Marguerite Roberts – The Magnificent 60s

Behind the Scenes: “True Grit” (1969)

Not cut out for the musicals, comedies, historical adventures (let’s not count The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965), thrillers, dramas, and spy pictures that dominated that 1960s the western was John Wayne’s default. After his initial battle with lung cancer, he enjoyed an extended period of success in Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Howard Hawks’ El Dorado (1967) and Burt Kennedy’s The War Wagon (1967) before diversifying in Vietnam war picture The Green Berets (1968), which he directed and was also a hit, and Andrew V. McLaglen oil drama Hellfighters which did, however, fall short of his high box office standards. So when any big western picture was mooted, it was either Wayne or James Stewart to whom producers first came calling. But when the actor particularly wanted a part, he usually got it.

Charles Portis was a journalist with one modern novel, Norwood published in 1966, to his name when he wrote True Grit, published in 1968, which, unusually for a western, spent 22 weeks in the New York Times bestseller list. The main attraction for a reader was the equally unusual first-person narrator, Mattie Ross, towards the end of her life telling the tale of how as a 14-year-old in Arkansas she sought bloody revenge for the death of her father. The narrative voice was highly individual with colorful phrases, punchy dialogue, and a taut storyline.

Producer Hal Wallis snapped it up for $300,000, beating out Wayne’s Batjac operation. Wallis had been making his own pictures for over two decades, having originally overseen films as varied as swashbuckler Captain Blood (1935) and Casablanca (1942). He also had a western pedigree, having set up John Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Sons of Katie Elder and Five Card Stud (1968) with Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum.

The movie went into speedy production, barely a year from the novel’s publication to the world premiere. From the start Wallis had Wayne in mind for Rooster Cogburn, with Robert Mitchum as back-up. Mia Farrow turned down the role of Mattie Ross when she found out the director was to be Henry Hathaway. Genevieve Bujold turned it down because she didn’t want to work with Wayne. Wayne favored Katharine Ross (The Hellfighters, 1968) or Michele Carey (El Dorado) or his daughter Aissa whom Hathaway ruled out. Sally Field from the television series The Flying Nun was also considered, but the part finally went to 21-year-old Kim Darby.

She had been in the movies since 1963 (an uncredited role in Bye, Bye, Birdie) and, excepting small roles in Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965) starring Ann-Margret, fourth-billing in both the low-budget The Restless Ones (1965) and Arthur Penn television movie Flesh and Blood (1968), confined to guest roles in routine television series such as The Fugitive, Star Trek, Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

Elvis Presley was touted for the role of Le Boeuf but manager Col. Parker insisted his client receive top billing and the role went to another popular singer Glen Campbell, who had made his movie debut in The Cool Ones (1967). Robert Duvall, filling the boots of Lucky Ned Pepper, was also a refugee from television (The Outer Limits, The Fugitive, Combat) although he had delivered a memorable performance as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and had risen to third-billing for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969).

Henry Hathaway, a former child actor, had directed 60 movies beginning in 1932. But he had learned about direction at the feet of Josef von Sternberg and Victor Fleming, both hard taskmasters, and only made the move into megging at the third attempt. First of all, he had spent nine months touring India with the idea of making a film in the style of silent documentaries Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) or Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927). He managed to attract the interest of Irving G. Thalberg but the producer died before funding materialized. Next, Paramount planned to hire him when the studio planned an early 1930s investment in color but got cold feet and the idea was dropped. Finally, when Paramount decided it was going to make its own westerns, rather than buying them in, he was hired to direct Heritage of the Desert (1932) starring Randolph Scott but after six more in that genre – being paid $100 a week for the first two and then $65 a week for the next two after the Depression bit – he hit pay dirt with adventure The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) with Gary Cooper and comedy Go West Young Man (1936) with Mae West.

When Paramount finally embraced three-color Technicolor they chose Hathaway to direct adventure The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) starring Sylvia Sidney and Fred MacMurray. “It cannot be merely accidental that he was selected,” commented historian Kingley Canham, arguing that Hathaway had “more than just an aptitude for freshening familiar material through technical resourcefulness.”

And like John Ford he was economical with the camera. “I only shoot what can be used so the producer has no choice…I always cut in the camera, the cutter just has to put the ends together,” he said. Determined to achieve verisimilitude, instead of using studio hand-made locusts for biopic Brigham Young (1940), he travelled to Nevada where had been a big invasion of the insects. Except for this film and The Shepherd of the Hills (1941), starring Wayne, he steered clear of westerns, preferring action and drama. However, he was instrumental in helping Wayne extend his acting style. For Shepherd of the Hills, Hathaway “added new subtleties to the already characteristic western hero persona – the roiling gait and economy of dialog were still very much in evidence but his acting was more mature, more sensitive, and more assured.”

He was called upon to demonstrate further technical mastery in the first of Twentieth Century Fox’s semi-documentary dramas The House on 92nd St (1945) followed by film noir Dark Corner (1946) and Kiss of Death (1947). He made his first western in a decade with Rawhide (1951) toplining Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward and only two other westerns in the 1950s – Garden of Evil (1954), teaming Cooper and Hayward, and Hell to Texas (1958) with Audie Murphy, the twist in this one being the hero rather than the villain subjected to a manhunt. Another technical innovation came with The Desert Fox (1951), where he “did the whole raid before the titles,” the first time any action had been shown prior to the rolling of the opening credits.

He was so impressed with the acting skills of Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (1953) that he purchased Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage intending to team her with Montgomery Clift, but nothing came of the concept. He worked with Wayne again in Legend of the Lost (1957) co-starring Sophia Loren.

But, like Wayne, he returned in triumph to the western in the 1960s, all bar two of his movies in this decade in this genre, the first four of the decade starring Wayne – North to Alaska (1960), How the West Was Won (1962), Circus World (1964) and The Sons of Katie Elder. He had finished up on Five Card Stud when Hal Wallis invited him to direct True Grit. He had only received one Oscar nomination, four decades previously, for The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and no avant garde French film critic was reassessing his work, but he was known to bring movies in on time, and had his own distinct style if anyone could be bothered looking for it.

Certain themes did reappear, revenge for one, which was central to The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Kiss of Death, historical adventure The Black Rose (1950), Prince Valiant (1954) with James Mason, The Sons of Katie Elder and Nevada Smith (1966) starring Steve McQueen. He also focused on disruption within the family, and situations where an older man aids an impetuous youngster, both instrumental to True Grit. “He is the only director I know,” observed Kingsley Canham, “to have specialized in films about backwoods and mountains.”

Screenwriter Marguerite Roberts was also old-school, born in 1905, with over 30 screen credits. She sold her first script while working as a secretary at Fox, had her first screen credit in 1933 for Sailor’s Luck. By 1939 she was earning $2,500 a week at MGM and turned out Honky Tonk (1941) with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, Sea of Grass (1946) with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Gunga Din remake Soldiers Three (1951) and big-budget historical adventure Ivanhoe (1951) with Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor.

Like Abraham Polonsky she fell out of favor with Hollywood for her left-wing sympathies and was blacklisted for nearly a decade until Daniel Petrie’s The Main Attraction (1962) with Pat Boone and Nancy Kwan, Guy Green’s Diamond Head (1962) with Charlton Heston and Rampage (1963) with Robert Mitchum. She, too, had been working for Hal Wallis on Five Card Stud before receiving the commission to adapt the Portis book.

Roberts was familiar with the Old West, since her father had been a lawman in Colorado. Screenwriter Wendell Mayes, who wrote From Hell to Texas, commented that “Henry Hathaway is very easy for a writer to work with.” “When a screenplay is finished,” said Hathaway, “I go through it and work on it. I worked on True Grit with Marguerite Roberts because there was a great deal of repetition in the book and I eliminated a lot of things.” John Wayne felt Hathaway “never got the creative credit I think is due him…He was sort of a story doctor…a fine, instinctive, creator.”

Her first problem was how to translate the book’s distinctive first-person style onto the screen without the entire movie sounding too archaic and although many speeches were lifted verbatim from the book it was Roberts who established Mattie Ross as an authority figure from the outset by introducer the teenager as her father’s “bookkeeper” and inventing the argument about the type of horses he intended to buy.

The result is an unusual composite of tight storyline, exuberant characterization and wonderful dialog. The movie was filmed mainly in Colorado – Ouray, Owl Creek Pass, Ridgway, Canon City, Montrose, Bishop, and Gunnison – as well as Durango in Mexico and Inyo National Park in California where Hot Creek was used for the outlaw’s cabin and also Sherwin Summit.

The critics, who had slaughtered The Green Berets the previous year, and been largely indifferent to many of his previous westerns during the 1960s, virtually gave him a standing ovation. Variety called it a “top adventure drama…Wayne towers over everything in the film – the actors, script and even the magnificent Colorado mountains.”

Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “a triumph…one of the major movies of the year.” The New York Daily News claimed it was “John Wayne’s finest moment.” The New York Post came closest to defining its appeal: “Few westerns will come along this or any other year that can be as fully enjoyed by as many people of varying ages and sex.” Vernon Scott of United Press was not alone in predicting “Wayne should win the Oscar.”

Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times said, “come Oscar time Wayne will be a leading contender.” Norma Lee Browning of the Chicago Tribune informed readers that “there’s already talk that he may, at long last, get an Oscar nomination.” Charles McHarry of the New York Daily News held the same view. Time opined “a flawless portrait of a flawed man.” International Motion Picture Exhibitor found it “the perfect vehicle for Henry Hathaway’s directorial style. He approached the simple western story in the most straightforward manner…garnished it with a delightful humor that springs right out of the vagaries of the homespun characters…and giving it a rhythm that carries the viewer along despite its lengthy running time.”

Allen Eyles in Focus on Film summed up the film’s appeal: “That True Grit could end up being the best western of the year is a tribute to old Hollywood – to a producer, director, star, cameraman and others who’ve been at the top of the film business for more than three decades. Their solid, unpretentious professionalism enables them to meet the challenge of filming a first-rate novel with pleasing assurance and directness…it is far superior to…the poorly-shaped but occasionally striking The Wild Bunch from Peckinpah…(it) is not innovatory in style but the details are communicated with a freshness that is appealing.”

Unusually, for a film of the period, the movie repeated a single image in all of its advertising, Wayne’s face dominating the composition, with below him Mattie Ross standing gun in hand and Glen Campbell behind him. That Campbell sang the title song over the credits led to the release of a record, and there was a New American Library book tie-in. Ancillary promotional items included a t-shirt embellished with the words “This Man Has True Grit,” and buttons announcing “I Have True Grit” and, alternatively, “Give Me a Man with True Grit.” Stetson created a special hat called “The Duke,” with a special one costing $1,500 to be presented to Johnny Carson on his show, with an advertising campaign that included Playboy and Esquire while Aramis created a special line of “Grit Soap.”

Time magazine had raised expectations for the picture by putting John Wayne on the front cover, on August 8, although this was in part retaliation to Life’s joint cover story on Wayne and Dustin Hoffman which ran in the Jul 11 issue, and Paramount took a gamble opening it in New York at the Radio City Music Hall, partly a ploy to boost European revenues, the first western to be so honored, although the theater covered itself by claiming the movie was an “outdoor adventure” rather than a western per se. The picture broke all sorts of records there and went on to conquer America, shattering Dallas records, for example, and then helped along by the Time cover story. For a few months it looked set to become the best performing western of all time, but was soon overtaken by the release of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Even so, it took $11.5 million in rentals to finish sixth in the annual chart. It was reissued after Wayne’s Oscar triumph the following year in an unlikely double bill with Oscar-nominated The Sterile Cuckoo and grossed $3.7 million in the twelve days. But Paramount, trying to offset calamitous losses, prematurely sold off the western to television so its reissue value was sharply curtailed.

SOURCE: Brian Hannan, The Gunslingers of ’69: Western Movies’ Greatest Year, (McFarland, 2019).

True Grit (1969) *****

An old-style western with a modernized anti-hero in Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne), nearly as “rapaciously brutal” as the same year’s The Wild Bunch, a script with language that captured the period, a heroine Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) who falls into the robust Barbara Stanwyck/Maureen O’Hara mold, humor and action in equal measure, and an unfussy director (Henry Hathaway) who loved the panorama even more than John Ford.

Although still critically rated as not as good as The Wild Bunch, and still mostly disdained by academics, I would argue that it has been grossly under-rated and fully deserving of a re-evaluation. In the first place, despite direction very much in the old school, Hathaway exhibits many stylistic flourishes, not least the very long shot which has rarely been used to such effect. He also utilizes the shaky-camera point-of-view in a much more effective manner than Mackenna’s Gold (1969) to record Cogburn’s charge at the outlaws and there is even a zoom, to pick out the villain Tom Chaney.

Also, you know exactly where you are in a Hathaway picture, not just in the narrative sense, but in terms of how people lived and where the towns and farms were in relation to each other (the Ross farm is 70 miles from Fort Smith, the hamlet of McAllister 60 miles from the villains’ hideout). He liked to show many aspects of a town, so we see where the courthouse is in relation to the jail and the stable by the simple expedient of having the characters walk past them. And the movie is littered with sound effects of the most ordinary kind (blacksmith’s hammer, train whistle, footsteps). The film is as much about progress as Once Upon a Time in the West and The Wild Bunch, the name of the town, Fort Smith, where much of the initial action takes place, indicates it was once a frontier town.

Rooster Cogburn feels crowded out by a new generation of lawyers challenging swift justice, and Mattie Ross, hunting the killers of her father, is well schooled in argument, winning many a confrontation with apparently more experienced and wily men by being more adept at negotiation and like a chess player always one move ahead. The aftermath of the Civil War lingers in the background, demonstrated by Mattie’s weapon and Cogburn’s antipathy to Texas Ranger LaBeef (Glen Campbell). But the story strikes an even balance, no matter how assured Mattie Ross comes across in civilization she almost comes apart in the wilds and without the protection of Cogburn would have met the kind of fate at the hands of men undergone by female characters in The Stalking Moon (1969), Mackenna’s Gold and The Wild Bunch.

It should be said here that the movie is full of audience direction, we are always told where Mattie will go next or where Cogburn is intending to go, with accompanying plausible reason, especially when later Cogburn calls off the hunt for the outlaws. There is no exploration of mystery, the characters are always upfront, and where characters express regret is it minus the self-pitying of The Wild Bunch. Nobody is defined by something they should have done instead, so, in that respect, the narrative is as clear as the overall direction.

We hear Cogburn’s voice before we see him, as if the director is preparing us for a different John Wayne. This is the actor in a new timbre, the usual slow drawl replaced by a raucous bark. And it is a different Wayne, one eye covered in a black patch, giving him a piratical look. He hustles the prisoners out, kicking one straggler viciously in the butt. Wayne walks differently, too. Instead of the famous slow walk, Cogburn is a man in a hurry, pushing forward with purposeful stride, ignoring Mattie as she comes racing after him, slamming the basement door in her face.

LeBeef is another dreamer, “nobody yet” but aiming to “marry well”, in this case “a well-placed young lady in Waco” who would “look with favor” on him for bringing back Chaney who has also killed a senator. His charm fails to convince Mattie to join forces. She sees right through him: “I have no regard for you but I’m sure you have enough for yourself to go around.”

Then comes a four-minute Mattie tour de force as she confronts Col Stonehill (Strother Martin) and demands $300 in reparation for the loss of her father’s saddle and for selling him dodgy horses. She threatens him with the law in the shape of Daggett, her secret weapon, and she knows enough about legality to beat Stonehill at his own game. Even better, this is no meek woman. It is one thing to be able to score points off an old lawman like Cogburn, who would have been putty in the hands of any capable woman of the Stanwyck/O’Hara variety, but another to outwit a wily old horse-dealer like Stonehill (his title a hangover from the Civil War and one which ensures a measure of respect). Even better again, she knows she will win, so confident that she has already drawn up the papers to sign.

Now neither Cogburn nor LeBeef are witness to this demonstration of her capability, so they will, naturally, treat her as a young girl, “baby sister” in Cogburn’s dismissive term. But Hathaway is setting a trap for the audience. Having witnessed this display, we think she will be able to hold her own in the wilderness, mistaking her willfulness for sagacity, and so are on her side in her attempts to win over the two men, when, in fact, she will prove to be so out of her depth as to endanger herself and others.

The pursuit is dogged, and everyone at some point is found wanting. Cogburn smokes the villains out from their cabin and would kill the others without warning except LaBeef objects out of principle and Mattie wants Chaney alive.

At Mattie’s prompting, we hear Cogburn’s mostly unvarnished, but never maudlin, history, he lost his eye in the war, committed a robbery to fund the purchase of an eating place that had a billiard table, married a grass widow, until she left him for her first husband, taking their son, Horace, hiding his sorrow at the boy’s departure in a grumpy “he never liked me anyway” and berating him as “clumsy.” When she lies down to sleep, he gazes at her fondly for the first time, perhaps prompted by memory of his loss.

In the climactic shoot-out, in the most famous John Wayne image since his character’s introduction in Stagecoach (1969), first in long shot then from his point-of-view with a shaky camera, he grasps the reins in his teeth and fires two-handed. He kills two but Pepper shoots his horse from under him and Cogburn, in a sign of his age when otherwise traditionally cowboys leap free of a falling horse, is trapped on the ground under the weight of the animal, unable to reach his gun or to shift. The wounded Pepper advances. He towers over Cogburn until LaBeef, whose marksmanship had previously been in question, saves his life.

And that should pretty much have been the end of the picture, roll credits with Chaney being hung, but there is still nearly 15 minutes to go. Returning to collect Chaney, LaBeef is ambushed, cracked on the head by a rock. Mattie shoots Chaney but the recoil sends her into the snake pit. Cogburn arrives in time to kill the wanted man, also sending him into the pit. She has damaged her shoulder and cannot pull herself up on a rope so Cogburn has to descend. He shoots a rattlesnake but another bites her.

She still had enough presence of mind to demand he first collect her fallen gun and her father’s gold piece from Chaney’s corpse. As he hauls himself up, a dazed LaBeef, mounted on a horse, pulls on the tope to ease their ascent, but the effort is too much, and he keels over and dies.

Mattie strokes his head, the first sign of her changed feelings towards him. Alternatively, this could be guilt because it was her wrong-headedness that caused his death, but that seems unlikely, she is not one to covet regret. Cogburn slaps saliva on the wound (rather than, as we might expect from watching other westerns, sucking out the poison), puts her arm in a sling, and sticks her on Blackie, her horse, despite her protests about the little horse carrying such a weight. Cogburn is ruthless, riding the horse so hard it dies. Then he carries her and finally steals a buggy.

Where previously most of the journey had been rendered in long shot, now Hathaway reverts to medium shot and close up of the haggard Cogburn racing desperately to save the girl’s life. When we cut to Cogburn and Chen Lee instinctively we know she has been saved. The lawyer Daggett appears to pay Cogburn what he is owed plus $200 for saving her life, though, typically, she has prepared a receipt for him to sign.

Then she is home. It is winter. Snow lies on the ground. Cogburn explains there was no woman waiting for LaBeef, though the marshal has collected the reward. She shows him her father’s grave and wants Cogburn, the father she has adopted, to be buried in the same burial ground. She gives him her father’s gun and in a final triumphant moment the “fat old man” gloriously rides over a four-bar fence waving his hat in the air.

John Wayne received just reward with his Oscar, Glen Campbell (The Cool Ones, 1967) does better than we might expect from a singer. Kim Darby (Bus Riley’s Back in Town, 1965) was ignored by Oscar voters but she certainly holds her own. Terrific direction by Henry Hathaway (5 Card Stud, 1968) from a script by Marguerite Roberts (5 Card Stud) based on the bestseller by Charles Portis (Norwood, 1970).

Unmissable.

Behind the Scenes: “Five Card Stud” (1968)

Every now and then in the writing of my blog an event occurs which comes as a great surprise. Last year, I was contacted from Los Angeles by Claudia Pretelin, a producer working for DVD specialist Vinegar Syndrome. They were planning a 4K restoration of Five Card Stud (1968) and, alighting on my review of the movie, Claudia asked if I would do the audio commentary, especially as I had detected the strong feminist undercurrent that runs through the western.

Five years ago, McFarland had published my book The Gunslingers of ’69: The Westerns’ Greatest Year. But if I had been writing about 1968, Five Card Stud would be one of the standouts. For whatever reason, it’s so under-rated it’s almost been completely forgotten, overshadowed by the three other westerns Henry Hathaway made either side of it, most importantly True Grit (1969) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) . Overshadowed because it wasn’t made by John Ford or Howard Hawks. Together with Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood they were the directors most admired by critics. Overshadowed because it didn’t star John Wayne or James Stewart, both considered essential elements to any great western. Overshadowed because nobody gave a damn about Dean Martin (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) as a serious actor.

But from the outset, this is distinctive with recurrent motifs and a visual symmetry – overhead camera, water, strangulation, the card table – that seems to have gone unnoticed, unlike The Searchers. Given the testosterone on display – Robert Mitchum (Secret Ceremony, 1969) in addition to Dean Martin – this is unusually an extremely feminist western. The three female leads are far from docile and screenwriter Marguerite Roberts has changed the source book, Glory Gulch by Ray Gaulden, to exploit those elements.

Entrepreneur Lily (Inger Stevens) runs an upmarket barbershop – generally a male monopoly – with an interesting sideline, but when it comes to romance she’s in charge, choosing – and dumping – the men. Nora (Katherine Justice) is a rancher’s daughter so smart and effective that her father has already decided that he’s going to leave her a half-share in his business rather than, as would be the norm, leaving it all to his son Nick (Roddy McDowell). Mama Malone (Ruth Springford) owns the eponymous saloon and takes no sass from anybody.

Van (Dean Martin) likes to think he has the measure of women, when in fact they have the measure of him. The story avoids the obvious lure of a love triangle, of jealous women competing for Van’s affections. Both the young Nora and the more mature Lily are pretty well grounded and judge their men by the standard of their kissing – that’s equality for you.

The movie was one of the fastest ever made, just five months from the start of shooting to release – that’s efficiency for you. And for many critics that was how they regarded director Henry Hathaway. He wasn’t considered a stylist, but a studio workhorse, apt to take what was offered, work in too many genres. But this is one of his most stylish films. In some ways it harks back to film noir. The story is a mystery. And his extensive use of overhead camera would be considered innovative had it been made now.

This is in fact about a serial killer, a treatise on law and order, almost acting as a conduit between the decade’s previous westerns when the good guys and the bad guys are easily distinguished to the end of the decade when such distinctions were muddied. Here, we don’t know who the bad guy is. He’s not a hero saving a town or enforcing law and order. Not a detective either, trying to nail down a killer. He’s only trying to save his own skin. The whodunit is really a MacGuffin, an opportunity to examine the hypocrisies of the West.

The Sons of Katie Elder, Nevada Smith (1966) and Five Card Stud are all about revenge, justified in you like in the first two. Play this another way and the vengeful preacher Rudd (Robert Mitchum) would be the hero, vindicated as much as characters in Hang ‘Em High (1968), Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) or True Grit.

Producer Hal B. Wallis (True Grit) bought Ray Gaulden’s western Glory Gulch in May 1967, three months after publication by Berkeley Medallion as a paperback original. (Reprinted a year later, it was re-titled Five Card Stud). It came cheap. Nobody else was bidding. Robert Redford (Downhill Racer, 1969) turned down the role of Rudd – he thought the character too obvious and didn’t like the way the narrative developed – so Robert Mitchum was actually second choice.

Filming was due to start in October 1967 but was delayed till February 1968. It was shot in Durango – a popular locale also utilized for Guns for San Sebastian (1968), Shalako (1968) and The Scalphunters (1968) – and Churabasco Studios in Mexico City. There were 22 actors and 52 crew. The main location was 8,000ft up on the Sierra Madre mountains. The actors were billeted in a motel, but Mitchum, demanding peace and quiet, had the end room so got more of the cold and required a portable oxygen tank. Instead of privacy he was frozen. The boilers didn’t work and allocated a single blanket he ended up piling all his clothes on the bed. Roddy McDowell wasn’t hired until after shooting began and he modelled his somewhat hippie sideburns after George Harrison. Mitchum was nearly crushed to death by a falling 18^th high camera pedestal. While the two stars didn’t particularly hit it off there was no animosity either.

Some of those involved scarcely needed to work. Dean Martin was one of the richest men in the business. At a time when the very top stars took home $750,000 a picture, say $1.5 million if they made two movies a year, Martin took home closer to $5 million a year when you totted up fees from his television show, movies, records and performing. McDowell was the co-owner of a thriving disco franchise. Hathaway had just sold his stake in an oil business for $18 million.

Marguerite Roberts had been one of the top-earning screenwriters in the Hollywood

Golden Age. Starting out in 1933, her credits included Honky Tonk (1941) with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, The Sea of Grass (1947) starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and MGM’s big-budget blockbuster Ivanhoe (1951) teaming Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor. Around the time of Five Card Stud she had two other projects on studio slates, Hero Suit and Flight and Pursuit, though neither was made and it was perhaps ironic that her next assignment concerned a lawman who took the same no-holds-barred approach to the criminal fraternity, namely True Grit, as the killer in this picture.

Filming began on February 7 and finished on April 14. It opened on July 12. That was a phenomenal turnaround for the period. A Time for a Killing/The Long Ride Home (1967), also starring Inger Stevens, took 16 months to reach the screen. In 1967 there were 125 films in studio backlogs – movies completed but no release date set as yet as yet, studios in no hurry, and often first run cinemas in the major cities clogged up by roadshows or long-running hits.

The western from mid-1960s had become the default for many stars. Where earlier in the decade stars might mix western and war with comedy and drama now for many top names for a period of three, four or five years they appeared either exclusively or almost exclusively in westerns. From 1965 to 1968 except for Matt Helm and one comedy Dean Martin had tackled five westerns. In the same period for James Stewart four out of five were westerns. For Mitchum it was four straight westerns from 1966 to 1968. In two years starting in 1967, four out of five Inger Stevens pictures were westerns. In three years, Glenn Ford made five straight westerns and after Battle of the Bulge (1965) Henry Fonda made four straight westerns. It was the same for directors: between 1965 and 1971 Andrew V. McLaglen made nothing but, and Burt Kennedy, in one year less, seven out of eight.

DVD with 4K restoration and audio commentary by yours truly available to pre-order and comes out in a few days.

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/5-card-stud

Diamond Head (1962) ****

Bold examination of racism years ahead of its time. Narrative not sweetened for audiences by a detective story (In the Heat of the Night, 1967) or grumpy father-of-the-bride comedy (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967) or by protagonists unrepresentative of society by being criminal (The Defiant Ones, 1958) and criminally insane (Pressure Point, 1962), the issue of racism – miscegenation and interbreeding – smack bang in the middle. Though it takes place in Hawaii, theoretically at one remove from the violence emanating in the U.S. Deep South, the points made strike home.

If a shade melodramatic, that is undercut by a set of very fine performances by all the principals. Charlton Heston, later lacerated in democratic circles for his defence of the right to bear arms, here employs his marquee value to deal with the ticking time bomb.

*Yep, that is an advert shaped as a diamond. Subtle, huh?*

The tale is simple enough. Headstrong Sloane (Yvette Mimieux) decides to marry native-born Paul Kahana (James Darren) against the wishes of her older brother, widowed millionaire landowner “King” Howland (Charlton Heston). Despite using equality as an election platform in a bid to become a Senator, King fiercely objects to the marriage on the grounds that it will dilute his bloodline and, in effect, hand over control of his empire to an outsider. His spinster sister-in-law Laura (Elizabeth Allen) backs him on this score as does, oddly enough, Paul’s mother Kapiolani (Aline McMahon) who complains that interbreeding has reduced the number of native Hawaiians to a mere 12,000.

Complicating matters is King’s hypocrisy. His mistress, Mai Chen (France Nuyen), already is of mixed parentage. But when she announces she is pregnant, he demands she have an abortion. Spicing up that particular complication is her brother Bobbie (Marc Marno) who sponges off the perks King provides and now decides to hit the gold seam by blackmailing King. And just in case that’s not enough in the way of complications Sloane has always had a yen for Paul’s older and more successful brother Dean (George Chakiris), now a hospital doctor. In fact, as outlined in a flashback, Paul was decidedly second-best in Sloane’s eyes and there is a hint she romanced him to spite the more sensible brother.

Bobbie doesn’t get the chance to put his scheme into practice as he is implicated in the death of Paul, who had been trying to stop the blackmailer from drunkenly attacking King at a traditional engagement ceremony. Paul is killed accidentally by King.

That should have simplified matters, but it doesn’t. King is abandoned by Sloane and Laura leave and Mai Chen throws him out. The scandal of Paul’s death should have ended his political ambitions, but despite his backers dropping out, arrogantly he decides to go it alone until receiving the slow-handclap treatment from the public. He is fully aware of the consequences of his action, pointing out that $3 million spent on philanthropy wouldn’t “buy me a tear.”

It could have ended there, proud man brought down by ambition, institutional racism and stubbornness, but it follows a different, and reconciliatory, tack at the end.

And it could have been a heaving brew of melodrama with dilated nostrils and screaming matches but it’s redeemed from that by most of the actors downplaying their roles. There is some impressive playing by Charlton Heston (55 Days at Peking, 1964) who carries off his hypocrisy in some style, but doesn’t descend to the obvious ploy of disinheriting the defiant one or at the very least chucking her out and generally manages to keep the lid on his temper. George Chakiris (Flight from Ashiya, 1964) uncannily captures all the elements of his character. An educated man so can’t be downtrodden but has to watch his step in confronting such a powerful man, so he makes his point with quiet determination.

In an early starring role Yvette Mimieux (Joy in the Morning, 1965) is given a lot more to do than in some later offerings. She exhibits defiance not just in regard to racism but sexism as well, determining that her marriage would be an equal relationship not one where she would be subservient to her husband. Had she been able to rein in her pig-headedness and present herself as more interested in the business than its perks she might have allayed her brother’s fears that in endorsing the marriage he was risking handing over his empire to her idiot husband, so lacking in the brain department he needed extra years to graduate at college.

France Nuyen (Man in the Middle, 1964) has a peach of a part, plenty good lines, and the beneficiary of the few scenes not driven by narrative requirements, in particular her observations at watching her lover dress. James Darren (The Guns of Navarone, 1961), given less to do, is not surprisingly more of a cliché. Oscar-nominated Alice McMahon (Cimarron, 1960) is quietly impressive as the equally torn parent who could, at one point, take legal revenge on King.

Director Guy Green (The Magus, 1968), aware the content is inflammatory enough without the principals going overboard, does pretty well to stick to the issues. Screenwriter Marguerite Roberts (5 Card Stud, 1968), in adapting the bestseller by Peter Gilman, makes several changes to keep the focus on the key element.

In his diary, Charlton Heston noted that that movie was overly melodramatic but with the proper treatment it could work. He was right. The plot has more cogs than any wheel could comfortably accommodate, but by keeping the central issue central the movie would be viewed today as the highpoint of Hollywood’s opposition to racism rather than being superseded five years later by the pair starring Sidney Poitier.

Five Card Stud (1968) ****

Another western in sore need of re-evaluation. Largely dismissed as a routine oater trading on the gimmick of a whodunit and packed with old stagers, this is in fact about a serial killer, a treatise on law and order, and almost acts as a conduit between the decade’s previous westerns when the good guys and the bad guys are easily defined to the end of the decade when such distinctions were muddied after The Wild Bunch (1969) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) invited audiences to root for the bad guys. In this rather well-structured picture, full of action and romance, we don’t know who the bad guy is.

The whodunit, however, is really a MacGuffin. The movie is more concerned with investigating the changing mores and hypocrisies of the West and predicting the inherent dangers in the proliferation of weaponry. It’s worth remembering that the movie came out at time when mass murderers such as Charles Whitman (the subject of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, 1968) who went on a killing spree in 1966 were becoming the norm.

A card sharp is lynched for cheating at poker in the quiet town of Rinchon where late-night gambling is the height of entertainment. One of the players, professional gambler Van (Dean Martin), attempts to stop the hanging but is beaten up for his troubles. No surprise then, that he ambles off to Denver. Sometime later the hangmen begin dying off and Van returns not just to solve the mystery but to ensure that his name isn’t on the list. “If someone is out to kill you, you don’t sit around and let him pick the time,” he concludes. With the number of killings, not to mention brawls and shoot-outs, it’s almost continuous action.

On his return, Van discovers, with a gold strike nearby, the incipient boom town has attracted unsavory elements, not just the high murder quotient but a whorehouse and loud music in the saloon. Acting as counterbalance is gun-toting preacher Jonathan Rudd (Robert Mitchum) who announces his presence by spraying bullets in the saloon floor, emerging as the self-proclaimed “conscience” of the town.

For a sometime protector of law and order, Van is rather lax in the morals department, unwilling to commit to main squeeze rancher’s daughter Nora (Katharine Justice) when the likes of Lily (Inger Stevens), the unlikely proprietor of a barbershop-cum-whorehouse, are on hand. Van is an interesting study. Once he becomes aware that the only people likely to end up in an early grave are the six men who played poker with the lynched individual, it doesn’t occur to him to fess up to Marshal Dana (John Anderson) which would ease the fears of the ordinary public. Awareness the only corpses belonged to the guilty would have prevented further outbursts of violence among a disaffected population. Interestingly, too, Dana makes no attempt to investigate the lynching.

At the core of this picture are a couple of amazing scenes as paranoia takes hold. One miner, without the slightest sense of irony, complains that in the old days a gunfight took place face to face, not by a murderer slinking round in the dark. Rudd adds some prophetic advice: “wear a gun and use it fast, wear a gun and use it slow – I say don’t wear a gun and you won’t use it at all.”

Van likes to think he has the measure of women, when in fact they have the measure of him. The story avoids the obvious lure of a love triangle, of jealous women competing for Van’s affections. Both the young Nora and the more mature Lily are pretty well grounded. “One wore-out no-account kiss” is Nora’s dismissive description of Van’s attempts at romance while Lily lets Van know she has taken a shine to him as a matter of convenience, he’s just a man and she hasn’t had one in three years. Expecting to be treated as a pariah, Lily, expressing the notion that “women don’t usually like women who like men,” strikes up a friendship with Nora.

Marshal Dana finds it increasingly difficult to maintain any kind of peace since as the death count mounts, paranoia grows rife, exacerbated by the kind of greed gold fever brings, resulting in citizens determined to challenge authority and take matters into their own hands.

The most antsy character is Nick (Roddy McDowall), Nora’s brother and the leader of the lynch mob. Nick seems to stir up bad feelings, provoking the ire of both his father and Van. The guilty are despatched in original ways, one man “drowns” in a barrel of flour, another strangled by barbed wire, a third wakes the town at night when the church bell to which his neck is attached starts ringing out. It’s not too hard in the end to work out who the killer is, but as I said, that is not the point of the picture, although the ending is satisfactory.

There a mass of small detail of the kind that director Henry Hathaway (True Grit, 1969) tends to work into his pictures. Van is a cut above. He travels to Denver and back by stagecoach not on horseback. Citizens can purchase Pocahontas Remedies and beer from the Denver Brewery. Shaves and haircuts at the Tonsorial Parlor are reasonably priced but “miscellaneous” comes in at $20. After the preacher shoots up her floor, saloon owner Mama (Ruth Springford) smooths out the holes.

And there is some distinctive direction. Rudd’s sermon that lasts nearly 90 seconds is delivered in virtually one take, a fistfight is conducted in silence except for a soundtrack punctuated by grunts and punches hitting their target, a dying man tries to leave a physical clue about the identity of the mysterious killer. And there is a superb main street gunfight with Van trying to rescue the marshal and Rudd striding down the street in old-fashioned gunslinger mode.

Dean Martin (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) and Robert Mitchum (The Way West, 1969), both with apparently easy-going but magisterial screen personas, come off well together. Inger Stevens (Firecreek, 1968) always a great screen presence, an ethereal beauty, is vulnerable and strong at the same time. Katherine Justice (The Way West, 1967) is sassy and independent-minded and has a terrific facial response to coming across the first murder. John Anderson (The Satan Bug, 1965) leads a fine supporting cast including Yaphet Kotto (Live and Let Die, 1973), Denver Pyle (Shenandoah, 1965) and Whit Bissell (Seven Days in May, 1964).

Screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, adapting the novel by Ray Gaulden, contributes some classic lines. “If that is a Bible, read it,” Van instructs Rudd, assuming the preacher has a gun planted in the Holy Book, “If it ain’t a Bible, drop it.” There’s a nod to a James Coburn scene in The Magnificent Seven (1960). Congratulated on his marksmanship in hitting the spinning wheels of a windmill six times out of six, Rudd protests his shooting was a failure since he was aiming for the spaces in between. It was ironic that her next assignment concerned a lawman who took much the same no-holds-approach to the criminal fraternity (True Grit, 1969) as the killer in this picture.

I was so intrigued by this picture, realizing it had much more to offer than a whodunit, that I watched it again within a few days and was pleasantly surprised by its depths.