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The Stagecoach couple in Bleeding Kansas, a run-through for the Civil War. "A real cowboy," the John Wayne persona solidified with rough courtliness, "the contrariest critter I've ever seen!" His pal (George "Gabby" Hayes) tends to the teeth he knocks out, demonstrating the finer aspects of 19th-century dentistry. (Patients are offered a jug of anesthetic hooch: "Imbibe, madam, or suffer.") The town needs a marshal, the main candidate is a schoolteacher (Walter Pidgeon) who is also the hero's rival for the attention of the banker's daughter (Claire Trevor). (Trying to woo the maiden, the buckaroo suddenly turns into a tongue-tied little boy: "I got no bad habits." "I would say asking perfect strangers to marry you is a very bad habit!") The milquetoast loses on both fronts and becomes a guerrilla gun-runner, and a comic Western grows dark and bitter. Raoul Walsh on Quantrill's Raiders, with its aftermath later obliquely recounted in The Tall Men. Raymond Walburn's blustery proclamations and Marjorie Main's funereal premonitions provide the range of the tessitura, and there's Roy Rogers going from lighthearted sidekick, high-pitched coyote laugh and all, to mixed-up murderer. "Well, you got strange ideas about justice..." The action builds on a stunt from King's Jesse James by filming the wagon's fall off the cliff with an overhead angle, the attack on the burning town is closely studied by Kurosawa. Above all, a tragic portrait of the cultured man who builds himself a marauding kingdom, dressed down by the unlearned vigilante at the luxurious dinner table. "First time I ever had two kinds of bird with one meal—turkey to eat and buzzard to look at." The Shakespeare jest at the close is indicative of Walsh's rambunctious erudition. With Porter Hall, Joe Sawyer, Helen MacKellar, Trevor Bardette, and J. Farrell MacDonald. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |