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.

Old West glossary, no. 20

Montana cowboys, c1910

Here’s another set of terms garnered from early western novels. Definitions were discovered in various online dictionaries, as well as searches in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, Dictionary of the American West, The New Encyclopedia of the American West, The Cowboy Dictionary, The Cowboy Encyclopedia, The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms, and The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

These are from novels by Harold Bindloss and Hugh Pendexter, about a rancher in British Columbia and a world-travelling showman. Once again I struck out on a few. If anybody knows the meaning of  “pleasuroid,” “gallery god,” or “toss up grapevines,” leave a comment. Images today are from old Fourth Readers (defined below).

Alice-blue = a pale tint of azure favored by Teddy Roosevelt’s daugher, Alice. “Now the average peon, after absorbing all the visible supply of aguardiente, will hunt all over the map for the most outre place in which to sleep off his Alice-blue rabbits.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith. 

big casino = an idea or asset expected to be a big winner. “Hiram fractured his face with another smile, and I instinctively knew he had big casino.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

boodle = corrupt politician. “How I wish we were back there living in Christian fraternity with Mike O’Daffy, the boodle alderman.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

brace game = any gambling game in which there is concealed cheating. “This is a brace game and we play no favorites.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

brûlée = a burned-over area of forest. “It was dark when they came out of the brûlée and pitched camp amidst the boulders beside a lonely lake.” Harold Bindloss, Alton of Somasco.

budget = a leather container. “Deringham glanced through his budget, and his face changed a little.” Harold Bindloss, Alton of Somasco. 

castor = a hat. “That was the only time Tib ever shied his castor into a ring.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

circus type = a display font with circus poster features. “He invented names of men and even States, and at the wind-up proclaimed in circus type that England was about to declare war against the North.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

copper = to bet against (a term from faro). “If we’d asked for potatoes they would have coppered us to lose, I reckon.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith. 

Daniel come to judgment = someone who makes a wise judgment about something that has previously proven difficult to resolve. “When it came to doing the Daniel-arrived-at-judgment act, he had Blackstone and all the other calf-bound antiques begging for mercy.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

deadhead = receiving services without paying. “We let them in for what they had, except the alcalde, who entered deadhead.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

devil’s club = a large forest shrub noted for its large leaves and woody stems covered in brittle spines. “His breath gave out as they floundered into fern-choked forest which was further garnished with the horrible devil’s club.” Harold Bindloss, Alton of Somasco. 

diligence = a stagecoach. “We sailed in November from ’Frisco, bound for San José de Guatemala. From there we were to take diligences to the capital.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith. 

Fourth Reader = a textbook of instructive readings for elementary school students. “Then came a few stanzas about his lost youth, and ‘Oft in the Stilly Night,’ and other Fourth Reader stunts.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

foozle = a miss, a blunder. “The chief rattled off a few eeny-meeny-miney-mo sentiments to his god and again swung back his club for another foozle.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

highbinder = a thug. “I told Tib it was bad enough to get chummy with various disagreeable forms of deaths in just trying to catch wild life for a show, without skiving our margin down another degree by inviting the acquaintance of that highbinder.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith. 

joss = an idol, figure of worship. “At that moment we completely filled in the foreground, middle distance, and background of all their joss dreams.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

Marlin rifle = a shoulder arm developed by John Marlin of New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1890s. “Seaforth was at the head of the stairway with a pack upon his back, and the barrel of a Marlin rifle sloped across his shoulders.” Harold Bindloss, Alton of Somasco.

mill = a fight, prizefight. “Dear, dear! what a mill it was, and neither of ’em wore the American flag or talked into phonographs!” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

pink tea = a formal tea or social occasion. “Tiberius Smith has never been eaten yet and doesn’t intend now to contribute himself for a pink tea.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith. 

Western writer inspiration no. 3

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Montana cowboys, 1904

Smoke of a .45, Charles Russell, 1908

Steer wrestler

Montana cowboy herding cattle, c1910

Straw

Working cowboys near Benjamin, Texas (CC) Pschemp

Come and get it!

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons 

Coming up: Old West glossary no. 20

Out and about: LAPL

Today I'm posting a short photo essay about my new "branch" of the Los Angeles Public Library. This busy place is located on a slope across Fifth Street from Bunker Hill, in the shadow of the high rise office buildings downtown. Built in 1926, it was damaged by fire, renovated, and reopened in 1993.

The small park has fountains, benches, and grass, where you can sit in the shade and read, with a cup of coffee from the cafe as I did on a recent afternoon. Around you is the hum of the city traffic and the sound of street musicians. In a city with few green areas and a short supply of tranquility, it's a haven for book lovers.

View of Central Library from elevated walkway at Fifth and Flower

Ground level view of fountain-lined entrance

Steps to entrance inscribed in various languages

Central room where the main floor's four corridors meet

Eight-story atrium with colorful hanging artwork

There's always Hope, and a way to find it.

Street-level entrance on Hope: "Books Invite All - They Constrain None"

Terraced walkways leading from Hope Street up to main floor entrance 

Two towering neighbors

Cafe with two food counters

Exit through the gift shop

The Dash shuttle that gets me there and back home for 25 cents each way

Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith (1907)

The full title of this comic novel is Tiberius Smith, as Chronicled by His Right Hand Man, Billy Campbell. Hugh Pendexter (1875-1940) became a prolific western writer in later years, but this early effort owes more to Jules Verne. Modeled after a fashion on great showmen like P. T. Barnum, world-traveler Tiberius Smith is a turn-of-the-century Phileas Fogg.

Tib helps four fugitives escape capture disguised as circus animals.

Tib, as he’s known by his young sidekick Billy, is often on the search for exotic wild animals. Whether leopards, apes, or polar bears, an order comes from a circus agency in New York, and the two men are off to another corner of the pre-postcolonial world. There the animals are easy to find, but the local natives are quick to take umbrage.

Thus every chapter is a different death-defying and thoroughly farcical adventure. In Mexico they are stranded in the middle of an insurrection. There they keep hostile troops at bay with the aid of a handy kinetoscope, projecting movies of marching armies on the side of a cliff.

Captured by headhunters in the Amazon, Tib engages the chief in a game of baseball, dumbfounding him with sinkers, sliders, and curve balls. Deep in the jungles of Burma, he discourages an attack of spear throwers by loading dogs with explosives. In Canada, they discover a stash of medieval armor in an abandoned fur trading post and get out of trouble by using it to skate along a frozen river with a band of indigenous cutthroats in hot pursuit.

And so on.

Abbott and Costello, 1949

All is told by Billy Campbell, a kind of James Boswell to the great man Tiberius. Reading his accounts, you find yourself looking ahead to the antics and wild excesses of the Keystone Kops, with the verbal hijinks of the Marx Brothers added in, and the buddyship of Abbott and Costello. Along with Mark Twain, you’re at the headwaters of American humor’s mainstream.

If you have the temerity to sample this novel, you’ll find the first stories lack the finesse of the later ones. Since making sense of it all relies not at all on the order you read them, start with the chapters near the end and work your way backwards.

All or nearly all of the Tiberius adventures appeared first in the magazines: Munsey’s, Saturday Evening Post, Everybody’s Magazine, and All-Story Magazine among others. Pendexter burst upon the scene in 1904 with a story in The Red Book. By 1907, the year that Tiberius Smith saw hard covers, he’d published 28 titles in the magazines. And it was just the start.

Tiberius Smith can currently be found at Internet Archive, google books, and for the nook.

Image credits:
Illustration from the novel by Albert Levering
Africa Screams, Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Old West glossary, no. 20

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.

Western writer inspiration no. 2

Introduced last week and continuing today is a collection of the past week's #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Cowboys and surf

River crossing, c1910

Buccaroos, Charles Russell, 1902

Bull wrestling. Frederic Remington, 1895

Mustangs, Utah

Idaho cowboys driving cattle

Arizona cowboys, roused by a scout, 1882

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Old West glossary, no. 20