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Fritz Lang picks the perfect detail from Henry King's original to open on—Bob Ford (John Carradine) steadying his trembling gun grip before shooting Jesse James—and takes it from there. The news reach his brother Frank (Henry Fonda) in pastoral hiding, the vengeful revolver emerges from the wheat grain box and the Liberty Weekly Gazette editor (Henry Hull) gives it his blessing. "Good huntin', Frank." Following small town (Fury), road (You Only Live Once) and department store (You and Me), the Old West is the logical next stop in the director's tour of America. In vain, characters attempt to control fate and rewrite their lives and deaths: Frank fabricates his own gallant demise for the Denver Star reporter (Gene Tierney), the ruffians reenact their betrayal as stagy heroism in a rich balcony nod to Griffith. "Looks like a show I oughta see." Charlie Ford (Charles Tannen) is quelled in an outdoors composition of snow-capped mountains and ricocheting bullets and jagged rock, a reminder that Lang at one point almost directed Winchester '73. The contrasting arena is the courtroom, more theater of the absurd to stoke "the late unpleasantness between the states" still fresh in everybody's mind. (Amid such shenanigans, the camera captures Fonda's inner serenity as he savors a tobacco chaw.) The curly calf too big for his britches (Jackie Cooper), the showdown in the tenebrous stable. The abstruse stylization of Rancho Notorious is still a decade away, though the frontier is already a severe plain enlivened by intimations of hellfire, where integration into society is a fickle thing. (The tale fades out on a "Dead or Alive" poster, tattered but not forgotten.) With J. Edward Bromberg, Donald Meek, Ernest Whitman, George Barbier, Russell Hicks, Lloyd Corrigan, and Victor Kilian.
--- Fernando F. Croce |