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A shaggy relaxation for William Wyler between prestige projects, complete with a little joke on Wuthering Heights. (The ghost illuminated by an oil lamp at the window is just a hungry cowpoke, he comes in for supper.) The war after the Civil War for a nation "in the throes of rebirth," cattlemen versus homesteaders west of the Pecos, jurisdiction of one Judge Roy Bean (Walter Brennan). A homegrown despot, the "mangy old scorpion" whose passion for hanging strangers is eclipsed only by his passion for Miss Lillie Langtry. Into the saloon-courtroom stumbles the rambler accused of horse-thieving (Gary Cooper), who dodges the noose by professing familiarity with the adored diva. Cornfields and barbed-wire fences, "a nice house" with the maiden (Doris Davenport) is the dream. "That's the trouble with you sodbusters, you can't shoot straight." The folksy dictator has a sentimental streak along with a crick in the neck, a rich portrait by Brennan of the prairie demon who finds his comic counterpart in Cooper's cunning deadpan. A scuffle is filmed up close with shadows and clouds of dust (Wyler balloons it into a cosmic view in The Big Country), the hoedown that goes up in flames offers a glimpse of Millet's Angelus in the scorched aftermath. A lock of a woman's hair is a treasure raptly unwrapped in a choice shot—windy hill, one fellow obsessively smitten and the other grudgingly so, bovine masses moving in the valley behind them. The reflexive treatment of genre leads to a curtain rising in the empty theater (cf. Lang's The Return of Frank James) and a vision of beauty that goes out of focus. "See what you done? You stopped the show!" With Fred Stone, Forrest Tucker, Paul Hurst, Chill Wills, Lilian Bond, Dana Andrews, and Charles Halton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |