Lust for Gold (1949)

The posters might suggest that Lust for Gold, released by Columbia in 1949, is going to be a western. It isn’t. Not quite. It is set in the West but it’s a thriller and the setting is contemporary. Or at least partly.

The original director was George Marshall but he walked off the set early on and producer S. Sylvan Simon took over directing duties.

The movie is based on the story of a real-life lost mine that has never been found.

The movie is about what the title says it’s about. Gold fever. Somewhere in the vast sprawling expanse of Superstition Mountain there is a lost mine (the legendary Dutchman Mine) and a huge hoard of gold. Enough gold to get twenty men murdered over the previous 70 years. If the Apache legends are correct then a lot more men than that have died for this gold.

And nobody knows for sure that there is any gold. Or if there is any chance of finding it.

Young Barry Storm (William Prince) has just seen the twentieth man die on the mountain. Barry’s grandfather Jacob Walz claimed to be the owner of the mine.

Barry becomes obsessed with finding the mine. He finds an old guy who tells him Jacob Walz’s story. This is not so much a main story bookended by a framing story as two distinct stories taking place decades apart both dealing with a search for the mine. There are multiple murders in both stories.

In 1887 Jacob Walz (Glenn Ford) found the mine. The mine had at that time been lost for many years. He becomes involved with a woman who owns a bakery in the nearby town. She is Julia (Ida Lupino). The connection between Julia and Pete Thomas (Gig Young) guarantees that things will get very messy.

What follows is a sordid tale of human depravity. It’s not just the lust for gold. There’s sexual lust, emotional betrayal, jealousy and a web of deceit.

The plot is delightfully overheated. Both stories have wild crazy endings. In fact there’s a third ending and it’s wild and crazy as well.

This is a fairly rare chance to see Glenn Ford as an out-and-out bad guy and yet in his own strange way he’s an innocent and a victim. It’s a credit to Ford’s subtlety as an actor that he can make us feel oddly sympathetic towards Jacob even after we’ve seen him do some breathtakingly vicious things. Ford really is outstanding here.

Ida Lupino is extremely good as a woman who may be thoroughly rotten, partially rotten or just easily tempted or maybe she’s just out of control and has no idea which way she will jump next.

All the characters are reprehensible and yet all are perhaps victims. Men will do terrible things for gold or sex. And women will do equally terrible things. Although without that gold maybe all of these people would have been decent enough. Or maybe not. They have all been corrupted.

This is not a movie that casts humanity in a very flattering light.

I’m always leery of describing movies as noir westerns because in most cases they don’t really fit the noir mould. Having said that there are of course westerns that contain some of the elements that are found in the crime movies that were later labelled as film noir. During the 40s there had been a slight shift towards darker subject matter and a more cynical pessimistic edge in several genres. Lust for Gold falls into that category. It’s part of a trend that began in the 40s, towards harder-edged less conventionally heroic westerns

Ida Lupino can certainly be seen as a femme fatale here, leading every man she encounters to disaster. It might seem like a stretch to see Glenn Ford as Jacob as a noir protagonist (he’s already a very bad man at the start of the movie) but the argument could be made. Perhaps he could be redeemed by love. He does genuinely love Julia. But choosing Julia as a vehicle for redemption is a bad bad choice.

The plot (or plots) gets crazy enough and events spiral so much out of control that although it seems highly likely that things will end badly it’s difficult to predict exactly how disaster will strike. And there’s at least one wild plot twist you won’t see coming.

Lust for Gold is a rather oddball western-thriller genre hybrid and it’s exceptionally interesting. Highly recommended.

The Spanish Blu-Ray looks great. It includes the original English-language version with removable Spanish subtitles.

The Big Diamond Robbery (1929)

The Big Diamond Robbery was the final silent film for legendary cowboy star Tom Mix. It came out in 1929, right at the end of the silent era.

This is a western but it’s a contemporary western (which seems to be true also of the other film included in the Blu-Ray set). This is a movie made in the 1920s, and set in the 1920s. So while part of the action takes place in the West this is not quite the Old West, not quite the Wild West.

Tom Mix is Tom Markham and he’s in New York. He meets a girl and she’s on horseback but the second time he meets her she’s been arrested for speeding in her sports car. She is Ellen Brooks (Kathryn McGuire).

She has so many previous offences that this time she’ll get jail time for sure. Except of course she won’t. She’s rich.

Her very rich daddy has just bought her a fabulously valuable diamond.

The diamond is stolen. Tom steps in to help retrieve the stone.

To punish her for being a bad girl Ellen is banished to the ranch in Arizona. Tom seems to be the manager of the ranch.

So now the action moves out West.

The thieves are still after that diamond and now they’re in Arizona too.

There’s a stagecoach holdup and a war party of braves from the local tribe attacks the stagecoach as well. But appearance can be deceptive.

So this a hybrid film. The first half is an urban crime thriller with shootouts with machine-guns and car chases. Later it becomes a western, but not really a western. Tom does some trick riding and chases the bad guys’ car on horseback. It’s really just a crime thriller that features a cowboy.

It’s all very lightweight but it has action, comedy and romance and it’s fast-paced and done with a certain amount of panache. The plot is paper-thin.

Tom Mix is no great shakes as an actor but all he really has to do is look like a square-jawed cowboy hero and ride a horse well and and he manages those things easily enough.

Kathryn McGuire is likeable enough. She isn’t really a Spoilt Rich Bad Girl. She just needed to get out of the city and meet a handsome cowboy.

This is a good-natured romp and the running time is short enough to ensure that it won’t wear out its welcome.

I’d be willing to see more Tom Mix movies although I would like to see him in a full-blown western.

The Big Diamond Robbery is recommended.

It looks terrific on Blu-Ray and they found a tinted print. I love tinted movies.

The Man from Utah (1934)

The Man from Utah is a 1934 western B-movie made by Lone Star Productions and it’s one of the many B-westerns John Wayne made in the 30s.

Somehow or other the music track for this movie was lost at some stage and eventually a somewhat unsatisfactory modern music track was added. Fortunately the original dialogue track survived.

When we’re first introduced to John Weston (John Wayne) we think this is going to be a singing cowboy movie but it isn’t.

John Weston arrives in a little town in the West looking for work. When he almost single-handedly foils a bank robbery the crusty but good-natured Marshal Higgins decides he’s found the man he needs to take on a gang that uses a rodeo in the neighbouring town of Dalton as a front for its criminal activities including a series of robberies.

Weston is deputised. He will be undercover, posing as an entrant in the rodeo. It could be dangerous. There have been several mysterious deaths at the rodeo - men who fell foul of the gang. Marshal Higgins can’t prove that these were murders but he has no doubt that they were.

Weston is going to have romance problems as well. He falls for Marjorie Carter (Polly Ann Young), daughter of Dalton’s leading citizen but he has to play up to sexpot Dolores (Anita Campillo). Dolores is mixed up with the gang and she could provide a way for him to ingratiate himself with the gang.

The leader of the gang is Spike Barton (Edward Peil). He has his suspicions of Weston. Weston has some ideas about how the gang uses the rodeo as a cover for its robberies. He also thinks he’s figured out how the murders were carried out.

So it’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game between these two.

A major advantage that B-movies (especially crime thrillers, spy trillers and westerns) enjoyed was that the running times were so short. This one clocks in at just 51 minutes. You didn’t have to think about the pacing. It had to be brisk. There was no choice. This movie moves along very quickly indeed.

There’s lots of rodeo action. It’s all stock footage of course but it’s integrated into the movie pretty well.

There’s lots of action. Of all kinds - shoot-out, fistfights and daring trick riding.

The Big Trail (1930) was an ambitious epic western that was expected to make John Wayne a star but it didn’t happen. The movie flopped. This turned out to be, perversely, a lucky break for Wayne. He wasn’t ready for stardom then, the John Wayne persona was not yet fully formed and he did not yet have the necessary star quality. He spent almost a decade in the B-movie ghetto but when he did finally get his big break, in Stagecoach in 1939, he was ready. He’d gained a vast amount of experience, his trademark persona was now fully developed and the characteristic John Wayne star quality was there in abundance. After that his career never looked back.

In The Man from Utah you can see the process half-completed. He’s starting to get that easy good-humoured confidence that was such an essential part of John Wayne the star.

This movie boasts a perfectly serviceable plot and while it’s obviously not one of the great westerns there’s a lot for fans of the genre to enjoy. If you’re a fan of Duke Wayne, even better.

The Man from Utah is a fun little movie and it’s highly recommended.

My copy is on an ancient long out-of-print Payless double-feature DVD (it’s paired with a Roy Rogers movie) but the transfer is quite acceptable.

Sierra (1950)

Sierra is an early (1950) Audie Murphy western. I’ve become a rather obsessive Audie Murphy fan. I’ve now seen seven of his westerns. They’re all enjoyable and a couple of them, in my opinion, rank among the very best westerns of the classic western era.

Sierra begins with a cute but headstrong girl, Riley Martin (Wanda Hendrix), causing a major headache for Ring Hassard (Audie Murphy) and his dad Jeff (Dean Jagger). They live in a shack way up in the mountains. No-one knows they’re there. That’s how they want to keep things. They have a good reason. They need to avoid the law. Years earlier Jeff Hazzard was accused of murder. He always proclaimed his innocence but he couldn’t prove it.

Now Riley Martin knows about them. She could talk. She promises she won’t. They trust her. They have to. They can’t kill her. They’re outsiders but they’re nice guys.

There’s another problem. Riley also, quite inadvertently, brought about an accident in which Jeff was so seriously injured that his life in danger. That means they’ll need to get a doctor up there. Then everyone will know that they’ve been living in the mountains and the sheriff will send a posse.

In the midst of all these dramas Ring shoots Riley. He had to. It was for her own good. She’d been bitten by a rattlesnake. You can learn fascinating things by watching movies. Apparently you can eliminate rattlesnake venom by shooting the person in the infected area. It’s something worth remembering.

Of course this attracts more attention.

Jeff and Ring have an obsession. It’s an enormous herd of wild horses. No-one believes the herd exists but they’ve seen it. They aim to round up that herd one day. Then they’ll have the money to buy the ranch they always wanted.

So Ring (with help from some other semi-outlaws) is trying to round up the mustang herd whilst keeping a step ahead of the posse. And he’s made a couple of other very dangerous enemies as well, and they’re also gunning for him. He has a lot on his plate.

Of course Riley has fallen for Ring. A girl always feel closer to a guy after he’s shot her. And he has the glamour of being a sexy outsider rebel with a sensitive side. How could she resist him? Ring thinks Riley is pretty special as well.

It’s a fairly routine but serviceable western plot and a bit on the contrived side. You can see the crucial plot twist coming up a mile away.


The biggest problem is Burl Ives. He plays Jeff Hazzard’s wise old buddy Lonesome. Lonesome is a sort of comic relief character and he’s already irritating enough and he starts to sing. And he just keeps on singing. I guess this is supposed to add a folksy warm-hearted touch but I just wanted someone to fill Lonesome full of lead.

On the plus side it’s a Universal International 1950s western in Technicolor and they always looked nice. This one has cinematography by Russell Metty so it looks very nice indeed.

And it has Audie Murphy. This was the kind of role he handled with erase - a quiet self-effacing nice guy but you can tell that underneath the mild exterior there’s real grit and a stubborn obsessiveness. Added to which Murphy had charm and charisma.

Wanda Hendrix makes a fairly likeable Feisty Heroine. Riley has had a fancy big city education but she was born on the frontier and was one of those girls who learned to ride before she learned to walk.

Look out for Tony Curtis in a bit part.

Sierra is nothing special but it’s enjoyable and it’s recommended. It's included in the second of Kino Lorber's Audie Murphy Blu-Ray boxed sets.

Over the course of the 1950s Audie Murphy’s westerns just got better and better and towards the close of the decade he made the excellent Hell Bent for Leather (1960) and the absolutely magnificent No Name on the Bullet (1959).

Winnetou and the Crossbreed (1966)

Winnetou and the Crossbreed (Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi) is a 1966 sauerkraut western. 

The sauerkraut western is the German equivalent to the spaghetti western. The main difference is that spaghetti westerns were always aiming for an international audience. Sauerkraut westerns were aimed more at the German domestic market, tapping into the immense popularity of the genre in Germany.

That popularity was due to Karl May (1842-1912), a popular German writer who launched a pop culture phenomenon with his novels of the Wild West. His books have sold around 200 million copies and are still in print. May’s novels were written at a time when the Wild West still existed. And at the time he wrote his best-known westerns he had never been anywhere near America. He wrote about the Wild West of his own imagination. And the entire German nation went totally Wild West crazy.

The main heroes of May’s westerns were a German settler nicknamed Old Shatterhand and his best friend, the Apache chief Winnetou. May’s novels were very very sympathetic indeed to the Apaches and this is reflected in the movies.

Between 1962 and 1968 there were seventeen Karl May movies, most of them based on his westerns.

Winnetou and the Crossbreed opens with the 21st birthday of Apanatschi (Uschi Glas). Her father is a European settler, her mother is an Apache. Her father’s birthday present to her is a gold mine. This present turns out to be a very bad idea. Some very unpleasant people find out about it and they’re determined to steal the gold.

A gang of bandits and cutthroats gets involved. There is treachery among the bad guys. Apanatschi and her kid brother are kidnapped.

Fortunately somebody was smart enough to contact Old Shatterhand (Lex Barker). He’s not going to allow this kind of wickedness to go on. And if Old Shatterhand comes to the rescue he’ll have Winnetou beside him.

It ends up in a full-scale war between the good guys and the bad guys, with lots of gunplay and lots of explosions.

The bad guys are holed up in a little town that is almost completely lawless. People are constantly getting shot. Within a few minutes we get every single western cliché you can name. At times it’s almost like parody. It’s a bit like Blazing Saddles, but played straight.

Of course there’s a classic western saloon and there are saloon girls. They’re quite obviously whores, but interestingly they’re very much on the side of the Good Guys.

What’s fascinating is that this movie gives the impression of having been made by people who hadn’t seen any of the great grown-up psychologically complex westerns of the golden age of westerns (from about 1946 to 1962). It’s as if their idea of a western was drawn entirely from the B-westerns of the 1930s. In this movie there are very straightforward Good Guys and Bad Guys.

This is a movie totally imbued with the sensibility of 1960s German pop cinema. Just as the German Edgar Wallace krimis are supposedly set in England but get every single detail delightfully wrong so this movie gets everything about the Wild West delightfully wrong. And as with the Edgar Wallace krimis it’s the fact that everything is slightly wrong that gives this movie such a wonderfully delirious and crazy flavour.

And it really does have that B-movie feel - it’s just pure entertainment packed with action and thrills.

Pierre Brice (a Frenchman) does the noble Apache warrior thing quite well. Lex Barker makes a fine hero. Uschi Glas as Apanatschi is a fine heroine - she’s lively and likeable and she’s as cute as a button. All the bad guys are played with gusto.

Winnetou and the Crossbreed is nothing like a spaghetti western. The violence is never graphic and there’s not a trace of cynicism. It’s family entertainment but it is fun and it’s recommended.

The Treasure of the Silver Lake and Winnetou and the Crossbreed are both included in a German three-movie DVD which offers the movies in both English-dubbed versions and in German with English subtitles. I recommend the German-language version because it gives more of a non-Hollywood feel.

I’ve reviewed the first of Karl May’s Wild West novels, Winnetou I, and I cannot recommend it, except for its considerable historical significance. It’s slow and dull. I’ve also reviewed the first of the Karl May movies, The Treasure of the Silver Lake (1962), and it’s a rollicking tale of adventure in the Old West and it’s huge amounts of fun.

Gun for a Coward (1956)

Gun for a Coward is a 1956 Universal-International western. Which means it was shot in colour and in Cinemascope.

The three Keogh brothers run a ranch left to them by their late father. The oldest brother, Will (Fred MacMurray) is in charge and he’s a father figure to the other two. The youngest brother, Hade (Dean Stockwell), is a bit wild but he’s OK. The other brother, Bless (Jeffrey Hunter), is not OK. He’s a coward.

It doesn’t take long for us to realise why he’s a coward. He’s a grown man but his mother treats him like a baby.

And we soon learn that there’s more to it than that. Mrs Keogh despised her late husband. She hates the ranch. She despises ranchers. She hates the West. She always thought she was too good to be a rancher’s wife. She doesn’t want Bless to be a rancher. She wants him to move to the city and become something respectable. A doctor or a lawyer.

And she doesn’t want him to be a man. The masculine world of ranching horrifies her. She despises her other two sons.

Every time Bless tries to be a man his mother undermines him. She humiliates him. She’s controlling and manipulative.

There’s potential for other kinds of trouble as well. It’s understood that Will is going to marry Aud Niven (Janice Rule), the pretty young daughter of a neighbour. They would make a fine couple. The problem is that young Bless is rather sweet on Aud as well. Even worse, she’s rather sweet on him. They really need to tell Will that Aud isn’t going to marry him, but they keep putting it off.

Without fully realising it Will and Hade have become somewhat over-protective of Bless. There’s a confrontation with another rancher. It’s a situation in which Bless desperately needs to fight his own battle for once, but Will and Hade just automatically step in and fight it for him. The sad truth is that even his own brothers don’t think Bless is man enough to fight his own battles.

Naturally Bless keeps getting into situations in which his behaviour looks like cowardice. He’s pretty good at rationalising it away. He thinks he’s being sensible and smart. But then two men are killed in separate incidents and his cowardice seems to have been a contributing factor. The interesting thing is that sometimes his behaviour really is sensible. The trouble is that backing down from a fight is not always the right thing to do.

Fred MacMurray was a very reliable actor and he’s excellent here. Will is a good man but he has a lot to deal with. He makes mistakes but he does his best. He’s an imperfect hero. Jeffrey Hunter does the tortured thing quite well. Dean Stockwell is very good as Hade. Hade is wild, undisciplined, hot-headed and impulsive. He will be OK, if he learns to exercise some judgment.

Janice Rule is OK although I found Aud to be a very unsympathetic heroine. She’s interesting. You expect a female character in a western to be a good girl or a bad girl. Aud is a misguided good girl. She thinks she’s helping Bless but she’s harming him. She thinks she’s trying to avoid hurting Will by not telling him she’s in love with Bless but in fact she’s going to hurt him a whole lot more by keeping it a secret. And she’s unable to recognise that at times her behaviour is simply selfish. She’s a seriously flawed good girl.

The three brothers represent different kinds of masculinity. Will is mature masculinity. He never goes looking for a fight. But if he has to fight he will fight, and he does possess considerable courage. Hade is immature masculinity. He hasn’t learnt that sometimes not backing down is just dumb. A man has to learn to recognise the times when he should fight and the times when he should just walk away. Hade is going to be in trouble unless he starts growing up soon.

Bless is masculinity gone wrong. He can’t accept that if you keep running away then people will keep provoking you because they know you won’t fight back. So rather than avoiding confrontation you’ll end up in more confrontations, and increasingly dangerous confrontations.

This is a movie that some modern viewers will have problems with since they’re not used to seeing subjects like masculinity and courage treated seriously and sympathetically. They might be inclined to sympathise with Aud who lets Bless know that she loves him even though he is a coward. I think Aud is dead wrong. That’s the sort of thing that will make a man hate himself for the rest of his life. She fails to realise that he can never have self-respect unless he overcomes his cowardice. He already has too many people protecting him and coddling him.

On the surface Gun for a Coward is a very routine western but if you dig a bit deeper you find that it has some subtlety and some intelligence. Highly recommended.

Umbrella released this movie on DVD in their excellent Six Shooter Classics series. It’s a very acceptable transfer.

Gunsmoke (1953)

Gunsmoke is a 1953 Universal-International western directed by Nathan Juran. It certainly hits the ground running.

We get an action scene right at the start. We meet the hero Reb Kittredge (Audie Murphy). He’s a very likeable guy but a few minutes into the movie we know he has a Shady Past. We was, and maybe still is, a hired gun.

We’re introduced to rancher Dan Saxon (Paul Kelly). He’s in danger of losing his ranch. He has a beautiful daughter, Rita (Susan Cabot), who’s engaged to be married to Saxon’s foreman Curly (Jack Kelly). But Reb has already taken a shine to Rita. And Saxon is sure that Reb has been sent to kill him. That turns out to be not quite the case.

This is all within the first few minutes but already we know we have a classic setup for a western with lots of potential for tangled relationships between the main characters. And we’re not sure about the hero. Is he still a killer? This is how you make a western!

Reb is soon in for a surprise. He finds himself owning a ranch, the Square S ranch. It was Dan Saxon’s ranch. They made a deal, of a kind. It’s not all good news. He owns the debts attached to it as well. But he if can drive the herd to the railroad company he’ll have enough money to pay the debts.

There is of course a sinister figure pulling strings in the background. Matt Telford (Donald Randolph) aims to own every ranch in the valley. Including the Square S. He’ll stop at nothing, including hiring gunslinger Johnny Lake (Charles Drake) to kill Reb.

There’s high drama as Reb tries to drive his herd to market, in the face of all kinds of nefarious plots.

I think the ending is quite satisfactory. We know there’s going to be a showdown but we can’t figure out how Reb is going to manage this since he’s injured his right arm - his shooting arm. That problem is solved neatly.

This is Audie Murphy doing what he did so well, playing a really likeable guy who manages to give the impression that he could be very dangerous indeed. Reb is likeable and he’s also ambitious with a streak of ruthlessness. He has the ranch. Now he wants Dan Saxon’s daughter. She belongs to Curly. Reb will just have to take her away from Curly.

The supporting players are all perfectly adequate. Susan Cabot is fine as the prickly Rita and Mary Castle is very good as bad girl dancehall singer/dancer Cora Dufrayne.

This is not one of the great westerns and Nathan Juran is not one of the great directors He is however a skilled professional. He understands that pacing is everything. Keep the action moving along and nobody will notice any deficiencies in the script. That’s what he does here.

The movie was shot in Technicolor in the Academy ratio. Visually it’s impressive, which you expect from a 50s Universal-International western. The location shooting is very good.

The action scenes are handled well.

Not every movie has to be ground-breaking. Not every movie has to redefine the genre. This is not The Searchers or Rio Bravo. But there’s nothing wrong with well-crafted movies that meet our genre expectations and deliver solid entertainment. And Gunsmoke does that. Highly recommended.

I don’t think Gunsmoke is available on Blu-Ray but it looks quite OK on DVD.

Kansas Raiders (1950)

Kansas Raiders is a 1950 Universal-International western starring Audie Murphy and a very interesting western it is too.

Murphy plays a very young Jesse James. Now you have to remember that this is a Hollywood movie so it has zero interest in historical accuracy. Don’t assume that it’s going to follow the real-life story of Jesse James in any way, shape or form. That’s a particularly important point to bear in mind with this movie since any assumptions you may make about James as either a hero or a villain will lead you astray.

It is 1863, the middle of the Civil War. The movie opens out west, with a group of young men heading for the headquarters of the famous (or infamous) guerrilla leader Quantrill (Brian Donlevy). They want to join up. Quantrill’s admirers see him as a brave and bold warrior for the Confederacy. His detractors regard him as the leader of a gang of thieves and murderers.

Jesse James as we see him in the early part of this movie is a very likeable very pleasant young man. The sort of young man we expect to see as the hero in a western. He rescues a young lady when her horses bolt and both she and her cart seem headed for disaster. He’s the kind of young guy who saves the lives of ladies in peril.

And then suddenly we get a glimpse of a darker side to him. It’s a scene that has been repeated in countless westerns and adventure films. The hero has to fight a duel, in this case a fight to the death with knives, with a man who has tried to bully and insult him. We know what will happen. The hero will win, the bad guy will be disarmed and lying helpless waiting for the killing blow, and of course the hero will let him live because heroes do not kill helpless unarmed men. But in this case Jesse unhesitatingly delivers the killing blow. It’s a shocking moment of ruthless violence that you just don’t see in Hollywood movies in 1950. This is clearly going to be an unusual western.

There is more brutal violence to come. There are several scenes in which unarmed men who have surrendered are ruthlessly gunned down.

Jesse is appointed an officer in Quantrill’s guerrilla army. Jesse’s admiration for Quantrill knows no bounds. Then disillusionment starts to set in. Quantrill’s guerrilla army really is nothing more than a band of cut-throats and murderers. This is indicative of the overall mood of cynicism in this movie. There’s a Union guerrilla army, known as the Red Legs, operating in the same territory. They are also cut-throats and murderers. In fact Jesse has first-hand experience of the Red Legs. They slaughtered most of his family a few weeks earlier. Jesse is obsessed by thoughts of revenge. He is twisted up inside by hate. But he is at the same time fundamentally decent. He is a very conflicted young man. There’s some nice moral ambiguity in this movie.

There’s a definite cynicism towards war in this movie. Those who lead men to war talk of glory and honour but in practice war is nothing more than butchery. This is a dark grim violent movie.

This movie sets itself a difficult problem from the outset but it’s the way it tackles that problem that makes it such a fascinating movie. The focus is on young Jesse James and his brother Frank and their three buddies who would later go on to be the core of the James Gang. Jesse is very much the protagonist. We have to be able to relate to him. These young man have to be presented in a reasonably sympathetic light but they would go on to violent criminal careers and the movie itself focuses on their activities as party of a notorious band of thieves and murderers. The solution adopted was to portray them as innocents misled into wrongdoing by the charismatic evil Quantrill. And in particular Jesse is portrayed as being totally under the spell of Quantrill - he has a romantic notion of Quantrill as a brave fighter for freedom.

Of course as the truth about Quantrill becomes increasingly obvious Jesse becomes more and more conflicted and tortured. Jesse just cannot accept that he has become complicit in evil. This makes it a complex demanding part for Audie Murphy. Is Jesse a tragic hero or a tragic villain? He’s a bit of both. Murphy does a fine job. We might be exasperated by Jesse but at the same time we admire his loyalty to Quantrill, even if it’s tragically misguided loyalty.

Quantrill is evil, but he is also deluded. He seems to really believe that he is going to be the saviour of the South. It’s possible that at one time he really was a hero but he has spiralled downwards into self-delusion and fantasy.

A romance angle has been added. The woman (Kate, played by Marguerite Chapman) Jesse rescued at the start of the film turns up again at Quantrill’s headquarters. The movie has to be rather coy about her status. She is clearly Quantrill’s woman but that cannot be made too obvious.

The ending is really interesting and very effective.

Kansas Raiders is an exceptionally interesting western and it’s highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray transfer looks superb.

Destry (1954)

Destry is 1954 Audie Murphy western based on a novel by Max Brand. There were two film adaptations in the 1930s including a fairly admired 1939 version (with the title Destry Rides Again) directed by George Marshall. In 1954 Marshall directed another version, simply called Destry, with Audie Murphy in the role played by James Stewart in the ’39 film. This is the film reviewed here.

I’ve seen the 1939 movie but it was so long ago that I was able to approach this 1954 remake with an open mind.

Restful is the name of the town but restful it ain’t. It’s run by a very shady businessman and gambler named Decker (Lyle Bettger). Decker has the crooked Mayor Sellers (Edgar Buchanan) is his pocket and a gang of gunmen.

Restful is without a sheriff after the previous holder of that office, Sheriff Joe Bailey, suffered a fatal heart attack. That’s what it says on the death certificate but the death certificate neglected to mention that by an amazing coincidence the heart attack happened at the exact same moment that the sheriff got a bullet in the back. This occurred shortly after a dispute over a poker game in which Decker cheated Henry Skinner (Walter Baldwin) out of his ranch. Decker cheated with some help from sexy saloon girl and chanteuse Brandy (Mari Blanchard).

To ensure that they have no problems with nosy sheriffs Decker and the major appoint hopeless drunk Rags Barnaby (Thomas Mitchell) as sheriff. Rags then has a brainwave. Years earlier, before he crawled inside a bottle, Rags had been the deputy of a legendary sheriff named Destry. Destry had a son, Tom. Rags hasn’t seen the son for years but he figures he’s bound to be a tough two-fisted fast-shooting lawman.

When Tom Destry (Audie Murphy) arrives in town all Rags’ hopes are dashed. Tom is a quiet inoffensive young man who looks like he would faint if he saw a gun. And Tom makes it clear that as deputy he has no intention of carrying a gun. Tom is a tenderfoot who will clearly be no use at all.

Appearances are of course deceptive. Tom Destry doesn’t carry a gun and he doesn’t believe in shooting people but underneath the gentle bookish exterior there is steel. Destry is tough and brave. He’s just not tough and brave in a way that involves shooting people. And he’s smart. Why try out-shooting criminals when you can out-think them?

Destry is determined to clean up Restful, and bring the murderer of Sheriff Bailey to justice.

This is the sort of thing Audie Murphy did particularly well, playing an unconventional hero. He plays this hero as a seriously nice guy but he convinces the viewer that Destry is actually quite formidable in his own way. And of course Audie Murphy had a very high likeability factor. I think Murphy’s performance works just fine.

Mari Blanchard has a tougher challenge, playing the role played by Marlene Dietrich in the ’39 film. She’s no Dietrich but she’s not pretty good. She gets several musical numbers which she handles well enough.

Thomas Mitchell as Rags and Edgar Buchanan as the sleazy mayor are of course huge amounts of fun. Wallace Ford as the town’s incompetent doctor and Alan Hale Jr as a hot-headed cattleman are also excellent. Lori Nelson gets saddled with the thankless good girl role but she’s OK.

As I said earlier I have only dim memories of the 1939 Destry Rides Again so I can’t compare the two movies. Judged on its own merits Destry is a pretty good western. Recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray (in their Audie Murphy Collection II boxed set) offers a nice transfer. Being a 1954 Universal International release the movie was shot in Technicolor and looks great.

I’ve seen and reviewed quite a few Audie Murphy westerns. Their quality is variable but Murphy’s performances are always good. Hell Bent for Leather (1960) and No Name on the Bullet (1959) are superb. Ride Clear of Diablo (1954) and the Don Siegel-directed The Duel at Silver Creek (1952) are reasonably OK.

The Beguiled (1971)

The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood, was released in 1971. It’s not at all what you might expect from either Siegel or Eastwood. It’s set during the American Civil War but it’s neither a western nor a war picture. It’s more of a gothic melodrama.

The setting is an estate in the South. Corporal John McBurney (Eastwood) is a Union soldier lying wounded and dying. He is found by a little girl named Amy. Amy cannot bear to leave him there. She drags him back home. Home for Amy is Miss Farnsworth’s school for girls.

(Geraldine Page) is horrified. He’s a Yankee. She wants to turn him over to the Confederate authorities so he will be sent to a prison camp. She is persuaded by the other ladies that she cannot possibly do that in his present condition. Miss Farnsworth and her girls decide to nurse him back to health.

All the men are off at the war. There are only women at Miss Farnsworth’s mansion now.

McBurney is a youngish good-looking very masculine man and as you might expect his presence sets feminine hearts a-flutter. Three of the women find his presence particularly disturbing. Martha Farnsworth is one. The second is young teacher Edwina. Edwina is still young but seems to be settling into a life as a dedicated spinster teacher. Until McBurney awakens her female emotions. The third is one of the pupils, Carol (Jo Ann Harris). Carol is man-crazy. Tensions rise and jealousies begin to fester.

McBurney is in a bad way and he’s helpless. The women’s suspicions of him start to subside. Romantic complications ensue with Miss Farnsworth, with Edwina and with Carol. Suspicions flare up again. Jealousies blaze ever more brightly.

And then the movie takes a perverse turn and becomes steadily more perverse. There are dangerous games being played here and they get way out of control.

One of the pleasing things about his movie is that it resists the temptation to bludgeon the viewer with political messaging. The women are all Southerners. Some are kind and selfless. Some are spoilt and selfish. Some are embittered by life. In other words, people are the same everywhere - some are good, some are bad, most are in-between. There’s a very mild anti-war message to the extent that war makes people afraid and brutalises them. McBurney assumes that household slave Hallie (Mae Mercer) will welcome him as a deliverer but she doesn’t. She likes him but she insists that he’s no more free than she is. That seems to be one of this film’s major themes. We’re all prisoners. McBurney wasn’t free when he was a soldier. Now he’s literally a prisoner of these women. And the women are prisoners of their fears and desires, and in the case of Edwina and Miss Farnsworth, of their pasts.

The Civil War setting is irrelevant, aside from the fact that it provides a convenient explanation for this being an entirely female household with not even a male servant, it explains why outsiders are shunned, it explains why the women must keep McBurney’s presence a secret and why he cannot risk leaving. Any wartime setting would have worked just as well.

There’s plenty of complexity to these characters. Martha Farnsworth is a hard woman with a bitterness stemming from her past but underneath there’s still some humanity.

We’re told that McBurney is a Quaker and was a medic with his regiment, and that therefore he has never actually borne arms against the Confederacy. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit like a Quaker. He’s a nice guy but we wonder how truthful and trustworthy he is. He seems keen to seduce Edwina. He seems keen to seduce Carol as well. And maybe Martha, given half a chance. For a godly Quaker he sure does like chasing skirt.

There are fascinating power dynamics that have nothing to do with gender. The power shifts are caused by circumstances and because the various characters have their own psychological reasons for either gaining in self-confidence and power, or losing self-confidence and power.

It’s interesting to compare Eastwood’s excellent performance here to his equally excellent performance in Play Misty For Me in the same year. In both cases he plays a man brimming with self-confidence and convinced that he knows how to handle women. In both cases he finds out that he’s wrong. He is in fact hopelessly out of his depth and confronted with women who do not behave the way he expects them to.

This is a movie with no political axe to grind. It’s a story of loyalty and betrayal, deceit and manipulation, and jealousy. It certainly does deal with female sexual desire and emotional longing but there’s no political aspect to it. These are just complex people driven by contradictory emotions. Miss Farnsworth and Edwina are desperate for love but confused as to what to do about it. Carol just wants to get laid.

These are not particularly admirable people but mostly they have reasons for their actions.

What I love is that there is so much ambiguity and the fact that the ambiguities remain unresolved is a strength. We never find out exactly what McBurney’s story is. We don’t know what his intentions are because he doesn’t know - he’s just playing it by ear. There’s a very slight hint of an attraction between Miss Farnsworth and Edwina but the two women may not even be aware of it. They’re both desperate for love, and for sex, but they don’t understand their own motivations clearly. Amy’s feelings toward McBurney are confused.

This was a labour of love for both Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood. Eastwood read the source novel, became obsessed by it and gave it to Siegel to read. Siegel became equally obsessed. This was a movie they just had to make. They were both very proud of it. It was a box-office flop. Siegel felt very strongly that Universal spectacularly mishandled its release. To the extent that Universal promoted it at all they promoted it as a shoot ‘em up Clint Eastwood action war picture which was bizarrely inappropriate.

It has a certain gothic look and ambience. So many candlelight scenes, and a sense of gothic doom.

The Beguiled is an excellent complex, subtle, multi-layered film. Very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers an excellent transfer and there are quite a few extras.