. When found, a captured white boy has become a fierce young warrior beyond any hope of “deprogramming.” A white man’s wife doesn’t care to return, for reasons that become clearer later in the film.

In trade for weapons from Stewart (not money as agreed), Quanah Parker gives them the boy and a Mexican woman (Linda Cristal). She is the wife of another warrior, Stone Wolf (Woody Strode), who is drumming up a revolt against the chief. Escorting the two back to the fort, Stewart and Widmark are followed by Strode, who is shot dead by Stewart.

Civilization is not receptive to either returned captive. The boy commits an act of savagery that quickly has him in the hands of a lynch mob. The pretty señorita is shunned by the officers and their wives who regard her as damaged goods, degraded by being taken as an Indian’s wife.

Linda Cristal, James Stewart

Stewart defends her to no avail. Returning with her to Tascosa, he finds that during his absence a dimly incompetent deputy has been elected to his old job as marshal. And Cristal is scorned by a truculent saloon owner (Annelle Hayes). Fed up with the frontier, Stewart and Cristal board a stage and head for California.

Romance. A surprising face to appear in the cast is Shirley Jones, remembered more for movie musicals, Oklahoma! (1955), Carousel (1956), and The Music Man (1962). She plays the grown sister of a boy stolen nine years before. All she has of him today is a music box with a song he used to love.

Richard Widmark, Shirley Jones

She knows the effort to find him now is fruitless, but she feels guilty for not making more of an attempt to save him the day he was taken. She tells this story to Widmark, who has been in the Army for as many years as the boy has been missing. Widmark gets her to let go of the past by persuading her out of her pigtails and the men’s pants she’s been wearing and into a dress. He asks her to come with him to the dance at the fort.

Up until that point, two rubes (Harey Carey, Jr., and Ken Curtis) have been noisy and dim-witted rivals for her hand. In a farcical scene they are once and for all discouraged in this effort by being doused with flour. At the dance, Widmark awkwardly proposes marriage to her and she accepts.

Death of a Gunfighter (1969)

The story goes that Richard Widmark fell out with director Robert Totten during the making of this film, and Totten left the project. Disavowing any connection with the final product, Totten had his name removed from the credits. And thus began the career of fictitious Hollywood director Alan Smithee, whose name appears instead in the opening credits of this film.

From appearances, Totten seems to have been doing creditable work. The cinematography is often inventive, fresh, and interesting. It’s tempting to think the film would have been a whole lot better had he remained in charge. The finished product starts out well, gets to feeling a little choppy in the middle, and then becomes more than a little confusing at the end.

Plot. Widmark plays a town marshal who has outlived his usefulness. It’s now the 20th century and the men of the town council no longer have need for frontier-style law enforcement. But he doesn’t want to quit, and he can go public with some of their dirty secrets if they try to take away his badge.

They first try to get the county sheriff (John Saxon) to arrest him on murder charges and spirit him away. But the sheriff doesn’t quite cooperate. Seems he was once Widmark’s deputy, and the marshal had championed the young man despite the town’s prejudice against his Greek roots.

The editor of the newspaper, who has a dark secret to keep, tries to bushwhack Widmark. His attempt fails, and he commits suicide. When the editor’s son tries to avenge his father’s death, he gets shot in an exchange of gunfire with Widmark. Before he dies, the young man learns his father’s secret.

The rest of the film is a long bloodbath, as the sardonic owner of the Alamo saloon (Carrol O’Connor) and two cronies try to gun down the marshal themselves. Two get shot dead, and the bar owner is roped and dragged off through a corral of milling cattle by Widmark on horseback. The marshal is finally cut down in a barrage of rifle fire as he staggers, already wounded, into the center of the town’s main street. The town fathers have finally rid themselves of him. 

Lena Horne, 1964

Characters. The old-west marshal out of place in a new-west town makes for an interesting story. Hired many years ago, he cleaned up the town at the point of a gun. The film begins with his 13th fatality, as he shoots a man who tries to ambush him in a livery stable. Not exactly an outlaw, however, the dead man was the aggrieved husband of a woman Patch has apparently been bedding.

Afterward, Patch and the widow have a long scene together in which she laments a life wasted on a man she long ago stopped loving. There’s also a good deal of warmth lacking in her feelings for Patch, though her reasons are not clear. She tells him she hates him before he makes his exit.

Patch also has an ongoing affair with the owner of another saloon, played by singer Lena Horne. She keeps a stable of whores, who are an ordinary-looking bunch next to their stunningly beautiful employer. Patch, in a quick decision never explained, proposes marriage to her in the last reel, and within an hour the JP is pronouncing them man and wife.

Carrol O’Connor stands out in a role that looks ahead to his Archie Bunker. A long cheroot between his teeth, he and his two associates are for a long time a kind of chorus observing and commenting on the action. It’s a surprise when they assist the newspaper editor’s son in his effort to kill the marshal. And it’s another surprise when they begin a firefight with him themselves.

Garden of Evil (1954)

The more I watch old westerns, the more I appreciate that they were made for grownups. The kids in the audience were there to learn, not to be entertained. If they paid attention, they’d learn how adult men and women behaved, for better or worse. There was excitement at appropriate intervals – for the kid in everyone – but the meaning of what came in between was chiefly for the adults, and for kids to ponder.

Garden of Evil is maybe a strange name for a western. But given to a story of how greed, self-interest, and sexual desire get people into trouble, it is not far off the mark. The set-up is simple. A woman enlists the help of four men to rescue her husband, who is trapped in a gold mine deep in the mountains of Mexico.

The men have been set ashore indefinitely after their ship founders on its way to the gold fields of California. There’s Gary Cooper, a man of few words who reveals only that he’s been a sheriff. There’s a talkative gambler, played by Richard Widmark, who befriends him.

Tagging along is an impulsive and quick-tempered younger man played by Cameron Mitchell. Joining them is a tall, dark, and handsome hombre played by Mexican actor Victor Manuel Mendoza. He and Cooper converse in Spanish, and with your Spanglish you can easily follow along. (The ubiquitous Whit Bissell was apparently not available for this film.)

The woman (Susan Hayward) packs a pistol and means business. She is Anne Baxter’s counterpart all over again (see my review of Yellow Sky), better dressed but holding her own against a tag team of men. When the Mexican hombre secretly leaves marks along the trail to the gold mine, she gets rid of them. When the “youngster” makes a pass at her, she puts up a good fight.

Risk factors. A real test of everyone’s mettle comes early in the trip as they ride a narrow trail along the face of a cliff. It’s unnerving enough for someone with acrophobia like me, but they have to leap their horses across a place where the ledge has fallen away completely. That’s where I would have turned back. But nobody does.

The risk factor is ramped up by the presence of “hostiles,” referred to as Apaches in the film. There’s not much evidence that Apaches ventured this far into subtropical Mexico, so you may have trouble taking this as seriously as the film’s characters. But no one seems to have told the Apaches. They eventually show up anyway. And wearing Mohawk haircuts.

The DVD commentary notes that the original script, called The Fifth Rider, was set in Arizona. Then Darryl F. Zanuck decided that Mexico would make a more picturesque location for a widescreen western. The Apaches seem to have come along for the ride.

Yellow Sky (1948)

This post-war western is set somewhere in the Southwest in post-Civil-War 1867. Gregory Peck leads a gang of six bank robbers who escape across a vast salt flat and fetch up in a ghost town. Like Prospero and Miranda, a prospector and his granddaughter are the only inhabitants. They’ve successfully extracted a fortune in gold, and the gun-toting granddaughter (Anne Baxter) is all for the gang’s immediate departure.

You can forget any memory of Peck as kindly Atticus Finch. He is fully believable as a tough-as-nails gang leader, who isn’t leaving town without the gold or the girl. For both, he has to contend with two fellow gang members, played by a snarly Richard Widmark and tall, dark, and long-legged John Russell (TV’s “Lawman”). Harry Morgan (TV’s Col. Potter on “M.A.S.H.”) plays another member of the gang. Well-written, well directed, well cast, the gang is a well-drawn collection of individuals, each with his own personality and intentions.

While the men are also well outfitted for their various roles as desperate men of the period, Anne Baxter looks like she stepped straight off the cover of a pulp novel. She’s wearing a man’s shirt for a top, and a very snug pair of Levi’s. She’s as tough as any man in the bunch, keeps a shotgun handy, and goes by the name of “Mike.”

Anyone analyzing gender roles in the film would have a heyday with this. One objective of the story is to “feminize” her character. The presence of the men competing for her attention is supposed to awaken her sexuality, long-starved by her life in the desert. By the end of the film, she’s wearing a bonnet and there’s the distinct possibility of a wedding. (I won’t give away which of the six men she picks.)

Warlock (1959)

To start with the title, a warlock is a male witch, and that already says a lot about the tone and subtext of this film. While brightly lighted, both indoors and out, there are more than enough dirty deeds and moral ambiguity to make this a western noir.

It’s a two-hour, big budget production with a large cast, and multiple plot strands. The plot, in fact, is too complex for a simple synopsis here. Characters switch alliances. They shift from one place on the moral spectrum to another. Action slows for exposition and the clarifying of motives.

Somehow it all holds together, even largely succeeds, surely because of capable direction from Edward Dmytryk. Mostly forgotten after its release in 1959, its reputation has grown over the decades as critics and western fans have rediscovered it.

Parallels to recent history. Dmytryk (a naturalized citizen of Ukrainian immigrant parents) had his troubles with the HUAC. After completing a real film noir, Crossfire (1947), he did time before naming names and resuming his career in Hollywood. All of which may help account for his handling of the material in this film.

The hero, played by Richard Widmark, is a former outlaw turned deputy sheriff, with a newfound respect for the law. He has troubles on both sides: (a) his ruthless former gang members and (b) a paid gunman, played by Henry Fonda, hired to clean up the town his own way. Steering a middle course between them, Widmark’s deputy is tentative but determined to represent duly constituted authority, even if it costs him his life.

He’s a decent man troubled by his past. In an extended scene that adds not a lot to the plot, he relates an incident in which the members of his gang disguised themselves as Apaches and killed 37 Mexicans trying to retrieve stolen cattle.

For me, it’s all a nice parallel of the situation in which Dymytryk found himself a decade before. Haunted by his former associations on the political left and up against a powerful, quasi-legal adversary on the right.