Tag: John Wayne

How the West Was Won (1962) – A Movie Review

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“How the West Was Won” is a Western extravaganza with enough Hollywood stars for five films.  It consists of five vignettes that are strung together out of the fortunes of a family from the East caught up in the settling of the western frontier.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Karl Malden is Zebulon Prescott, a farmer in New York State who becomes disgusted with his rocky unproductive land and sells it to go west with his wife Rebecca, (Agnes Moorehead) and two daughters Eve (Caroll Baker) and Lilith (Debbie Reynolds).  Along the way they meet fur trapper Linus Rawlings (Jimmy Stewart) who saves them from some nefarious river pirates led by Col. Jeb Hawkins (Walter Brennan) but finally Zebulon and Rebecca are killed going over the rapids on their raft and Rawlings reluctantly gives up his wandering ways to marry Eve and start a farm by the river.

In the next vignette, Lilith has become a show girl and does a song and dance act in St. Louis.  A messenger informs her that a former admirer has left her a gold mine in California.  She joins another woman Agatha Clegg (Thelma Ritter) in a wagon train headed west.

When gambler/fortune hunter Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck) overhears her good fortune, he follows her to California.  At first reluctantly and then gratefully, after he saves her life during an Indian attack, Lilith partners with Cleve.

But when they get to California, they discover that Lilith’s gold mine is played out.  Cleve leaves Lilith in the lurch to pursue his gambler’s life.  She receives a proposal of marriage from wealthy rancher Roger Morgan (Robert Preston) but rejects him because she doesn’t want a conventional life as a wife and mother.  But when Cleve overhears Lilith singing on a river boat, he realizes that they will both be happiest if they marry and combine their two adventurous lives together into a partnership.  And they do.

In the next story the Civil War has begun.  To dramatize this we even have a brief look at Raymond Massey portraying Abraham Lincoln.  Eve’s son, Zeb Rawlings (George Peppard) wants to follow his father into battle on the side of the Union.  Eve tearfully says goodbye and Zeb is swept along by the tides of war.

During this episode he manages to save General Grant (Harry Morgan) and General Sherman (John Wayne) from a Confederate soldier who was trying to convince Zeb to desert.  After the war Zeb returns home to find that both his parents are dead.  He leaves the farm to his brother and heads west as a cavalry soldier.

In the next vignette Zeb is a cavalry officer tasked with helping the Union Pacific Railroad cross the Great Plains.  The ruthless railroad boss Mike King (Richard Widmark) is angering the Indian tribes by laying down the track through the Indian hunting grounds.  Zeb has help from buffalo hunter Jethro Stuart (Henry Fonda), an old friend of his father.

They convince the Indians to accept the latest route but finally when settlers start filling up the area the Indians revolt and we watch as they stampede a herd of buffalo through the railroad worksite.  Disgusted with the railroad’ treachery, Zeb and Jethro leave for happier circumstances farther west.

In the last episode, we see Lilith as an old woman in San Francisco.  Cleve has died and an auction is proceeding to liquidate their estate to pay off debts.  All that will remain will be a ranch in Arizona that she hopes to retire to with her nephew Zeb Rawlings and his wife Julie (Carolyn Jones) and children.

Zeb was a sheriff and while meeting his aunt at the train in Arizona he catches sight of an outlaw Charlie Grant (Eli Wallach) that Zeb put in prison years ago.  He figures out that Grant means to rob the train when the next gold shipment is aboard.  Zeb recruits his old friend Marshal Lou Ramsey (Lee J. Cobb) to go with him to guard the train.

The train robbery scene involves Grant and eight or ten of his men boarding the train and battling Zeb and Lou as they fight them off with rifles and hand guns.  In the ensuing violence the train is battered to pieces and finally derails in catastrophic fashion but Zeb puts a final bullet in Charlie Grant.  Then he returns to take up a peaceful life as rancher with his family.

The movie ends with a panoramic view of California including Los Angeles freeways and the golden Gate Bridge with a stirring speech by the narrator (Spencer Tracy) about the epic adventure that was the taming of the west.

So, you get the picture.  This is an extravaganza.  They put every actor they had into it.  I’ve even left out a few other for the sake of brevity.  So, what do I think?  As far as spectacle, the scene of the raft on the rapids and the buffalo stampede are exciting and in the wide screen of a theater must have been fun for the audience.  Some of the landscapes are truly beautiful.  The plot is very straightforward.  It covers the various stages of the westward expansion of the United States with a personal story.  The performances vary from competent to perfunctory.  This isn’t high drama.  I would restrict my recommendation to saying if you’re in the mood for an epic western movie (and you have three hours to spare) this movie would be fine.

Rio Bravo (1959) – A Movie Review

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“Rio Bravo” is supposed to have been made in reaction to the movie “High Noon.”  In that movie Gary Cooper is a sheriff who can’t find any townsmen to help him stand against an outlaw gang gunning for him.  Howard Hawks and John Wayne were so affronted by what they saw as the whiny, “woe is me” feel of that movie they decided to make Rio Bravo as an alternative.  Wayne would play the sheriff but with no angst.  Basically, he refuses to deputize a large number of civilians to stand down a gang of outlaws who threaten to kill the sheriff if he doesn’t release the gang leader’s brother.

Wayne is Sheriff John T. Chance.  His sometimes deputy but mostly just alcoholic friend is Dude, played by Dean Martin.  They’re joined in their desperate but light hearted stand by Stumpy, a gimpy and hot-tempered old man played by Walter Brennan and Colorado, a resourceful young cowboy with a fast gun hand and a guitar played by Ricky Nelson.  And finally, Angie Dickinson is a professional gambler who will be the love interest for Chance.  For whatever reason the only name we’re given for her is Feathers.

The setup is as follows.  While involved in an altercation with Dude in the saloon Joe Burdette (played by Claude Akins) kills a man.  Chase arrests Joe and has Stumpy keep guard over him basically for the duration of the movie.  Meanwhile an old friend of Chance’s, Pat Wheeler (played by Ward Bond) arrives in town with his crew and supplies.  When he hears what is going on with Chance, he offers his associate Colorado as a deputy to help Chance hold off the Burdette gang that numbers in the dozens.  Chance declines because he doesn’t want to involve Wheeler in the trouble.  But Wheeler is murdered that night.  After some back and forth in which members of the gang take Chance and Dude hostage more than once, Colorado comes aboard as a deputy.

As a side story Feathers arrives in town to play poker in the saloon but when a wanted poster shows up that seems to implicate her as a card cheat Chance tells her to leave town.  But Colorado defends her saying that another player in the game was cheating.  After catching the cheater with several aces up his sleeve, Feathers tells her side of the story.  The poster was about her and her late husband.  He had gotten into a crooked card game and paid for his crime with his life.  For the rest of the movie whenever Chance and Feathers are together, they maintain an odd and annoying sort of awkward bickering cum flirting.

Meanwhile the climax of the movie arrives when Dude is taken hostage by Burdette’s gang and they demand a swap of Joe for Dude.  The transfer involves the two men crossing a clearing in opposite directions.  Joe is walking away from the barn where Chance, Colorado and Stumpy are holed up and Dude is walking away from the commercial building where the whole Burdette gang is arrayed.  But when they reach each other in the middle Dude tackles Joe and forces him into some cover that is somehow much closer to Chance’s building than Burdette’s.  After subduing Joe, Chance and his deputies begin a lively gun battle with Burdette’s gang.  Eventually Chance’s side gets ahold of some dynamite and he does some fancy shooting to set off the explosives as Stumpy hurls it across the clearing toward the Burdette building.  And finally Stumpy ties several sticks together and the final explosion takes most of the building down and the surviving gang members stumble out of the wreckage and surrender.

All that remains is for Chance and Feathers to complete their awkward courtship and declare their weird and annoying love.

So, this is a strange movie.  It’s part western, part buddy movie and I guess a love story.  Mixed into this is the fact that Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson are allowed to sing a few songs.  I know I haven’t made it sound like a conventional western but the main story around the Burdettes is done extremely well, especially the action scenes.  Wayne, Martin, Brennan and Nelson make for a very interesting team.  I have seen this movie many times and still consistently enjoy this part of the plot.  Now as for the “love story” I don’t know what to say.  It’s just so out of place and unconvincing that I can’t even dislike it.  It’s just this bizarro incursion into an otherwise normal movie.  All I can do is hope that sometime in the future, technology will allow it to be excised from the movie.

I can highly recommend this to fans of westerns and John Wayne.  Even the songs were very much in the tradition of the Roy Rogers, singing cowboy style.  A good western.

Stagecoach (1939) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Stagecoach was considered a classic western at the time it was made.  It also proved to be the breakout performance for John Wayne’s career.

The plot involves a stagecoach making a run straight through an Indian uprising under Geronimo.  The passenger list is a cross section of various types found in westerns.  Driving the coach are a lawman named Curley Wilcox and for comic relief Buck, played by Andy Devine.  There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold named Dallas who’s been thrown out of town by the ladies of the Decency League.  There’s a southern gambler named Hatfield played by John Carradine.  There’s the drunken Doc Boone played by Thomas Mitchell.  There’s the obnoxious town banker Mr. Gatewood who has secretly absconded with the bank’s money.  There’s Mr. Peacock who is a mild-mannered whiskey salesman.  There’s Mrs. Lucy Mallory the pregnant wife of a cavalry officer.  And last but not least, the Ringo Kid played by John Wayne.  Ringo has busted out of jail and is headed to Lordsburg like the rest of them but in his case, it is to find and kill the three Plummer brothers who killed his father and brother and framed him for one of their crimes.

The passengers represent the various class and moral differences that make for friction and hard feelings between them.  The main story is the journey through Apache territory and the gun battle with Geronimo’s men but along the way the drunken doctor sobers up long enough to deliver Mrs. Mallory’s baby.  Dallas and Ringo strike up a romance.  Doc Boone finishes off all of Mr. Peacock’s whiskey samples.  Gatewood and Mrs. Mallory discover that he served under her father the general in the Civil War.

But the final chapter is the showdown between Ringo and the Plummers.  And after Ringo finishes off all three of them (with just three bullets!) he gives himself up to Curley to finish out his sentence in jail.  But Curley decides to take the law into his own hands and frees the Kid and sends him off with Dallas to start their new life together across the state line at Ringo’s family ranch.  The storybook happy ending.

For our generation the story probably seems a little too stereotyped, the acting too broad and the ending too pat.  The idea that a lawman would release his prisoner on his own recognizance to allow him to engage in a gunfight after which he would just walk back into custody to be brought back to prison seems like some kind of fantasy.  The expectant mother travelling on a stagecoach through an Indian attack seems even crazier.  But the movie does provide an enjoyable story.  I wouldn’t consider it any kind of best in class western.  I think it’s a good story with several good actors, especially Thomas Mitchell and John Carradine.  And it’s fun to see a young John Wayne navigating around actors who were much bigger stars than he was at the time.

I recommend this movie to fans of westerns, John Wayne and movies of this era.

What’s the Definition of a Movie Star?

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I’m sure there are movie critics who have their own takes on this question.  I’ve never thought much about who the “real” movie stars were because what I was interested in was which were the good movies.  But recently I’ve been watching some old movies that were not in the top 100 movies of all time.  In fact, some of them were pretty bad.  The plots were hackneyed and the scripts were poorly written and some of the actors and actresses were pretty awful.

You might ask why I would do this.  It’s a combination of things.  Firstly, they were on Turner Classic Movies and I get that channel on my cable television subscription.  But the other reason is that I’ve just seen the good movies so often I need a break.  Even a great movie can be worn out by too frequent viewing.  So, I’ve been watching some stinkers.

I recorded a couple of movies with William Powell that I’d never heard of.  One was called “Lawyer Man” that also starred Joan Blondell.  It’s an early film from 1932 and the plot includes all kinds of stereotypical plot elements, dialog and characters that fairly scream “B” movie.  I wouldn’t recommend this movie highly although it was amusing because of the leads.

But what was obvious to me was that William Powell was a movie star.  And what that means is that regardless of the role or movie William Powell is in, he’s William Powell.  Whether he’s a lawyer or a private detective or a doctor or a stockbroker or a down on his luck everyman, he’s, unmistakably, the same person.  The persona that Powell had created is what the producers and directors wanted from him in all his films.  In one film he might be a hobo, in another a rich nobleman but in both cases, these were just the vicissitudes of life and they didn’t change his character.

This differs from a real actor like Lawrence Olivier.  When he plays Henry V, he’s a gallant hero.  When he plays Richard III, he’s a heartless monster.  And when he’s Hamlet he’s a lost soul.  Olivier becomes what the part requires.  But when we’re looking to spend an hour with a witty, pleasant, intelligent man we’d rather have William Powell.  He’ll work his way through the plot and whenever he’s on the screen we’ll be pleased.  The character William Powell plays is the man you’d wish was sitting next to you on a long train ride.  He’ll have stories to tell and probably has a deck of cards in his coat pocket and when his wife or girlfriend shows up, she’ll be a smart cute funny dame.  And if an armed robber shows up in the railway car Powell will manage to knock him out and tie him up with no apparent effort.

The movie stars I can think of were all of the sort that produced a character.  Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant always played the same part with slight differences to align with the plot and character details.  But they almost never were cast against type.  Of course, these were the pictures they made once they had reached star status.  As journeymen they had to take whatever roles they were given.  You can see this transition in someone like Humphrey Bogart.  When he started out, he had to play a lot of vicious gangsters and there was very little nuance in these roles.  But once he had done the Maltese Falcon, he was allowed to find his “type.”  He became the tough guy with a brain.  And at that point audiences knew what to expect from Bogey.

As I said, I generally am looking for a movie with a good plot and decent acting.  But there is something to be said for trying to match a movie to a mood.  If I need to relax and enjoy a reuben sandwich and a cold drink I’ll probably want a Western with John Wayne or Gary Cooper.  And If I need my spirits lifted, I’ll watch a Jimmy Stewart film or a W.C. Fields farce.  But if I’m ever homesick for the New York City that used to exist, I’ll look for a William Powell movie.  And maybe it never really existed but with William Powell to walk you through it will feel like home.  At least to me.