Tag Archives: Robert Taylor

George Sanders: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Ivanhoe

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We’ve been doing a rather casual retrospective on the films of George Sanders and as part of the series, we thought it would be fitting to highlight three more of his performances. They run the gamut of literary adaptations, fantasy romances, and medieval yarns. Sanders remains his incorrigible self through them all, and we wouldn’t have him any other way.

Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

“Lead us not into temptation, forgive us our sins, wash away our iniquities”

Whether you say he cornered the market or simply got pigeonholed, George Sanders could always be called upon to play snooty Brits bubbling with wry wit and aristocracy. His Lord Henry Wotton is certainly wanton — an incorrigible influence on many a man — and his latest acquaintance becomes Dorian Gray.

Hurd Hatfield is the picture of handsome youthfulness, dark and aloof, though his piano playing leaves much to be desired.  His reputation must precede him and perhaps an actor with greater gravitas could have done more with the part. Hatfield feels generally inert and uninteresting. Over time, it’s hard to confuse his distance with inscrutable mystery.

The primary object of his desire begins with Angela Lansbury, an entrancing tavern singer with an equally gorgeous voice to go with it. Lansbury and then Donna Reed (his second flame) both deserved better, at least in their romantic lead if not the roles they were given.

It’s a quite loquacious film thanks in part to Sanders, who always has a cynical word for every situation and thus lays the groundwork for Dorian’s total immersion into hedonism.

The movie must work in mood and tone because there isn’t much in the realm of intemperate drama, and for some reason I found myself crying out for something more substantive than elliptical filmmaking. Whether it was merely to assuage the production codes or not, so much takes place outside the frame, which can be done artfully, and yet the distance doesn’t always help here.

The impartial narrator discloses Gray’s internal psychology to the audience as he’s perplexed by his evolving portrait — the lips now more prominently cruel than before. The ideas are intriguing in novel form in the hands of Oscar Wilde. Here it’s all rather tepid and not overtly cinematic watching a man traipse around his home tormented by his own inner demons.

It’s easy to contrast them, for their exploration of warring psyches and the duality of man’s morality, but this is not Jekyll and Hyde. However, on a fundamental level, I must consider my own criticisms because this is a story about pride, narcissism, and the selfish roots of evil in the human heart. They can be unnerving as we consider the portrait that might be staring back at us.

I find it a drolling, monotone movie other than the inserted shots of color that shock us into some knee-jerk reaction. It’s made obvious there’s a moral leprosy eating away at Dorian and the ending showcases much the same, doing just enough to hammer home the core themes of the story in a rousing fashion. Though your sins be as scarlet, I will wash them white as snow. It’s possible for the portrait to be remedied, though not without consequence.

3.5/5 Stars

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

“Haunted. How perfectly fascinating!”

If you don’t love Gene Tierney before The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, surely you must adore her afterward. She’s totally her own person; strong but not unpleasant thanks to her ever-congenial manner. She has immaculate poise and knows precisely what she wants.

Even in her mourner’s outfit in honor of her late husband, she has a regality drawn about her, vowing to leave his family and take her daughter (Natalie Wood) and their housekeeper Martha (Edna Best) to carve out a life of their own.

The film has a score from Bernard Herrmann post-Citizen Kane and pre-Vertigo that’s warm, majestic, jaunty, and frantic all at the precise moment to counterpoint Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s rather peculiar take on a romance film.

I realized an appeal for the picture I had never considered before. I find old haunted house movies, aside from those played for comedic effect, mostly overwrought and uninteresting. And yet even this early on in the lineage, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir effectively subverts the expected conventions.

Instead of merely being frightened off by the specters in an old seaside haunt of a deceased sea captain (Rex Harrison), it becomes her pet project. She’s intent on making it her home because she’s an obstinate woman — a descriptor she takes as the highest of compliments.

It’s pleasant how their immediate distaste and ill-will soften into something vaguely like friendship (and affection). They take on a literary voyage of their own as she helps transcribe his memoirs and vows to get them published for him.

George Sanders — always the opportunistic ladies’ man — shows up with his brand of leering, if generally good-natured impudence. In this case, he’s living a double life under the beloved pen name of Children’s book author Uncle Neddy. If his introduction seems sudden, its purposes quickly become evident. He is a real man of flesh and blood. It only seems right that Mrs. Muir makes a life for herself with him…

It’s curious how both men evaporate around the same time: one out of sacrifice, seeing her happy in reality, and not wanting to complicate her life more. The other’s gone because, well, he’s a cad. For those fond of Rex Harrison, it’s rather a shame he is absent from much of the picture, but this is by design because it is his very absence — this perceptible passage of time developed within the movie — that allows for such a meaningful conclusion.

It’s what the entire film builds to and between the rapturous scoring of Hermann and the simple but efficient special effects, it allows them to walk out together arm in arm as they were always meant to be. If they are apparitions, then at the very least they are together again no longer separated by chemistry, mortality, or anything else. These themes have been melded together innumerable times before but rarely have they coalesced so agreeably.

4/5 Stars

Ivanhoe (1952)

As a child, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe always lived in the shadow of Robin Hood. The same might be said of this movie and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood from years prior. By now Ivanhoe is both a feared and beloved mountebank and although late-period Robert Taylor is a bit old for the part and removed from his matinee idol days, it’s easy enough to dismiss.

Taylor and Errol Flynn were both heartthrobs around the same time. Now a generation later he looks a little weathered and threadbare for his tunic though he proves stout-hearted enough. Joan Fontaine also effectively replaces her own sister as the guiltless romantic interest.

However, there are some other intriguing elements I would have not expected of the film. It becomes a fairly robust dialogue on anti-Semitism and the relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles. We always think of British history or this particular period as a war merely between the Saxons and the Normans. Here we are met with a bit more complication.

Ivanhoe must play the rebel in the absence of his beloved King Richard, but he is also called upon to be a friend to the downtrodden even those of a different religious faith. In the moments where he’s called upon, he’s an unadulterated hero, and it’s all good fun watching him bowl over his rival knights like a row of five bowling pins. However, this is pretty much expected. It gets far better when he’s faced with mortal wounds in the wake of a duel (with George Sanders of all people).

Both Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Fontaine stand by ready to dote over him. The ambush by the Normans sets up a rousing finale every lad dreams about. Because my old friend Robin of Locksley comes to their aid prepared to lay siege to the enemy’s castle. Meanwhile, Ivanhoe leads a rebellion on the inside, freeing his friends and stoking a fire to smoke them out into the open.

Watching the choreographed craziness full of arrows and swords, shields, and utter chaos, I couldn’t help relishing the moment because we feel the magnitude of it all being done up for our own amusement. And it is a blast. Regardless, of the romantic outcomes, it’s a fairly satiating treat; I do miss the age of Medieval potboilers.

3.5/5 Stars

Vincente Minnelli’s Films (1946-1955)

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Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent hardly holds a substantial place in any noir conversations partially because Vincente Minnelli’s reputation in part seems antithetical to the dark style born out of chiaroscuro and German Expressionism. His background was squarely in luscious art design and stage productions.

Likewise, the combo of Katharine Hepburn and the two Roberts: Taylor and Mitchum, is not one that quickly springs to mind. However, there are some merits to it simply for the sake of it being different; not dramatically, these types of psychological women’s pictures were very much en vogue during the ’40s.

It’s the pieces assembled that feel unique if somewhat ill-suited. Still, the curious hybrid of tones and talents certainly is a historical curio more than intriguing to the invested party.

I almost have trouble buying Hepburn as a reticent, uncomfortable outsider among the D.C. elite her new husband Alan (Taylor) knows, a woman holding drinks in hand just waiting for someone to talk to. But if I don’t completely believe it, she does earn my empathy.

Mitchum, the legendary mule of RKO was simultaneously earmarked for 3 or 4 pictures at the time, and so he doesn’t show up in Undercurrent until much later. Still, he has the benefit of casting a Rebecca-like influence over the picture.

After an hour of building him up, we finally get sight of Mitchum, and we know where this story is going. Because he’s a real human being and fairly innocuous to the eye. As the presence of Mitchum begins to exert itself on the picture, the marital bliss of newlyweds grows more and more harrowing by the minute. We have a picture in the same vein as Suspicion and House on Telegraph Hill.

Despite choosing the part, the constraints of the role don’t feel totally in line with Hepburn’s talents. She isn’t a shrinking violet or the kind of timorous beauty befitting Joan Fontaine or even Ingrid Bergman. Robert Taylor is mostly adequate in the vengeful husband part. He flip-flops efficiently between these stints of gracious charm — a perfect husband and lover — then, becomes clouded by these perverse streaks of jealousy and rage.

3/5 Stars

The Pirate (1948)

It’s plain that The Pirate is born out of the traditions of the 1940s Hollywood lineage like Blood and Sand or Black Swan, even Gene Kelly’s own Three Musketeers. However, between the bright evocative staging of Vicente Minnelli and the instant performance-driven rapport of Garland and Kelly, it works quite splendidly with what it has to offer.

Today it doesn’t hold much of a reputation, and I would stop short of saying it’s a minor masterpiece. What we do have is a picture banking on the charisma of its leads and a certain pictorial opulence supplied by its primary mastermind.

Kelly, taking all the niñas of the town by storm, is full of allure and his usual magnetism as he twirls, leaps, and bounds between all the pretty girls. It’s all about the patter between the stars as he plays the foxy street performer, and Garland is the put-upon maiden who is betrothed to another man. His vocation gives the director license to use these elements of theatricality and faux drama to tell the story.

What do I mean? It could be a story of tragic, unrequited love. It might just as well be a tale of marauding pirates, and yet somehow, between the song and dance, it becomes a kind of tongue-in-cheek comedy of two lovers perfectly suited for one another being thrown together.

There are moments where Garland and Kelly seem to be playing in a separate movie, or at least they are in on the joke with the rest of us, even as they mess with each other. Trashing his apartment feels like the highest form of romantic tension only for the drama to become slightly heady again: Kelly is set to be hung as the dreaded pirate Macoco. Is it a first to have a musical number performed under a hangman’s noose? I’m not sure.

Thankfully, he gets some stellar support. While I’ll be the first to admit “Be a Clown” feels like a less funny prototype for “Make em Laugh,” if you’ve never seen the Nicholas Brothers, it’s a small recompense to see them join Gene Kelly and get some commendation in the spotlight as his momentary equals. It feels like a flawed but heartfelt apex to a picture that could be described in much the same terms.

3/5 Stars

Madame Bovary (1949)

Madame Bovary is the kind of trenchant literary work the Production Codes would go to all costs to declaw. In one manner, it’s somewhat remedied by James Mason’s framing by providing a mostly blase narrative device to enter the story.

Even as something leaner in budgeted black & white (one could hardly confuse The Pirate with Madame Bovary), it’s still the same Minnelli. The ball sequence spelling the ascension of Emma (Jennifer Jones) as a society darling, while somewhat compact, exudes an impressive opulence.

The director makes sure to follow Jones’s incandescent form as she prances and waltzes her way across the dance floor with great distinction. Her gown alone is enough to make the upper classes stand up and take note. The dashing Louis Jourdan is certainly more than aware of her. It’s totally taken up by the kind of swirling euphoria also holding a place in the oeuvre of Marcel Ophuls — Letter from an Unknown Woman and Earrings of Madame De…spring instantly to mind.

It becomes more and more of a gothic drama as things progress, overtaken by gales of wind, thunder, lightning, and an incessant downpour of rains to go with the equally tumultuous score of Miklos Roza.

However, more importantly, Emma becomes possessed by all of her own ambitions and preoccupations. She is emotionally distant from her husband (Van Heflin), absent from her child, and totally involved with other men. She entreats them to take her away from such a dreary life, constantly prone to these histrionic gestures of love and loss at the hands of her suitors and husband. They hardly know how to respond to her.

If the terminology was present at the time, she is cut out of the cloth of some kind of femme fatale, albeit born out of the annals of classic literature. Moreover, she is a woman who never seems to know what she truly wants. She sends out an array of mixed signals — living a life made up of so many contours and emotions — and never settling on anything honest.

It’s as if she’s fashioned a kind of fantasy life for herself woven out of her own personal whims though she remains self-destructive to the very last iota of her being. There’s something unnerving about her and Jones plays her as such; it’s easy to understand how society was scandalized by her because she does not live by societal norms. Mason’s concessions for her character aren’t enough to totally wipe out the harrowing impact of the performance.

3.5/5 Stars

The Cobweb (1955)

“What happens if you go into town to the movies? You start screaming or something? They’d think you’re a critic, that’s all.” – John Kerr as Steven

If it’s true you can make a screwball comedy like Easy Living (1937) about a fur coat falling from the sky, then it’s equally possible to make a portrait of psychological horror about drapes. The Cobweb busies itself with the vast array of interpersonal relationships taking place on the grounds of a psych ward. Richard Widmark does his best to aid his patients in their recoveries as he juggles familial and boardroom responsibilities. It’s no easy balancing act.

For a film that is mostly disregarded, it’s easy to clump it together with something like Executive Suite (also produced by John Houseman) with one of the most phenomenal assortments of players one could hope to cobble together during the golden era of Hollywood.

Lilian Gish is at her most ornery but lest we forget, she truly is the queen of the movies. Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall are equally crucial touchstones of film history, playing two respective love interests as Widmark struggles to connect with his wife, Gloria Grahame. Even ’30s scream queen, Fay Wray, has a brief appearance in a picture that boasts Oscar Levant and then the up-and-coming talents of John Kerr and Susan Strasberg.

In one scene with all the various folks blocked throughout the room, it’s almost difficult to distinguish who’s a patient and who’s not, but if we are to appreciate this drama, it doesn’t half matter. Widmark falls for another woman. Grahame flaunts her charms and goes looking for love from Boyer, who is now mentally compromised. Gish is incensed about having her opinions disregarded. Some of them are petty and others are stricken with loneliness and actual psychoses.

The palette becomes such an evocative way to color the emotional undercurrent and elements of suburban life, not unlike some of Nicholas Ray‘s work or something like Strangers When We Meet. The visual world is beautiful; still, it lets loose an environment full of pain and inner turmoil. Although Minnelli handles his characters deftly, there’s no place for the film to go but toward a hysterical fever pitch.

3.5/5 Stars

The Law and Jake Wade (1958): Robert Taylor and Richard Widmark

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It’s initially intriguing to have a western pairing of Robert Taylor and Richard Widmark, rather like what we get out of Warlock from Henry Fonda and Widmark the year after. My estimation of the dashing ’30s matinee idol has refined over time as he matured into such worthwhile westerns as The Devil’s Doorway, Westward The Women, and even Saddle the Wind.

Here again, Taylor holds the mantle as the inscrutable, no-nonsense lead and Widmark falls back into his role as a merciless reprobate, prone to all sorts of aggression. What’s more, there’s something delightfully skeezy about his voice. He slips into it so seamlessly playing a kindred of Tommy Udo or any of his more reprehensible characters.

The premise is set up immediately with a brazen jailbreak — one man comes in for his pal — and then they shoot their way out of town toward freedom. However, it quickly becomes more complicated. Jake Wade (Taylor) and Clint Hollister (Widmark) are not so much friends as former acquaintances.

This is merely an act of reciprocation because when they raided the Yankees during the Civil War, they formed an uneasy alliance, out of necessity, before eventually parting ways. If they don’t entirely hate each other’s guts, then at the very least they’re deeply mistrustful.

It’s even more curious when Jake returns to his current life. He’s a town’s marshall. How do you make sense of him? In one moment he commits a brazen act of jailbreak, and yet in another, he sits behind a desk in a decent, sleepy town holding a position of repute. Here the noir element is made evident — the way a dark past always comes back to haunt the protagonist and the life he’s tried to make for himself.

In the meantime, the imagery and more specifically the snow-covered mountains are an awesome backdrop and something only the western landscape affords. Jake also is keeping company with a pretty gal. Patricia Owens reminds me a bit of Julie London, mousier but deeply sensible. Her requests make sense, but her man can’t tell her his misgivings without dredging up unwanted memories.

Because Widmark is the force out of his past he can never totally get rid of. We wonder why he pulled him out of prison. It might come down to some moral prerogative, but it feels a lot like letting the monkey out of the cage so it can end up on your back again.

The old gang moves in and Taylor is taken prisoner with the sole purpose of leading them back to a cache of gold pieces he buried in some forsaken town years before. The journey is long and arduous and the callous Clint makes his old partner do it with his hands tied behind his back. He’ll give him a horse, but he doesn’t trust him with more. If you give him an inch, there’s no telling what will happen.

Deforrest Kelly never quite does it for me as one of the heavies — though he’s quite a psychotic hulk in Warlock. Of all the sidekicks, Henry Silva has real umbrage and a chip on his shoulder, coming off smug and vaguely dangerous.

However, in its best moments, it really becomes a fitting inverse of The Naked Spur held aloft by the two central performances dueling it out. The bad guy is the one holding the reins and dictating the story while our hero and his girlfriend are under his watchful eye as they go on the hunt for the buried treasure. The tension rides with them every moment of their trek.

When Widmark skirts off to catch the Native scouts that bode trouble, there’s a fear something will be lost in the movie. We stay back with the others as they wait it out in the ghost town, and it feels mostly stagnant. The dynamic brought by Taylor opposite Widmark is momentarily relinquished.

In its wake, there’s a run-of-the-mill shoot ’em-up Indian barrage. I couldn’t help but compare it with the shootout in Man of the West also preoccupied with a ghost town. However, whereas that film has Gary Cooper and a mythos about it like a knowing predecessor to Sergio Leone’s stylized showdowns, Jake Wade feels mostly unspectacular. It’s a shame because the film packages together a handful of worthwhile performances and tangible menace in fits and starts.

3/5 Stars

The Last Hunt (1956) and The Killing Fields

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The Last Hunt considers an era that is no more. Once America’s Great Plains ran rampant with herds of bison numbering up to 60,000,000 based on the estimation of this movie. The initial premise of Richard Brooks’ western intrigues for the sole fact that this is a slice of history that doesn’t get much screen time in the cinematic west and, thus, it offers a framework for some potentially pointed commentary.

The onus for the circumstances is placed on both hunters and American Indians for recklessly slaughtering the population down to a mere 3,000. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems much of the blame must be cast on the white men. But this is something to get into later. 

For now, it should be briefly mentioned the movie has a great deal of footage shot in the famed Custer State Park spread out across the Badlands, and if you’ve never had the opportunity to go there, I would certainly recommend it, if only for the chance to see some bison. 

I’ve gotten the exhilarating opportunity to see bison several times in my life and let us just say, there’s nothing quite like it as far as putting you in touch with the sheer majesty of nature. To look at one of those creatures in close proximity, even from the relative safety of an automobile, is breathtaking. It gives one an even deeper appreciation for both the magnitude and the inner turmoil The Last Hunt attempts to grapple with. 

Sandy McKenzie (Stewart Granger) for one, is a big-time hunter who wants to wash his hands clean of the profession. He’s intent on taking one last job and moving on. However,  it’s one of his colleagues, the bloody-thirsty Charlie Gilson (Robert Taylor), who derives an unseemly amount of pleasure out of his vocation. He stays matter-of-factly, “Killing, fighting, war, that’s the natural state of things” and he wholeheartedly believes it. This mentality bleeds into all facets of his life. 

For one thing, he despises Indians. They’re hardly better than the big-time game he bags, and he’s quick to deride the genial half-breed who joins their company (Russ Tamblyn). Sandy is just as quick to welcome the boy on, and it’s yet another uneasy wedge between the two hunters. 

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Watching the bison drop instantly to the ground as dead weight is in itself a bit perturbing and feels unnatural. Be forewarned, The Last Hunt is not for the squeamish because there is nothing simulated about the hunting throughout the film, actually performed by government sharpshooters who thinned out the bison population. Why it is done this way I’m not quite sure.

Likewise, watching Taylor blast away at the giant beasts until he’s decimated a whole pack for their skins, and then a moment layer cutting away to what feels like a bison killing field leaves a startling impression. The baby bison are left parent-less and a majestic white buffalo — believed to be medicine for the natives — is unceremoniously struck down. 

But this is only a backdrop or even a representation of what is going in the hearts & minds of the two characters as they chafe against one another. The movie would not work without both of their points of view. Charlie continues to exercise his almighty power of life and death over the beasts, relishing every minute, because killing is the only real proof you’re alive. His words, not mine.  Sandy could care less — having his own personal crisis of conscience — even as he extends a courteousness to his fellow man, no matter their creed. 

 Lloyd Nolan, who might best be remembered for character parts in the 30s and 40s, to my recollection puts together one of the most colorful portrayals of his career. His cackling “Woodfoot” holds a foolhardy appreciation for life and the rush of the hunt. It’s a lark to him, but he’s also good at what he does. The resplendent green plains laden with sheets of pine trees capture the sense of rip-roaring adventure out on the trail as the raucous pegleg tears across the territory with a giddy sense of abandon. 

Over time he settles into a good-natured sagacity even as he provides nighttime accordion playing to lighten the mood. He’s a bit of insulation between the men around him while offering the young boy neighborly advice. He softens and becomes more decent as Charlie becomes more and more stricken with his crazed obsession. 

the last hunt

Because there are only a handful of primary characters, each one has a very specific personality put on display and each earns their keep in the movie. The one exception seems to be Debra Padget, no fault of her own. She is an extremely alluring albeit absent beauty. Charlie desires her lustily, despite his bigotry, while Sandy becomes her de facto protectorate. I feel sorry for her because with the part she has to play — as the captured Indian maiden with child — she can’t win. Obviously, there’s a vague sense of her being a love interest, but in a male-dominated arena, she doesn’t have much import, unfortunately.

 Though the picture doesn’t have the best track record with American Indians — this is often the case with westerns circa 1956 — The Last Hunt does make a valiant attempt at some kinds of off-handed commentary. When talking about their customs, Charlie says, “Indians they don’t have religion.” Woodfoot replies with a cynical response of his own, “Indian religion is just the same as ours, except they don’t pass the hat after they pray.”

There’s another moment worth mentioning as a kind of mutual appreciation builds between Sandy and Padget’s nameless Indian girl. He acknowledges that he learned how to ride and learned about life from natives, so he holds them in the highest esteem. Proximity breeds this kind of empathy. 

She comes back around with her own version (by taking care of a toddling infant who is not her own child). She learned babies belong to all people, a sympathetic pearl of wisdom gained from Christian missionaries. It’s in this space where they form a kind of shared understanding built on mutual respect. 

But there comes a point of no return. For Sandy, he goes into town to sell their skins for a hefty sum, but he’s also resolved to get some of the buffalo stench off of him. He’s ashamed and the whole outpost points to his ignominy. Soon he’s brawling over the beasts to the chorus of rowdy honky-tonk and bodies flying over and under the bar.

 Charlie fairs little better as he goes into a continued fit of paranoid delusion leading him toward a chasm of madness. He believes his partner is looking to double-cross him, and he’s prepared to track him down and kill him if he has to (or anyone else who might get in his way). For all his disreputable malevolence, Robert Taylor is undoubtedly the film’s standout totally committing to his demented role. Granger is a necessary foil, but he and most everyone else must play cool and understated only smoldering under Nilson’s provocations. 

Truthfully, the ending feels woefully anticlimactic, or at least ill-gotten, failing to follow the trajectory that the story looked to be paying off. Still, up until this point The Last Hunt has a nervy tenacity in its best moments that might well leave a lasting impression on a willing audience. It remains a contentious indictment of America’s dubious indiscretions even as it also helps to unwittingly propagate a few more. Sometimes the good comes with the bad. 

3/5 Stars

Westward The Women (1951): A Fuller, Richer Kind of Western

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westward the women

My only qualm with Westward The Women might be the title itself because otherwise, it’s a striking movie that should rightfully be heralded as a supremely significant western for the story it chooses to tell. At the very least, the title does make it evident that this is a story with women at the forefront — after all, the journey west was just as much theirs as anyone else’s. They just needed someone in a position of influence to enable them.

John McIntire is the visionary who can see what his land would become if subdued by men who could settle down with wives and make it into a suitable country. He’s already got the land. He’s already got the hands to work it. He just needs the women.

But he needs a man with the grit and horse sense to make it a reality because the closest females are thousands of miles away from his pristine California valley. Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) is the man for the job with a plethora of experience when it comes to being a wagon master. This task seems nearly unthinkable, and he takes it mainly for the money. He doesn’t necessarily believe they can make it. He hasn’t met the women yet.

As if to confirm his expectations, most of them are city folk and have neither fired guns nor ridden horses. They already have a few strikes against them. He’s hardly impressed, propped up in the corner with his hat tipped back contemptuously. During the vetting process, Mr. Whitman takes on the recruits with a far more benevolent eye.

They run the gamut from the imposing Hope Emerson to ladies with sullied reputations (among them Denise Darcel). The fact that an Italian widow and her young son sign aboard must also make us pause for a moment.

Because Westward the Women isn’t merely a story about heroic women — it is certainly this. However, since it was originally conceived by Frank Capra (who wrote the story and planned to direct), it’s an immigrant tale, albeit between Chicago and California.

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While Robert Taylor is rightfully acerbic and disaffected for the part, he also has a strict sense of equity extending to both genders. Although he has a crew of veteran men working with him, he’s not going to take any of their guff or fooling around, and he’s prepared to kill to maintain order. It’s supremely harsh but then again, he seems to understand something few others do: This is a life or death scenario.

There are the torrential downpours that nearly wash them away, the treacherous terrain crushes a couple of their wagons to pieces, and, of course, there’s the threat of Indian raids. Worst of all is the internal division inside the company. Buck knows they will never survive if they can’t stick together.

The trail requires the supreme sacrifice of many who give their lives in service to the journey. It’s never easy but more than anyone else, the women’s resolve is firm. They will make it to their destination even if it kills them. Moment by moment, we learn more about the depth of their character.

The movie is a western that cuts against the grain — of both the 1850s and the 1950s —  engaged in telling a story predominantly about women featuring a Japanese character who feels at least a little bit more substantial than a sideshow attraction. His existence at all feels unheard of for depictions of either era.

I wish more directors and westerns had seen fit to have characters like Henry Nakamura (also featured prominently in Go For Broke!). While he might not be a totally integral piece, he adds yet another perspective to the movie and provides a kind of empathetic echo chamber for Robert Taylor (ie. When you’re wrong big boss, I’ll tell you).

There’s also the long-running gag with Ito’s Japanese creating an unspoken irony between what he says in his native tongue and what he expresses to Wyatt. When they finally happen upon the grave of Wyatt’s dead buddy (and with it a cache of rum), Ito voices his surprise, then says “Good ol’ Quackenbush.” His translation is liberal, to say the least!

Still, one of the most unforgettable interludes comes with reading off the roll call of those who were lost in the latest raid. It moved me immensely. Most of these women we don’t know by name, but they leave an insurmountable impact on the story representing so much of the human spirit and the dignity held aloft by the film. They feel, rightfully so, like a hallowed list of heroes.

And again, over any prevailing plot points, it’s the specific touches that will be remembered going forward. With the trail getting unstable ahead, the women are beseeched to lighten their loads and begrudgingly ditch all their worldly possessions at the roadside. It becomes a graveyard of discarded belongings as they roll ever onward.

westward the women

Then, there’s a little dog being carried along in a bucket under the birth of the wagon or the impression of a wayward wagon wheel left behind in the middle of the desert in their wake. They stop for nothing.

Finally, they get to The Promised Land, with fresh springs of running water, but before they go over the hill, Buck vows to gather together garments so they can look their best for their future husbands. There’s a kind of mounting expectation on all sides. It’s something supremely special they all get to take part in and we are privy to it as well.

When Taylor speaks to the men, he entreats them, “These are good women, great women, make sure you treat them right because God help you if you don’t.” He’s grown to esteem them just as his audience has. Thankfully, these men will too.

When the sexes finally get together, it feels a bit like a western cotillion and the ending is fittingly idyllic as they create a kind of rural utopia built on the bedrock of matrimony, decency, and hard work.

John Ford was always the purveyor of civilization making its way across the West, but we must remember Capra also had a stake in representing the American Dream. As the actual director of this film, William Wellman does a fine job capturing the adventure with the trials and tribulations of a wagon train, highlighted by numerous standout performances garnering an abiding admiration for all these folks.

Westward The Women is sadly the exception to the rules governing the western genre, but what a treasure it is to have as a kind of hagiography to the pioneering ladies who weathered immense hardship to pursue their dreams. Whether fact or fiction, the portrayals feel revolutionary, and what a joy it is to find such bountiful parts for people as diverse as Hope Emerson and Henry Nakamura. They suggest a fuller, richer western landscape than we’re in a habit of seeing.

4/5 Stars

Magnificent Obsession (1935): Stahl Vs. Sirk Again

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As I continue my mini odyssey considering the differences between the melodrama of John M. Stahl and Douglas Sirk, one of the finest exhibit pieces is an early scene in Magnificent Obsession.

The beloved Dr. Hudson has died because the life-saving pulmotor he needed was being used on someone else. An irresponsible playboy, named Bob Merrick, is saved in his place, having capsized his boat during one of his typically drunken evenings. It just doesn’t seem fair. One man so good is lost and the man who probably doesn’t deserve to live regains his life. It’s a rather blatant allegory of Christian grace and it makes sense, after all, Magnificent Obssession was supposedly penned by a minister: Lloyd C. Douglas.

Here is my long-winded point. This plays as a critical scene in Sirk’s picture. We see Merrick on the water and we see it happen right in front of us. However, in Stahl’s rendition, it’s all over and done with after a few throway lines of expositional dialogue between doctors. It’s as if he’s purposefully shying away from the drama. It’s this quality that might save Magnificent Obsession from being a total bore.

I never gave much thought to it before, but Robert Taylor makes a modest approximation of Rock Hudson a few decades earlier. One could say Rock’s career was far more successful and well-remembered, but they both manage the smart-aleck ne’er do well quite easily. In both cases, this was one of the early movies helping to put them in the public eye as legitimate star power.

Regardless, a curious dichotomy is purposefully set up by the movie, with one man unseen a beloved martyr, and another one alive, the incorrigible playboy. Dr. Hudson’s goodness hangs over Merrick’s life — haunting him in a sense — making him feel even worse about who he is as a person.

Soon he’s struggling with self-loathing. Although it feels more complicated than that because he’s still overtly narcissistic; deep down he knows everyone dislikes him vehemently.

It becomes a movie of who Merrick falls into company with after sneaking out of the hospital against protocol. First, it’s Masterson (Charles Butterworth) who might as well be his comic sidekick unwittingly carried away by all his mischief.

Next, it’s Mrs. Hudson (Irene Dunne) the beautiful young wife of the man he indirectly killed. When he actually finds out who she is he feels even more ashamed to show his face in front of her. He just wants to get drunk and try to forget.

Then, by some curious bit of Providence, he winds up at the home of a stonecutter. The man happened to be a close friend of Dr. Hudson. Similar to Sirk’s rendition, he imparts the wisdom the good doctor provided him. He was taught how to make contact with a source of infinite power. If you think this sounds like a seance and pseudo-science, you’re not alone. It feels like the strangest introduction of religion into the storyline imaginable with electrical energy acting as some mystical metaphor for God.

This layman makes another fascinating statement that might not sound all that foreign to us today. He’s not interested in religion but interested in Jesus — the God-man — who was so successful in the science of generating human power. It’s as if he was a mere humanitarian or an entrepreneur in human capital.

I always have trouble dealing with these kinds of expressions in relation to the Christian doctrinal claims. It’s not that it’s simplistic; rather it seems to totally disregard some of the things this God-man purportedly said. They feel radical, unsettling, incisive at times — surely not warm and fuzzy enough for a movie like this.

Still, this pseudo-Gospel becomes a journey to find people who need help and then giving it to them. But, of course, there’s a catch. You must give to others in absolute secrecy — it’s a scrooge-like endeavor and there’s some truth in this kind of altruism, still, it feels laughable even folly to call it a theory to be followed.

It’s a kind of pay-your-way to the good person’s club, whether you believe in the afterlife or just in being a good person in a legalistic sense. Either way, surely we can agree these strict parameters seem suspect.

Regardless, Merrick somehow gets swept up by them as he vows to put this “theory” into practice. He’s done so much to injure and totally destroy Helen Hudson’s life through his own selfish negligence.

However, in a strange way, it’s as if he’s in pursuit of his dead rival’s wife. Although it might be totally out of the goodness of a changed heart, he looks to reconnect with her, and give her life new joy. It all feels rather twee in comparison to Sirk’s update, which at least swells with the kind of grandiloquence which seems, at the very least, self-aware.

As much as I admire Irene Dunne as an unsung and ever adaptable talent and my mild affinity for Robert Taylor has gotten a boost in recent days, Magnificent Obsession is rather hard to take. It’s an outlandish drama full to the brim with preposterousness that doesn’t even attempt to court any semblance of reality. Similarly, its religiosity, romance, and just about everything else feels sugar-coated and simplified. Somehow it hasn’t maintained its flavor as well as some of Stahl’s earlier efforts.

3/5 Stars

Johnny Eager (1941): Taylor and Turner Spark Dynamite

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“Are you thinking of allowing her to play Roxanne to your Cyrano?” – Van Hefflin to Robert Taylor

Pretty faces don’t always add up to a quality movie and if you want to find where the faults lie, you might look between the players and the script then split the difference. Johnny Eager has all the Classic Hollywood trappings that very well could have made it dead on arrival — especially years later.

Because our protagonist has a name that only exists in the movies (or Hollywood for that matter). He’s a gangster from the old days formerly clad in the finest of threads and raking in the dough. To this day, he’s unrepentant or at least blatantly honest about how he feels; he’s no chump, even despite a stint he did behind bars.

Now he’s on the outside on parole making a go at propriety as a cabby. After this preliminary bit of eye-opening exposition, the story has all but telegraphed its intentions, really no fault of its own. It doesn’t take much imagination to put a reformed Robert Taylor and a curious young sociology debutant like Lana Turner together.

They meet through his parole officer: a white-haired, benevolent picture of authority. He seems to believe every man is capable of reform and human goodness if only given a chance. His secretary, on the other hand, gives Johnny the stink eye. Lisbeth Bard can hardly take her eyes off of him.

Of course, none of this is on the level because Johnny is busy getting into his old rackets, including an ambitious plan to resurrect the Algonquin dog races to make a killing out of it. Simultaneously, he’s double-dealing, getting his sister and bratty niece to masquerade as his alibi. They’re nicely compensated of course to play up a squeaky clean picture of domesticity.

One has to laugh. The authorities must be idiots and Johnny accordingly plays them for fools. He’s a modern-day Machiavelli and this combination of authority, guile, strength, and charm makes Johnny Eager come off a bit more significant than a walking caricature.

It’s true Taylor had caught ahold of something in his career and whether or not he was considered a negligent actor and merely a pretty face, he brings a definite machismo to the screen more than capable of knocking off everyone else around him. He’s without a doubt the center of the action despite the plethora of scene stealers around him.

But one cannot forget the diffident school girl played by Turner, quoting Cyrano de Bergerac and sporting a hat to beat them all. What overtakes her exactly? Is it some compulsion to flirt to convert a wayward soul? Is it simply yearning passion? Whatever the reason, the film is full of “inamorata” — men and women lovers.

Not least among them is Van Heflin who’s quite the educated fellow, quick and rich on the prose, especially when he’s soused with liquor. Jeb is Johnny’s most faithful friend for reasons the movie never puts to words. But whereas everyone else is either a hired ally, a paid stooge, or an easy rival, Jeb stays by him because he has no one else.

The film is at its most engaging tracing the lines and mixing its reference points between literate dames and men pontificating with a grandiloquent verbosity while the thugs rattle off their own barb-wire jargon prickling the ears. They tumble around inside the head as the most unrealistic and simultaneously peculiar cocktail of discordant voices.

Heflin does very little compared to the other forthcoming gruff, garble-mouthed, shifty-eyed types, and yet he doesn’t need to because the words flowing off his lips play like riffs off the rest of the film. He seems to relish every soliloquy he gets to run off, and it definitely leaves an overall impression.

But the real fire is between Taylor and Turner for as long as they get on screen together. Aside from Johnny’s clandestine activity, Lisbeth Bard’s step-father happens to be a crucial man. Edward Arnold aptly plays the domineering and vengeful district attorney, who just so happens to be situated in the most convenient place in the movie. He helped put Eager away in the penitentiary as a service to the public. Now Johnny’s looking to stick it to him with Lisbeth implicated in his own crimes.

Could it be he never loved her at all? It always functioned as business over love? Regardless of his motives, enemies become accomplices as he leverages his new position to open up the long-dormant dog racing track. Everyone across the board has got an angle. What sets Johnny apart is his self-serving shrewdness, never blinded by sentimentalities such as sacrificial love, grace, or a guilty conscience.

Meanwhile, Lisabeth is overtaken by mental frailty and paranoia. She’s not bred for the cutthroat gangster’s life like Johnny. Her tragic hysteria forces him into a type of hero’s choice. It’s what all Hollywood movies ask of their protagonists. Something is required of them in the end.

In its day, Johnny Eager was a stirling success, and if history is any indication, it might have one of the most tragic days in American history to thank. It premiered in Los Angeles on December 9th, 1941. For those keeping tabs, this is two days after Pearl Harbor.

It heightens the dramatics just enough to bring out of the realm of reality and into the spaces of escapism. Where illicit romance can shoot off like fireworks on the screen between two scintillating specimens like Taylor and Turner. They were TNT as the contemporary advertisements so aptly framed it. They were the eye candy; they were the distraction to take the masses away from the tragedy right outside those cinema doors.

In a short time, the movies would be acting as a comment on the world at-large and the war at-large with propaganda machines spinning on all cylinders. For now, they still act as a counterpoint saying something about the state of a nation by not saying anything at all.

The story ends in a somewhat comforting manner, ultimately capping off with a Hollywood moralism that made sense, creating heroes out of gangsters far away from the chaos of sneak attacks and brazen days of infamy. It just goes to show life is more ambiguous and thus more complex than a movie.

3.5/5 Stars

Waterloo Bridge (1940) and The Farewell Waltz

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If you’re like me, Waterloo conjures up a limited array of mental images. Napoleon and The Battle of Waterloo. The Kinks and Waterloo Sunset. That’s about the extent of it. Now I can add Vivien Leigh, Robert Taylor, and Waterloo Bridge to the list.

Fittingly, our opening prologue begins at the titular location, as a handsome man with a touch of gray, dressed in military attire, makes a ponderous appearance. The place holds an obvious resonance for him even as he holds an unnamed token in his hands. This is Robert Taylor. He probably looks too virile to be an old man, but that’s hardly his fault. At any rate, he’s preparing to give one of the most continuously amiable performances of his career.

Then, we’re back in time. For a minute the cultural moment caught me off guard. Even though the flashback seemed to denote the first war to end all wars, how our star couple first meets, heading to the Underground for an air raid, feels like a distinctly World War II-era image. However, it happened earlier as well, and it makes for a very practical meet-cute.

With the Germans threatening to rain down their ammunition, the Underground is stuffed to the gills with all sorts including Captain Roy Cronin and Myra Lester (Vivien Leigh), a member of a ballet troupe. This might be their first and last meeting, but the spell between them is too bewitching. The cinematic mechanisms of star-crossed love are at work.

There’s a warmth and romantic civility bathing the picture, and it’s the kind of feeling you often seem to get in pictures of old — at least the most supernal ones. I can think of a handful: Random Harvest, Love Affair, Now Voyager, maybe The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. In a word: Stars. Because the scenario can change and yet when the talents fit together, there’s just something so disarming and delightful released into the atmosphere.

We want to soak it in and be in the moments with them to feel the same swells of emotion. Whether war or some other force pulls them apart or gets in the way of their love, they always face it with a good humor and a grace that we can live vicariously through as the audience out in the dark.

All of this might see like an admittedly surprising proclamation because anyone who knows anything about Leigh will first consider Gone With The Wind from the year before and then her larger-than-life relationship with Laurence Olivier. He was the man she wanted for this picture. Alas, he was called to make Pride and Prejudice (1940). What came into being with Waterloo Bridge is probably better.

Oh that we could be as handsome a Scotsman as Robert Taylor (with a better accent) or such an immaculate and gorgeous ballerina as Vivien Leigh. As such, their romance is set in this heightened supercharged arena created by wartime.

The film’s most illustrious scene is the “Farewell Waltz” by candlelight, played to the soft melancholy tones of “Auld Lang Syne.” In the silence or, rather, without dialogue, the magic of the moment is the film’s apogee. That song becomes one of the strongest motifs at the movie’s disposal.

It might have been the most bittersweet short film of all time if the first 30 minutes were all we got. All things considered, it wouldn’t be a bad place to end allowing the pleasantness to waft over us and invade our collective hearts and minds.

Still, their story continues for over an hour more. There must be complications. Robert Taylor is soon on the train platform, a fellow soldier holds a bawling son amid the hubbub, and our protagonist’s head is on a swivel as he moves down the platform. The camera follows close behind; he’s anxious to see his love just one last time before he ships out for what may as well be forever. It sets the tone going forward.

Their joint life together suffers in the wake of his departure and we can say “departure” because the movie stays behind as he goes overseas. It works in the story’s favor not to break off and try and tell both sides because this way it gets at the feelings of those left behind fretting on the home front.

Still, the final act needs something more. In comparison, it feels like a bit throwaway as if the movie is coasting on the power of those first minutes of romance and quite literally that haunting chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”

You can write it off as sanitized rendition of its 1931 brethren or otherwise call for a perceptive reading between the lines, but what the picture must resolve once and for all is Myra’s shame — the guilt she holds onto while her man is gone.

Because even with the spunky support of her best friend Kitty (Virginia Field), she is left destitute without the lifeline of her husband. Whether he lives or not, she must subsist someway, and she chooses the only conceivable path, prepared to live with the ignominious consequences.

The only way to redeem the ending is to reflect it back at the audience — back at all of us — because it’s indicative of what many of us deal with. It consists of the lies we tell ourselves when no one is around. We’re unlovable. We’re too far gone. We’re the Judas. But the movie fails to go anywhere creative and poor, downtrodden Myra hardly fits the description of a loveless tramp.

The final saving grace is Vivien Leigh. Her quizzical right eyebrow gives all of us lacking perfect facial symmetry hope. Despite her final moments being trance-like, she is more than capable of the art of captivation even in her character’s execution of the inevitable. If I don’t quite buy her convictions taking her to such a sorry conclusion — the logic seems a bit drastic even for the time period — it’s easy enough to get swept away by her emotion alone.

Robert Taylor for one, gives a performance brimming with vitality, and he feels like more than a chiseled block of wood. He reminds us that in order to have true love there must be two involved. That place. His token. They only maintain their meaning because he shared them with someone else. We get the privilege of being there with them both.

4/5 Stars

Three Comrades (1938) in Body and Soul

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“Germany’s a pretty rough sea if you’re drifting.” – Breuer

“But I’m not alone anymore. There are so many drifters!” – Patricia Hollmann

Erich Maria Remarque is of course most famous for his work All Quiet on The Western Front, which was adapted to great effect for the silver screen by Lewis Milestone in 1930. Three Comrades, another one of his novels, feels very much like an extension of the same themes found in the earlier novel.

We find ourselves at the tail-end of the Great War. Mainland Europe is jaded and bedraggled. One must recall these were the days before Nazism: a force that felt like personified evil. When we look around from trench to no man’s land, it feels like everyone’s equally besmirched, equally implicated in the senseless killing.

So in this regard, it’s not a far stretch of the imagination to think a cohort of three German veterans might be likable to an American audience (especially because they are also Caucasian). However, equally importantly, they are played by three strapping young talents with charm bouncing off them like pinballs. It’s how they’re able to leave the calamitousness of war behind and attempt to discover a new life of humble contentment.

It was the war that instilled them with a certain collective memory, both scarring and then firmly solidifying their friendship in the aftermath. They take the world on like the Three Musketeers: all for one and one for all. Together they happily resolve to become car mechanics, carving out a peaceful existence for themselves, even as their beloved country has succumbed to a kind of mob rule with rampant new ideologies. To each his own.

Erich Lokhamp is the first, played by a dashing, if a bit wooden, Robert Taylor. Though it’s his friends who really seem to bring him alive. Franchot Tone is Otto Koster, always ready to support his friends and speak sense into their lives. His brand of loyalty is finer than gold. The other is Gottfried Lenz (Robert Young) also light-hearted while stricken with the mind of an idealist. Still, he gladly gives up his social conscience for the sake of his friends’ well-being. At least for a time, life is happy.

But before there’s any greater stakes, it begins as three lads having a blast taking a stuffy socialite (Lionel Atwill) for a ride as they roar down the thoroughfares in their beloved, hopped-up creation “Baby.” It’s a bit of good fun, but it also introduces the trio to one of the most important people in their subsequent life together: Pat

Margaret Sullavan is at it yet again a husky-voiced, troubled soul and yet overwhelmingly resolute in her pursuit of love and the preservation of those around her. It’s a quality found in all these characters — this self-sacrificial nature that becomes so laudable, if not entirely necessary. She is the one who surmises how lovely it might be to pick when we were born. Perhaps an age of reason and quiet. This sounds like a Borzage picture. Because of course, they must make do with the here and now, where evil still exists in the world (as it does in any era).

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Their favorite hangout belongs to a jolly man named Alfons (Guy Kibbee). Erich takes his new girl there following some awkward interplay over the telephone. Also, his buddies always have a penchant for showing up uninvited to sit in on their evenings. It’s one of the added delights of the pictures because Young and Tone can supply the wisecracks to rib their friend.

I admire Otto and Gottfried even as I relate. They are faithful, they wish the best for their friends, act as encouragers — spurring each other on — and celebrating their victories while taking any setbacks as they always do: together.

This courtship brings with it other complications, namely trying to impress a high society girl of culture no matter how good-natured she might make out. It’s still easy for a man used to the inside of cars, to feel out of place with the social elite, dancing and wearing customary uncomfortable clothing, which also has a habit of coming apart at the seams. He even spins tall tales of rolling down to South America, an exotic land full of monkeys and coffee, just so he might be able to keep up with her.

All of this show proves unnecessary. This is how it works when you are smitten with a rich man’s girl and, more importantly, when she is in love with you. In another line that feels transcendent in the usual manner of Borzage, they aspire to being “lovers on the edge of eternity between day and night.”

A lesser film — or at least one ill-befitting the predilections of Borzage — would probably have made this a fight for the woman’s hand. It’s easy enough to see how this would have pulled the boys’ bond asunder. And yet these characters are more genial, enlightened, and well-intentioned. The story itself strives for something more. Young plays cupid urging his friend toward marriage. Tone’s character knocks out a concerto on their automobile as he tries to hammer away some sense into Pat in favor of his friend.

Propitiously, all this coaxing culminates in the quaintest wedding, which somehow fits all the players to a tee. Borzage captures it such that we feel we are there with them discovering it as it happens, partially spur of the moment, but also imbued with this star-crossed purposefulness. In step with everything else, their honeymoon to the seaside is as gay as can be until it is met with a setback.

It plays into the film that Sullavan always feels emotionally strong and sturdy but often physically frail. Maybe she just exudes this quality between her throaty vocals grasping at words and the obdurance she gained a reputation for. But in Three Comrades, she is bedridden and in critical condition from hemorrhages — still nursing sickness that has clung to her for some time. Erich has little idea, but once again, Otto comes to their aid with his usual expediency. It only serves to bring them together.

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While remaining unnamed throughout the film, there’s little question that the rising Nazi Party is the instigator of public brawls. Dr. Becker (Henry Hull) speaks out on his soapbox about the need for reason in confronting the issues of the times, instead of the prevailing violence. Since it’s not the first scuffle or an isolated event, Gottfried feels compelled to stand up for his beliefs, putting his ideals on the line.

Meanwhile, Erich has a less politically charged fistfight in the streets over a work claim. He gets ganged up on before his comrades, of course, fly to his defense. Just like old times. Pat is placed in a sanitarium on the behest of her doctor (Monty Wooley) just in time for the snows of winter and then Christmas.

The violence continues to escalate, this time dragging Tone into a shootout in the streets with Handel’s “Hallelujah” clamoring in the background. It’s oddly hypnotic even as it spells what feels like the end of the beginning.

If it’s not apparent already where Three Comrades is going, it easily functions as a fitting companion piece to Borzage’s later Mortal Storm because there is this same uncanny prescience about it, although it probably did very little to halt the impending course of history. The unholy mechanisms were already in place.

Every Borzage movie makes the world a little broader and love a little grander to match. In this regard, the meeting of the prose of Erich Maria Remarque and F. Scott Fitzgerald somehow manages to work in the hands of a director.

What sets it apart from a melodrama like Douglas Sirk’s is the slow burn and how the characters take each moment on with their own brand of quiet fortitude. In many ways, love (and camaraderie) are an antidote to the wiles of the world. Our heroes know what’s inevitable and they brave it together — smiling until the end of days — even in the face of tragedy and hardship.

Is it high-minded and idealistic? Most assuredly. But it’s also one of the most blessed hallmarks of Frank Borzage’s filmmaking. This hallmark, more than anything, is why we can easily draw a line in the snow from something like Seventh Heaven or Man’s Castle to Three Comrades and then The Mortal Storm.

One is especially reminded of Margaret Sullavan because one of the pervading attributes of her characters is this all-encompassing dignity to see her to the end. We feel like unsightly sots and indignant peons compared to her eminent calm.

But really, the same might be said about all the players in Three Comrades. It’s a pacifist portrait. Not so much in prognostications of any sort. It has to do with the inner peace inside the characters that radiate out from them, due to their affections for one another. Thus, in a fitting Epilogue, with fighting breaking out in the city, the four inseparable friends walk off solemnly together. If not in body, then certainly in spirit.

4/5 Stars

Saddle The Wind (1958): In Memory of Richard Erdman

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Saddle-the-wind_posterJulie London provides her airy voice to the title track and Elmer Bernstein gives his scoring talents for the rest of the picture. In these beginning moments, Saddle the Wind evokes the expanse of the majestic landscapes of the West like the best of its brethren. There is a sense we really are out on the frontier, not some manufactured piece of artifice. For the time being, the film maintains this sense of the wind-open spaces away from Hollywood soundstages.

It gets its first jolt of action when a leering Charles McGraw stomps into a saloon and shoves his weight around for food and a bottle. He’s got his feet kicked back and starts breaking bottles over counters just to get his point across. The locals aren’t looking for any trouble, but he’s certainly looking for someone: gunslinger Steve Sinclair (Robert Taylor).

Here we must introduce the glut of Saddle The Wind. Robert Taylor is still Hollywood handsome but time has set in and made his features more applicable for the West. Where a hard life and past wounds lead people to make a new existence for themselves. The reformed gunfighter is not a new concept, but it is a handy one. It gives a man menace without him having to show it, until it’s absolutely necessary.

The real action arrives in the form of his spunky dynamo of a little brother, who comes back to the family ranch with a woman (London) betrothed to be his wife. His big brother is less than pleased to find Tony has gone and got himself hitched and spent his money on a spiffy new gun.

If anything is cemented in this preliminary scene, it is that one is the hothead, the other maintains reproachful silence. They are the yin and yang of the West. Cassavetes and Richard Erdman, as rowdy Reb veterans, form a rambunctious partnership looking to tear up the town and have themselves a bit of fun. They positively take the bar by storm, only to have their merriment disrupted by the same out-of-towner. Except the man Venables meets up with isn’t an old local or a squeamish bartender.

Tony is on top of the world, and if there’s one thing he’s never gonna do is back off even when the other man isn’t looking for trouble. His quarrel, after all, is with the elder Sinclair. Still, the feisty buck takes it as a personal affront. He goads the man into action. There is no other way for it. Guns are drawn.

Steven rushes on the scene an instant too late. His brother isn’t killed, but something worse happens. He’s filled with renewed fire. The taste of power — the ability to strike a man down with the pull of a trigger — is like an intoxicating liqueur.

Steve Sinclair has long kept the peace with the main landowner in the area Dennis Deneen (Donald Crisp), who is, by all accounts, a businessman and a pacifist. The stage is set for something…

Clay Ellison (Royal Dano) is a proud man clinging unflinchingly to the promise of land out west, formerly bestowed on his dearly departed father when the territory was still wide-open. He’s come on the scene to take back what’s his even as Steve tells him, brusquely, he’s trespassing. In a different context, that might be the end of the incident.

What ignites it irrevocably is a remnant of North vs. South animosity left over from the Civil War (Ellison is a proud Union man with great distinction). The torchbearers are Tony and the impish Dallas as they have a grand old time with the squatters, upending their wagons and chasing away their livestock in fits of gunfire and laughter. It’s a bit of festering payback for wartime grievances, and it’s easily the most devastating scene, right smack dab in the middle of the picture.

It’s a testament of what happens when men take squatter’s justice into their own hands and when the protective big brother does little more than beat back his baby sibling and throw money at a problem. Nothing is remedied.

However, Saddle The Wind ends up being far more contained than I was expecting. It’s fundamentally a character study about two brothers and how they grapple with one another, based on outside stimuli.

We could name a number of people, first the new wife who is brought home. The old vagabond war buddy who is an instant enabler. A gunfighter with a vendetta looking to tromp up old wounds. Even the obdurate homesteader who’s not about to get pushed out by a punk kid.

None of these characters seems to truly exist for themselves. Even lord of the valley, Mr. Dineen, though deeply humanized by Donald Crisp, is just another piece in the brother’s story. This observation might seem too harsh, but with Rod Serling as the story’s scribe, it seems conceivable to say the intriguing idea — because it is that — takes some precedence over the characters.

There are moments to turn the stomach, feelings of conflict, and wrenching segments of tension. This is not a completely lethargic film by any means. If anything, Cassavetes alone sets it ablaze with his youthful fire. Still, some component seems to be missing.

With this vast assemblage of characters, it could be that there are a handful of stories worth telling when the credits roll, and we only got over the cusp of one of them. The ending lacks all the cathartic payoffs we craved so dearly. The strands don’t entirely tie together, though the movie does try and solve everything with a silver lining. Surely it’s not that easy.

Whereas the opening moments felt like a regalia of western imagery, Saddle The Wind settles into almost small-screen paces, going from long shots full of real sagebrush to close-ups with backdrops painted on.

Although it’s hardly fair to consider the film’s merits on this issue alone — I think the suspension of disbelief being broken speaks to something — even as these characters never settle into something truly genuine. It’s allowable to be harsh with critique only because Saddle The Wind has its share of all-too-brief shining moments to go along with its potential. It’s an oater with enthralling elements not fully realized.

3/5 Stars

Note: I watched this film literally two days before the passing of Richard Erdman at the age of 93. He was one of my most beloved supporting actors. He will be deeply missed for his myriad of classic roles and for his work as Leonard on Community.