Western – Page 4 – The Magnificent 60s

The Last Sunset (1961) ***

Too many hidden secrets turn this into a Peyton Place of a western. When the final unexpected zinger strikes home the movie has nowhere to go and undercuts the climax. Director Robert Aldrich also lets Kirk Duglas off the leash so there’s too much of him festering to put the outcome in any doubt. Strangling a vicious dog with your bare hands is usually a sign of heroism but here it just undermines Douglas’s character.

Wanted murderer O’Malley (Kirk Douglas) has skipped to Mexico away from the long arm of the American law. Nonetheless, lawman Stribling (Rock Hudson) is in pursuit, presumably hoping to kidnap him and drag him back over the Rio Grande into U.S. jurisdiction. The story, in a major narrative flaw, finds another way to head O’Malley north.

Anyways, O’Malley is in Mexico not just to escape, but for a more sentimental reason, he wants to hook up again with first love Belle (Dorothy Malone). The fact that she’s married to limping ex-Confederate soldier Breckenridge (Joseph Cotten) appears to make no difference. And when O’Malley strikes up a deal to help Breckenridge drive his herd of cattle to Crazy Horse, a town over the Rio Grande, he tells the husband of his romantic intent.

This would usually spell trouble except the narrative conveniently disposes of the husband. However, by this point the lawman has also thrown his hat into the romantic ring, having signed up to become trail boss. You can see the logic in Stribling’s decision. If O’Malley’s heading in the right direction then it makes it easier for Stribling to get him over the border.

What doesn’t make any real sense is Breckenridge’s hiring of O’Malley in the first place, or the deal the outlaw negotiates. O’Malley would go along in any case for a meal of beans a day just to keep track of Belle who’s the appointed cook for the ride. Instead, and with no cattle herding skills in evidence, he manages to get Breckenridge to agree to give him one-fifth of the herd as a bonus in addition to the normal pay of a dollar a day. Although the audience has already guessed O’Malley’s romantic purpose, he spells it out to the rancher, “I want your wife” the rider to the deal.

O’Malley takes little notice of Belle’s diffidence. The man who was once an enticing prospect to an inexperienced young girl is now presented in a different light. “You carry your own storm wherever you go,” she tells him. She no longer has a hankering to end up just “a survivor,” not convinced by his plan to settle down with the money from the sale of his share of the herd.

As usual, the trail ride has sufficient incident – lightning storm, stampede, a brush with Native Americans, saloon gunfight, a trio of no-goods hitching a ride, a sighting of St Elmo’s Fire and that old trope quicksand – to keep the story moving without the love triangle and what actually turns out to be a revenge tale.

The story takes some unexpected turns. Stribling is a pretty efficient cowboy, seeped in western lore, knows how to keep a herd in shape. He heads off a marauding tribe by trading some of the herd, in compensation for the innocent man O’Malley instinctively shot dead. Belle needs to kill a man to defend herself. And O’Malley, romantic ambitions thwarted by Stribling, starts wooing Belle’s daughter Missy (Carol Lynley) who, no surprises there, reminds him of Belle at a younger age.

As the secrets come spilling out, it becomes apparent that O’Malley has seduced Stribling’s sister whom the outlaw disses as an easy lay – “your sister was a free drink on the house” – and more importantly that his sister has hung herself after O’Malley killed her lover. Double revenge, I guess, to steal Belle and take O’Malley back to face justice.

You might have wondered how Belle ended up with Breckenridge in the first place and it’s not the soldier-wounded-in-battle routine. It’s because he made an honest woman out of her after – or maybe before – Missy was born out of wedlock. And when Belle sees how serious Missy is about O’Malley she reveals that he’s the father. Leaving O’Malley to do the right thing and not load his pistol when he heads for his shoot-out with Stribling once they have crossed the Rio Grande.

The ending smacks of star redemption. Kirk Douglas can play a mean guy better than most and he’s got no problem being tagged an outlaw but to lose a shoot-out would render him the loser whereas noble sacrifice turns him into some kind of winner. That notion doesn’t take into account that Stribling was guaranteed to win the shoot-out anyway since O’Malley’s weapon of choice is the Derringer, ideal for shooting someone standing right next to you, not a lot of good in a shoot-out where your opponent is twenty feet away.

The narrative twists and turns enough to keep you interested but with every secret revealed the flaws are only too apparent. Rock Hudson (Seconds, 1966) wins the duel of the big stars, a wider range of emotions on show but as tough as his rival and with western skills to boot. We’ve seen this brooding Kirk Douglas (The Arrangement, 1969) too many times before. Dorothy Malone (who had partnered Hudson in Douglas Sirk number The Tarnished Angels, 1957) is good as the woman who knows her own mind. Joseph Cotten (The Oscar, 1966) probably signed up not for the chance to show off his limp but for the scene in the saloon where his myth of Civil War heroism is cruelly exposed. Carol Lynley (Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1965) convincingly transforms from dutiful daughter with a Disney-esque affinity with animals to woman.

Robert Aldrich (The Flight of the Phoenix, 1965) looks hamstrung by the Dalton Trumbo (The Fixer, 1968) script based on the novel Sundown at Crazy Horse by Howard Rigsby.

Too convoluted to fly.

40 Guns to Apache Pass (1967) ***

Spent most of the time watching this wondering what depths Glenn Ford and Inger Stevens would find in this interesting script in which relationships come asunder through situation. Instead, we’ve got war hero turned movie actor – I hesitate to say star because his marquee was virtually always of the B-movie brigade – Audie Murphy (Bullet for a Badman, 1964) in his last starring role looking as wooden as ever and in a superbly-written conflicted role the equally ineffective Laraine Stephens (Hellfighters, 1968).

That there was still a market for the kind of western that refused to embrace the revisionism expressed by Cheyenne Autumn (1964) or Hombre (1967) was odd in itself. In fact, by this stage most of the best westerns steered cleared of the Native American issue, preferring subjects like the Civil War (Shenandoah, 1965), errant gunslingers (Cat Ballou, 1965) or standard western tropes with standard villains (The Sons of Katie Elder, 1965, El Dorado, 1967, The War Wagon, 1967).

The title plays around with the more famous Battle of Apache Pass which took place in 1862, seven years before this movie was set. Despite the indifferent playing, the script by Willard W. Willingham and wife Mary (one of the exceptionally few female screenwriters plying their trade in Hollywood at the time) is lean and interesting. Apache chief Cochise is on the warpath and settlers have to abandon their homes and be brought to the safer environs of Apache Wells.

Ramrod stiff Captain Coburn (Audie Murphy) is in charge of the operation which includes bringing his romantic interest Ellen (Laraine Stephens) and her family to safety. There’s not much trouble doing that except rebellious Corporal Bodine (Kenneth Tobey), the kind of subordinate who’s always insubordinate, picks a fight with the officer. Against the ostensibly much tougher opponent, Coburn wins the tussle and beats the living hell out of his underling. But Ellen is of delicate stock and doesn’t take kindly to her potential husband’s violent streak.

At the makeshift fort Col Reed (Byron Morrow) is driven to desperation by the lack of weaponry, awaiting a long-promised supply of the newest model of repeating rifles. The scouts delivering the titular 40 weapons refuse to risk taking the supply wagons so close to the Apaches so Coburn is designated to undertake the “mission” to secrue them, taking a team of ten men including two of Ellen’s brothers Doug (Michael Burns) and Mike (Michael Blodgett) and Bodine. Doug falters under fire and is responsible for his brother’s death.

Bodine steals the guns, planning to sell them for $1,000 each in Mexico, an enterprise that gains the support of the remaining troopers bar the captain and his sergeant. With a piece of exceptional cunning, Bodine plans for those two to be blown up in a manner that will look like they have sacrificed their lives rather than surrender the weapons. And it’s an equally clever trick indeed that allows Coburn to escape.

This section brings unexpected depth, character revelation the key. Bodine turns out to be a Johnny Reb, joining the Army, wearing the dettestable blue, as an alternative post-war to imprisonment. And he’s not going to ride over 1,000 miles to Mexico when he’s got potential purchasers, the Apaches, hardly any distance away at all. Cochise doesn’t take too kindly to a traitor, though he’s willing ostensibly to do business.

Coburn, it turns out, is anything but the ramrod straight officer he effects to be. He came up the hard way, mostly been a loser all his life, and knowing that he’s blown this chance for future promotion. Back at the fort, not only does he face court martial, but Ellen blames him for the loss of her brothers, one dead, the other heading towards summary execution should he be captured as a deserter.

So, naturally, the only way out of this pickle is for Coburn to steal a couple of horses and attempt to recover the weapons. He’s again got a clever plan, holding off the bad guys by placing a bunch of repeating rifles at crucial points in his retreat so he doesn’t need to stop and reload.

In better hands this would have been a cracker. The duty-bound Coburn undone by duty, Ellen undone by placing her trust in the wrong man, Bodine undone by thinking he could outwit the clever Cochise.

Director William Witney (Arizona Raiders, 1965) had over 100 directoial credits, virtually all low-budget movies or television series, so he knew how to get the job done. A better director would have better use of the situation, characters and physical setting – those enscarpments go to waste for sure.

Calling out as much for a Budd Boetticher as a Glenn Ford and Inger Stevens.

The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (1967) ***

All studios believed in their brand name. That the sight of the MGM lion or the Twentieth Century Fox searchlight or the Paramount mountain represented a quality mark that would buffer expectation and reassure an audience they were not going to be rooked. That might have been the case decades before when the Warner Brothers logo might mean gangster pictures or socially aware movies or MGM, with more stars than there are in heaven, pictures with top-notch talent, or Universal determined to scare the pants of you with its horror catalog.

But that was no longer the case, most studios so desperate for survival that they would fork out for whatever trend seemed most likely to make money and the industry lurched from western to musical to adventure and back again whenever a big hit appeared. The only studio which still retained genuine marquee appeal was Disney. As studios dipped into more unsavory fare, according to the older generation, and the prospects of sending your children to the movies without having to check out the picture in advance diminished, a Disney film was a guarantee of fret-free entertainment.

Throughout the decade adults as much as kids swarmed to the Disney repertoire. In 1961 the studio scored a box office triple whammy when The Absent-Minded Professor, The Parent Trap and Swiss Family Robinson took three of the top four slots in the annual box office race. In the following years Bon Voyage (1962), Moon Pilot (1962), Son of Flubber (1963), In Search of the Castaways (1963), The Sword in the Stone (1964), The Misadventures of Merlin Jones and especially Mary Poppins (1964) kept the studio buoyant, not to mention the string of pictures starring Hayley Mills and a stack of animated classics it could reissue at the drop of a hat.

Disney ruled the lightweight world, its films often driven by a simple plot device. And as the rest of the industry coveted sex and violence, exhibitors relied on Disney to bring in the kids (and adults) during holiday periods. It would end the decade on a whopping high with The Love Bug (1969).

Here, the ploy is as old as the hills, a fish out of water, in this case an English butler. Disney had rung the changes on that particular sub-genre through the governess in Mary Poppins, steadfastly ignoring a trend towards more sinister servants as demonstrated by The Servant (1963) and The Nanny (1965). But Disney did have the ability to hook name actors for its child-friendly movies, here Roddy McDowall (Lord Love a Duck, 1966), Oscar-winner Karl Malden (Nevada Smith, 1966) and Suzanne Pleshette (A Rage to Live, 1965).

If you are expecting whiplashing escapades of the Indiana Jones variety, you will be in for a disappointment. Eric Griffin (Roddy McDowall) is the aforementioned butler escorting a child Jack (Bryan Russell) on a treasure hunt through the gold fever American West. When his charge runs away, Griffin finds the boy stowing away on a ship. The ever-genteel Griffin has skills that see him through any situation, working as cook on the ship, setting up his stall as barber on the mainland, and occastionally employing a devastating right hook to knock seven bells out of giant bully Mountain Ox (Mike Mazurki).

The plot, such as it is, revolves around recovering a treasure map stolen by swindler Judge Higgins (Karl Malden) and eventually when the movie needs some zap the feisty Arabella Flagg (Suzanne Pleshette), Griffin’s bankrupt employer who as it happens fancies the bulter, turns up.

There’s enough action to keep the picture on a steady keel, a storm at sea, a stagecoach hold-up, prizefight and a climactic town-wrecking fire. There are, perhaps surprisingly, a few choice lines.

But there’s a misinterpretation at the center of the movie so it’s as well its made with kids in mind. The fish-out-of-water notion would play better if historically movies fielded idiot butlers rather than ones who tended to take command when things get tough, though it’s unliklely kids would be aware of previous entries in the sub-genre. So, theoretically, it’s a surprise when Griffin outfights the lummox and outwits the swindler.

If the kid isn’t cute enough there are compensations elsewhere, a decent support in Harry Guardino (The Pigeon That Took Rome, 1962) and Hermione Baddeley (Harlow, 1965). Roddy McDowall at least is in a movie that suits his screen persona and deceptively languid acting style while Suzanne Pleshette takes a feminist slant to the Wild West. Whether British comedian Tony Hancock – he was sacked during filming – would have added much to the proceedings is open to debate.

It’s worth remembering that, outside of Hayley Mills offerings, Disney comedies of this period revolved around adults coping with bizarre situation. This doesn’t quite have the gimmicks that drove Son of Flubber, The Ugly Dachshund (1966, also headlining Pleshette) and Lt Robin Crusoe U.S.N. (1966).

Adequately directed by James Neilson (Dr Syn Alias the Scarecrow, 1963) from a screenplay by Lowell S. Hawley (Swiss Family Robinson) drawn from the novel The Great Horn Spoon! by Sid Fleischmann.

I remember seeing this as a kid and feeling pretty content coming out of the cinema, so since it did what it says on the tin, I’m loathe from an adult perspective to take it to pieces.

A movie that says – lighten up!

Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 (2024) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Unpacking Kevin Costner’s hefty portmanteau is a significant task since at times it veers into the unwieldy. But only once during the three-hour running time did I glance at my watch and that was over an hour in when I started to wonder when Costner in his capacity as star would appear. Anyone looking for anything heroic or iconic or in the vein of Dances with Wolves (1990) or even Wyatt Earp (1994) had better look elsewhere. This has more in common with the grimy westerns of the 1970s when heroes were hard to come by and the West was a cesspool of brutality.

There’s a heck of an arthouse sensibility to this ensemble piece, characters and situations appear with little preamble and often little consequential explanation, and we switch geographically and psychologically at the drop of a hat. Theoretically, I should be waiting until Chapter 2 pops into view in a few weeks’ time before attempting summation because it’s clear that some sections are unresolved here, assuming the ending is more of a trailer for part two than a speeded-up finale.

At $100 million – and same again for Chapter 2 – this would have all the makings of an over-the-top vanity project, especially after Yellowstone was thrown out with the bathwater. In some senses it’s closer to a series of vignettes puncturing the myth of the West. The wagon train section, for example, focuses on an over-entitled English woman who breaks several golden rules and encounters a couple of peeping toms while the wagon master (Luke Wilson) finds out just how powerless he is in trying to enforce discipline.

Virtually all the women are schemers. Ellen (Jena Malone) attempts to murder her husband and flee with their child, takes up with another fella who’s trying to run some kind of gold strike scam but unfortunately runs into the sons of the man she tried to kill. Her child, meanwhile, is being cared for by sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee) who gets her hooks into prospector Hayes (Costner) but only as long as she can dump him for another man and dump the child on another family. By comparison Frances (Sienna Miller) is saintly, having survived an Indian massacre, but she makes no bones about making a play for married cavalry lieutenant Trent (Sam Worthington).

And the older ones are just as savage. Mama Sykes sets her sons out for revenge and an elderly lady in the fort batters two soldiers for trying to steal a child-sized bed. The latter is another vignette, the old woman, mourning the loss of one child, being maneuvered by a clever sergeant (Michael Rooker) into semi-adopting another, and that lass, in the most touching (or sentimental if you like) vignette, sending soldiers into battle wearing flowers she has cut from a quilt.

There’s not much point being a child here if you can’t fire a weapon. Native American kids are only too ready to aim arrows at white men and one young massacre survivor buys a pair of Colts to effect his revenge.

The main thrust of the tale is the land rush of the 1860s, when settlers dashed from east to west in the hope of a better life and in the expectation that the Army would take care of any Native Americans who got in the way. Lt Trent does his best to dissuade settlers from picking land that’s too far away from a fort to defend. The Apache chief tries his best to dissuade his son Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) from attacking the settlers, pointing out (somewhat improbably) that his tribe can find enough sustenance in the mountains.

From my own reading on the subject, namely The Earth Is Weeping by Peter Cozzens, this was true to life, the younger braves more likely to wage war, the older chiefs prescribing restraint and fearing consequence, and the rivalry between different tribes is cleverly dealt with, even though it’s hard to understand at the time the point of a lone Native American being hunted down and killed by a band of other Native Americans.

The titular “Horizon” is the name of a large swathe of land being sold back east to settlers as presumably a land of milk and honey, said settlers harnessing similar entrepreneurial spirit as the Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic in search of same. Every now and then a character pops up to provided a potted history, Col Houghton (Danny Huston) one such, predicting the bloody end to the encroachment of land.

The biggest set piece is the massacre that interrupts another set piece, the kind beloved of John Ford and Michael Cimino, the local dance, that itself punctuated by other vignettes, the teenager too old to dance with his mother, another teenager playing with a loaded gun, until both teenagers are taught savage reality and this section ends with Frances hammering a shotgun through the earth to provide a source of air for her and her daughter trapped underground.

There’s a quirkiness here that would sit well with Robert Altman or the Coen Brothers or Yorgos Lanthimos. And the scene between Hayes and the younger Sykes gunslinger is pure Tarantino.

But there’s way too much hair. Authentic though it may be, the thickness of the beards makes it virtually impossible at times to identify the actor underneath. But despite the running time it’s also been brutally edited, hard to work out how Hayes goes from being hunted by the Sykes Gang to working on the railroad.

So this is a warning as much as a straightforward review. Don’t go in expecting the usual. This isn’t an exploration of the West in the manner of How the West Was Won (1962) with big stars and a ton of set pieces and Cinerama to pump up the action and roadshow to make the whole enterprise seem somehow more worthy.

The women steal the acting honors, especially Sienna Miller (The Lost City of Z, 2016) and Jena Malone (The Neon Demon, 2016). Directed with some style by Costner from a screenplay by himself and Jon Baird in his debut.

Plenty to see here that’s worthy of praise if you set aside expectations.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady / Big Deal at Dodge City (1966) ****

An absolute delight. Thrilling too. Knocked sideways in the box office battle of the poker pictures by the purportedly classier The Cincinnati Kid (1965) with Steve McQueen in one of his most iconic roles facing off against Edward G. Robinson and underrated ever since. But this more than holds its own against the Norman Jewison number. In part because of terrific untypical performances from Once Upon a Time in the West alumni Henry Fonda and Jason Robards.

I get my daily movie fix late at night when the rest of the house is abed and disinclined to share my interest in old movies but when at a critical point my DVD gave out instead of, as would be more sensible, giving up and going to bed, I spent ten minutes frantically scouring YouTube for a copy, even glancing hopefully at one in a foreign language, and expended the same time again tearing apart my DVD collection, which at one point had been sensibly arranged alphabetically until too many additions made nonsense of that arrangement, until I found another copy. Finally, I settled down, even later at night, to watch an enthralling finale.

*A more blatant example of artistic license you couldn’t find. The movie is set in Laredo, not Dodge*.

Fielder Cook (Prudence and the Pill, 1968), with only a handful of movies to his name and generally considered no great shakes as a director, plays this hand brilliantly. It reeks of mystery, as a poker table should. We begin with an undertaker’s coach racing from town to town and house to house collecting with urgency a disparate collection of people delivered to the backroom of a hotel in Laredo, Texas, where, nonetheless, the townspeople are excited beyond belief. It’s the long-awaited poker game between the five richest men in the territory.

As he stuffs more cash in the safe and pulls out bigger and bigger batches of poker chips, the hotel owner (James Berwick) is constantly badgered by his exuberant customers as to who is winning. He remains mute on that score until Doc Scully (Burgess Meredith), heading out to deliver a baby and a foal, asks the same question. Such is the medic’s local standing, the owner gives a reply. This means something to the onlookers but not to us because we have very little concept of the players.

And that remains largely the case beyond some good-humored and occasionally tense banter when we learn that Drummond (Jason Robards) abandoned his daughter’s wedding to get here and that lawyer Habershaw did likewise in court leaving his client to defend himself. And the game itself is boisterous, devoid of the cathedral-like atmosphere of The Cincinnati Kid.

But when a relatively impoverished newcomer Meredith (Henry Fonda) enters the fray the situation turns ugly as he is besieged by insult and verbal abuse as his paltry stake gets smaller and smaller. When he takes his last $3,000 – the whole sum intended to provide a new future for his wife and son on a farm near San Antonio (“San Antone” he quickly learns is the correct pronunciation) – he discovers that he is undone as his fellow gamblers raise the bidding beyond his amount.

At which point he collapses, potential heart attack. Doc Scully hauls him off on a makeshift stretcher. The money will be defaulted unless upstanding wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) of the anti-gambling fraternity can be called upon to play out his hand in a game of which she is completely ignorant and, more to the point, raise the cash to be allowed to continue.

The players sneer at what she has to offer. The richest men in the territory have no need, even at a cut-price offer, of a gold watch and a new team of horses and wagon. For a moment you think Mary, seeing her family fortunes going downriver, is going to offer herself as collateral, but instead, she decides to try and get a loan, based on the hand she holds, from the bank. You might as well try to get blood out of a stone from bank owner Ballinger (Paul Ford). Maybe she has something worth more to him as collateral than watch and wagon.

I won’t spoil it for you by revealing the ending but it’s well worth the wait and the mystery.

I was knocked out by Henry Fonda’s acting. Usually, he is gritty, upstanding, sometimes the last man standing, and his smile is often more of a grimace. Here, he is nervous, jumpy, anxious, and desperate, the reformed gambler unable to resist temptation, persuading himself that this one last game would be worth all the broken promises given his wife. His smile is so ingratiating you wouldn’t want anything to do with it. As regards the temptation facing addicts it’s on a par with the heroin victim of The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and the alcoholics of Days of Wine and Roses (1962).

With him removed from the equation, the acting lot falls to Joanne Woodward (A Fine Madness, 1966). She’s the prim opposite and doesn’t overplay her hand, restraining as best possible her confusion and fear. And this is a very fine turn from Jason Robards, most commonly accused of over-acting or under-acting, and here he gets the balance just right, volubility matched by arrogance, and a determination not just to win but to demolish an opponent.

A raw truth is expored here. Winners don’t just like winning – the medal, the lap of honor, the pile of cash, all that jazz – but they enjoy more seeing the defeat of their opponent, savoring that disgrace. This ain’t the kind of game that ends in a handshake or embraces sportsmanship. This is real in a way that The Cincinnati Kid is not.

There are a couple of familiar faces, John Qualen (The Sons of Katie Elder, 1965), and Charles Bickford (Days of Wine and Roses) in his final movie. The rest of the cast is largely anonymous, there to add febrile excitement, with hollering and racing around, desperate to keep up with the action.

Screenwriter Sidney Carroll had been here before, the big stakes, no-hoper taking on the world in The Hustler (1961) but he and Cook had managed a small-screen rehearsal of this picture a few years before on U.S. television in the DuPont Show of the Week series.

Every now and then, as I’ve maybe mentioned before, one of the joys of this little odyssey into the world of the 1960s movie is that you come across a little gem.

This one sparkles.

The Ballad of Josie (1967) ***

What was viewed as an oddity by the star’s legion of fans has turned out to have considerable contemporary appeal, situating Doris Day as an unlikely feminist icon. It was almost the opposite of her current template. She didn’t sing and the narrative was not driven by romantic mishap. It didn’t endear director Andrew V. McLaglen to his fans either after the tough-guy heroics of Shenandoah (1965). And you might also ask the question – was the feminism watered down by slapstick in order to make it more acceptable to the general audience.

One issue extremely relevant today is pretty much skated over. Josie (Doris Day) kills her drunken husband after setting about him with a pool cue. His death was largely misadventure, he fell down the stairs escaping her intended blow rather than as the result of it. What’s the world coming to, muse the men of the town, if a woman could get away with defending herself against a brute of a husband in such a fashion, given it’s accepted that a wife needs knocked about once in a while.

That she gets off seems less to do with understanding than narrative convenience. It turns her into a widow, and deprived of her son (removed by the threat of legal action by her father-in-law) that means she will come in handy for married men fancying an affair. Unable to find respectable work, she has one catastrophic shift as a waitress. In narrative terms this is intended to act as the ultimate humiliation but in terms of screen treatment it’s convenient excuse for slapstick.

For some reason best known to screenwriter Harold Swanton (Rascal, 1969), she appears best placed to influence the female townspeople on a delicate political point. Whether such influence is due to her getting away with bumping off her husband is never made clear. Turns out that women in Wyoming have the vote and in their battle for statehood the men believe that will count against them and want Josie to get them to agree to drop that right. (History tells us that the good folks didn’t enforce that and allowed women to keep the vote, so three cheers for Josie.)

Those two elements – wife-beating and voting – would make a darn good movie right there but they seem to just dip in and out of proceedings unless in some lame humorous instance. What does take center stage though is Josie’s battle for independence, not wishing to “be taken care of” by some man. She argues that “you can’t kick under the rug that women are also people” and agin the notion that a woman is “a species of idiot kept in the back closet and spoon-fed three times a day.”

So she decides to become a cattle rancher. That inflames the ire in equal measure of suitor Jason (Peter Graves) and deadly enemy Arch (George Kennedy). And pretty much she is setting herself up for failure until she comes up with the notion of raising sheep rather than cows. The sheep vs. cows argument has been surprisingly well covered in the western – witness The Sheepman (1958), Heaven with a Gun (1969) and, in more recent times, 1923 (2022) – and here they decide the two animals are best kept apart by geographical divide. The sheep are really another narrative device, cue for more slapstick-style sequences, and as you know a sheepdog will tear the britches off anyone foolish enough to get in its way.

It’s somewhat astonishing that within this unwieldy set of confounding narratives that this works at all. And mostly that is down to Doris Day (With Six You Get Eggroll, 1968) junking her previous persona of feisty female willing to be wooed by ardent or cunning male. While her anger often comes over as more like petulance and you would never mistake her for an Elizabeth Taylor or Maureen O’Hara as a woman not to cross, she does comes out of this with some credit. Peter Graves (Sergeant Ryker, 1968) and George Kennedy (The Pink Jungle, 1968) are merely adequate. Andrew V. McLaglen doesn’t show much gift for comedy apart from the most obvious but presumably he’s to be thanked for even venturing into such difficult territory.

Whether it was, as I said, a deliberate attempt to bring feminist issues to the fore, or to sneak them in under the guise of comedy, is a moot point. The star always claimed she was duped into the role, finding her husband Martin Melcher had signed her up for it without her knowing.

1923 (2023) ***

“The herd comes first,” says matriarch Cara Dutton reading the riot act to a rancher’s daughter. Except it doesn’t. We’ve got umpteen diversions before herd matters lumber into frame. We’ve got dodgy accents, dodgy sheep, dodgy big-game hunters, even dodgier priests and nuns, and you have the feeling that the opening episodes are trying to cram in as many characters (and narrative arcs) as possible at the same time as deciding which ones, for dramatic effect, to kill off or fatally wound.

Some whose purpose remains obscure get beaten half to death anyway, in a quite bizarre segment, Native American Teonna Rainwater (Amina Nieves) has her hands beaten to a pulp by hardass nun Sister Mary (Jennifer Ehle), who in turn receives the same treatment from headmaster Father Renaud (Sebastian Roche) before he thrashes the young lass until she bleeds. Then we’ve got Spencer (Brendon Sklenar) whose only way to put out of his mind the horror of machine-gunning half the German army in the trenches of World War One is to head off to Africa and start knocking off elephants, leopards and lions, who have the temerity to get in some rich guy’s way. He’s not even that good a tracker, failing to notice that it’s two leopards not one who have been picking off humans. Presumably, the leopards had some clever way of masking their footprints.

*The original Harrison Ford in 1923 picture “Maytime.”*

Because of his failing he doesn’t notice the other leopard creeping up on some dumb rich blonde who’s stupid enough to venture out of her tent for late night ablutions. Even more surprising, nobody digs him up for this and, in fact, instead, another far more intelligent blonde Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer) takes a shine to him – perhaps because he has the temerity to call her Alex – and soon they are sharing a tree to escape marauding lions and hyenas.

And while I’m being picky, what kind of rancher’s daughter, Liz Stafford (Michelle Randolph), doesn’t know that “the herd comes first” and kicks up a ruckus when cattle take precedence over her impending marriage to Jack Dutton (Darren Mann).

You’ll probably be aware that this is a prequel-sequel (taking place before Yellowstone but after 1873) so I suppose you can expect some confusion as the series struggles to get all its ducks in a row. Throw in Prohibition, possibly to explain why machine guns are so easy to come by.

Anyway, the central narrative, once you’ve managed to put all these interruptions to one side, is that there’s a drought and tough ornery patriarch Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford) isn’t inclined to share his lush pastures with the neighboring sheep farmers led by Banner Creighton (Jerome Flynn). But if in Yellowstone the ranchers occasionally had to abide by the law, here they take advantage of more lawless times and it’s not long before sheep farmers are being lynched. And it’s not long before revenge becomes the order of the day, the various Duttons ambushed in episode three, some so badly you might have believed this was the kind of horror film where you had to guess who lived and died. If Cara is anything to go by, nobody crosses the Duttons, as witnessed in the opening scene where she brutally guns down a fleeing wounded man.

I caught the first three episodes courtesy of British Airways when I was returning on the red eye from a trip to Los Angeles and had enjoyed what I had seen of Yellowstone (catching it on DVD rather than Paramount Plus) so I was looking forward to some slow-burn drama with electrifying acting.

What I got was a mini-series-by-numbers, unlikely development heaped on unlikely development, characters with no room to maneuver and closed-off from any arc and nothing of the freshness of the original. I’m so used to Harrison Ford turning off the charm by now and reverting to his grumpy old man persona and to Helen Mirren going tough that this almost seemed like routine. The two other love duets were just cliché. The white hunter and the English grand dame, and the spoiled rancher’s daughter with little to do but wail about how the cattle that brought her such prosperity were spoiling her life.

I had expected that I would enjoy such a tantalising glimpse of a new series that I’d be obliged to sign up for the streamer the minute I got home. But I think I can just as easily do without.

Old Shatterhand (1963) ***

Blame Lex Barker (Pirates of the Coast, 1963) and Daliah Lavi (The Demon, 1963) for my interest in this German-made western. In the aftermath of the spaghetti western and the messianic writings of Christopher Frayling I’d been aware of the Karl May western boom in the early 1960s and a series revolving around cowboy Old Shatterhand and his buddy Apache chief Winnetou, based on the novels of May who died in 1912. Quite why it took the 50^th anniversary of his death to make the Germans wake up to his potential is anybody’s guess.

Theoretically, he was the German equivalent of Zane Grey, but unlike the American author whose novels were filmed over 100 times before the 1960s, only six movies were made from May westerns up to that point compared to over 20 and umpteen small-screen features and series since. Treasure of the Silver Lake (1962), the number one film at the German box office that year, was credited with starting the boom.

Story here is quite simple but the cinematography, filmed in 70mm, is breath-taking, even if it’s primarily of Yugoslavia. And there’s an iconic score. Hugo Fregonese (Marco Polo, 1962) isn’t in the Sergio Leone league – he doesn’t come close – but the picture is held together by Lex Barker (Pirates of the Coast, 1963) as Shatterhand and Frenchman Pierre Brice (Samson and the Slave Queen, 1963) as Winnetou with Daliah Lavi popping up as half-breed Paloma, not, interestingly enough, romancing either of the principals, and actually exploring her maternal instinct, looking after the orphaned Tom (Leonardo Putzgruber), more central to the narrative.

Guy Madison (Tobruk, 1967) used his matinee idol looks in kind of a role reversal, the idea of a handsome villain being anathema to audiences of the period, more accustomed to bad guys in the Jack Palance-Lee Marvin vein.

U.S. Cavalry Capt. Bradley (Guy Madison) teams up with the Commanche to frame Winnetou for the murder of settlers in order to disrupt peace negotiations between the Native Americans and the Government. Tom, the only survivor of a massacre, is later brutally murdered by the soldiers. Not quite lingering on the baby blues of ruthless killer Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) but still breaking a big taboo.

As you might expect there’s an attempted lynching but you’d be surprised to see this amount of nudity for the time, though, of course, a nice peaceful river always proves too much of a temptation for skinny dipping. There’s some pretty decent action, and the Native Americans get to show off their marksmanship with a bow-and-arrow, and there’s an axe duel instead of the usual fisticuffs. Shatterhand doesn’t always come to the rescue, for the finale he’s tied up. But there’s some interesting authentic detail, a male saloon keeper, for example, hanging out towels to dry, and when Native Americans ambush a wagon train with boulders it is logically achieved – and the boulders look dangerous enough. There’s a pretty big reversal when you’re cheering on a Native American attack on a fort.

Although the American western was about to enter a revisionist period, there was no equivalent to the ongoing friendship between Shatterhand and Winnetou or the idea that the Native American was a regular guy.

There’s not enough story to support a two-hour movie but the scenery is stunning and you can see why Lex Barker was invited back to the well several times. Daliah Lavi’s talent was often overlooked in favor of her beauty but here, at least, she has a part with some meat.

Interesting.

Sergeants 3 (1962) ***

There’s a terrific western directed by John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven, 1960) inside this Rat Pack offering, the second of four in the series. On the plus side are plenty twists on traditional scenarios, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin displaying a certain kind of easy screen charisma, and three exceptional and well-choreographed battle scenes. Sinatra, Martin and Peter Lawford play the eponymous sergeants, Lawford committing the cardinal sin of wanting to quit the regiment to get married, with Sammy Davis Jr. as a former slave, bugler (an important plot point) and horse-lover wanting to sign up, and Joey Bishop (television star and occasional movie actor) as their sergeant-major boss.

A fair bit of time is spent on the usual Rat Pack shenanigans, getting drunk, brawling, playing tricks on each other, and exploring odd comic notions such as playing poker with a blacksmith’s implements as chips. But when it gets down to proper western stuff, it fairly zings along, with a decent plot (a Native American uprising) and excellent action scenes. You could have had William Goldman writing the script for the number of reversals, where the picture keeps one step ahead of audience expectation.

For a start, rather than flushing out outlaws from a town, the troopers have to remove Native Americans who have taken it over. Instead of the cavalry pursuing Native Americans, it is mostly the other way round. It is the soldiers rather than the Native Americans who attack a wagon. Sinatra finds himself employing a bow-and-arrow and then a tomahawk rather than being on the receiving end of such weaponry. Instead of dynamite, the good guys make do with fireworks. Where Native Americans are usually pinned down, this time it is Sinatra’s merry band. And when it comes to resorting to serious violence, that, too is usually the remit of the Native Americans, not as here, Sinatra chucking man off a cliff.

When it sticks to action, the picture is very well done and involving. When Sinatra has to take charge instead of larking about, the movie has focus. Both Sinatra and Martin were undertaking serious roles around this time, the former in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the latter in political drama Ada (1961) so this might have appeared welcome relief. The comedy isn’t along the laugh-out-loud lines of Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) or Blazing Saddles (1973) and the action of so full-on you wonder why anybody thought this required comedy at all, although there is a pretty good punchline ending. Action aside, it’s almost the equivalent of easy listening. The Rat Pack was a particular 1960s institution, the members joining each other on stage in Las Vegas or featuring in television programs, but there’s no real modern correlative.

It was interesting to see how the Rat Pack concept developed. This movie chucked out the idea of including a few songs as with Oceans 11 (1960) while the next one in the series, 4 for Texas (1963) was more of a serious straight western. But the final picture Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) went in the opposition direction and was a full-on musical as if by the time they came to making that picture everyone had realized the film would make more sense if it played to their inestimable talents. The series developed in other ways, too. Romance was minimal in Oceans 11, barely seen here, but was a major element of 4 for Texas – who would want to waste the talents of Ursula Andress and Anita Ekberg – but just as Andress is a smooth operator in 4 for Texas when it came to the last Rat Pack picture Barbara Rush was also a significant player for whom romance was merely a means to an end.

Villa Rides (1968) ***

Best viewed as Charles Bronson’s breakout movie. Yes, he had played supporting roles in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen, but these had all been versions of the same dour, almost monosyllabic, persona. Here, though somewhat ruthless, he steals the show from the top-billed Robert Mitchum and Yul Brynner with many of the best lines and best situations with an extra slice of humor (make that first-ever slice of humor) to add to the mix. He is the most interesting of the three main characters, in part because he does not have to spout any of the “good revolution/bad revolution” dialog that falls to the other two.

Villa (Brynner) is fighting the Colorados but his superior General Huertas (Herbert Lom) is planning to overthrow President Madero (Alexander Knox). Mitchum is an aeronautical gun-runner from El Paso, initially against the revolutionaries, stranded in Mexico when his plane breaks down. He has just about time to romance a local woman Fina (Maria Grazia Buccello) before the Colorados arrive, take over the village, start hanging the leaders and raping Fina. Villa saves them, Bronson slaughtering the Colorados with a Gatling gun on the rooftop. Faced with the one-man firing squad that is Bronson, Mitchum turns sides. His plane comes in handy for scouting the enemy, then bombing them.

The actions sequences are terrific especially Villa’s attack on a troop train. To get Villa out of the way, Huertas puts him in the front line in a suicidal attack on a heavily-defended stronghold which turns into another brilliant set-piece with cavalry charges. The plot is constantly interrupted by politics of one kind or another and comes to dead stop when Villa is arrested by Heurtas and Villa demands a proper trial. It’s kind of hard to take when a murdering bandit, no matter how legendary, decides that he has been hard done by.

That aside, there are interesting attempts to build up his legend. He doesn’t want power for himself, but to give it to the people, although he has sat back and let the first village be attacked so that the people there learn to hate the Colorados enough to join the fight. There’s not really any good guys – Brynner and Bronson are stone-cold killers, Mitchum a mercenary. But Brynner does marry Fina in order to prove that a raped woman should not be treated with dishonor, though he has a tendency to marry other women as well.

Bronson’s unusual one-man firing squad involves him laying on the ground with a pistol in each hand and giving prisoners the opportunity to escape before he shoots them. After all that hard work, he bathes his hands. Then he decides he can kill three men with one bullet, lining them up exactly so he can drill them all in the heart. But he’s also the one who shoots a molester in a cantina, then delivers the classic line: “Go outside and die, where are your manners?” He is at the heart of some well-judged comedy – continually sending back his meals and trying to get out of getting into a plane with Mitchum. Without him, there would be too much justification of slaughter (Brynner) and arguments against (Mitchum). This is the first time in the kind of action role that suits him that he has an expanded characterization.

Brynner did not like Sam Peckinpah’s original script so Robert Towne (Chinatown) was brought in to present Villa in a more appealing light. Bronson (Adieu L’Ami/Farewell Friend, 1968) shows hints of the screen persona that would so appeal to the French. Yul Brynner (The Double Man, 1967) adorns his character with many shades of grey, but Robert Mitchum (Secret Ceremony, 1969) has less to do. Buzz Kulik (Warning Shot, 19660 has great fun with the action, less fun with some of the turgid dialog-ridden scenes.

Good for action and Bronson.