They Rode West (1954)

It’s a generic title for a fairly routine oater—or is it? This little flick from director Phil Karlson is either a standard Saturday matinee filler, with the usual sloppiness with which those pictures were thrown together, or one of those daft concoctions that accidently slide into absurdity.

In the first place, the only character who actually rides west astride a horse is Dr. Allen Seward (Robert Francis), who hates riding horses and does it poorly. He’s been assigned to Fort Whatever to replace the last medic, who was malpractice on two legs. Capt. Peter Blake (Phil Carey) hates all doctors, all Indians, and probably most everyone else, too, but the movie runs only 84 minutes so there isn’t enough time to tell for sure. He and Dr. Seward vie, in a very offhand manner, for the attention of visiting cutie Laurie MacKaye (Donna Reed), but the Doc may also have a case of the simmers for Mani-ten (May Wynn), a white woman who has been living with the local Kiowas so long she decides to stay with them when she has the chance to move to the fort.

Seward disobeys a direct order and sneaks off to the Kiowa camp (a sort of make-shift reservation) to treat Indian victims of malaria. Indians and soldiers misunderstand each other’s motives and several of each kind get killed, but the doctor will later remove a bullet from the chief’s son’s back, where it was deposited by Capt. Blake while he was trying to shoot Seward because he was in the Kiowa camp again, so peace breaks out on both sides in a ridiculously under-motivated kumbaya moment and suddenly everything is so why-can’t-we-be-friends you’ll laugh your butt off.

What I enjoyed most was the performance of Roy Roberts, playing Irish Sgt. Creever in what could be a sly parody of Victor McLaglen in John Ford’s Calvary Trilogy. Roberts is wearing a beard here so you might not recognize him, even though he played continuing roles on a dozen TV series. If you’re old enough, he’s probably best remembered as Capt. Simon P. Huxley on “The Gale Storm Show,” aka "Oh Susannah!", and also co-starring Zazu Pitts.

Written by DeVallon Scott and Frank Nugent, from a story by Leo Katcher, with the best intentions in the world, They Rode West is one goofy western. Watch it for that reason. Or don’t.

Hang ‘Em High (1968)

When Clint Eastwood left America for Italy he was a TV actor with a few bit parts in feature films. When he returned, he was an international movie star. My business trips should be so successful.

His first film back in the U.S. tried to emulate the look and feel of his spaghetti westerns. Even his Italian director, Sergio Leone, was asked to visit here to shoot the film. Leone was already involved in Once Upon a Time in the West so he declined the offer and the job went to a TV director who had worked with Eastwood on Rawhide, Ted Post. Dominic Frontiere’s score is more successful at imitating Ennio Morricone than Post was at mimicking Leone. Frontiere’s hangman leitmotif—five notes followed by a crash of instruments replicating the sound of a gallows door dropping open—is repeated during the film’s most tense moments.

Eastwood is former lawman Jed Cooper. As the story begins, he is driving a small herd of cattle across a river. On the far bank he is stopped by a posse looking for the man who stole these cattle and murdered their owner. Capt. Wilson is the leader, a sweaty and belligerent Ed Begley, who refuses to accept Cooper’s bill of sale and orders him men (including Bruce Dern, Alan Hale, Jr. and L.Q. Jones) to hang him high.

Which they do.

Then they ride off and leave the body swinging in the breeze. Moments after they depart, Sheriff David Bliss (Ben Johnson) rides up, cuts down the barely breathing Cooper, and takes him into Fort Grant (substituted for Ft. Smith, Arkansas) to be investigated by the notorious “hanging judge” Adam Fenton (in place of Judge Isaac Parker.

Fenton (Pat Hingle) discovers that Cooper is innocent when another man in his jail confesses to the crime, and to prevent Cooper from riding the vengeance trail and getting himself into real trouble, the judge tosses him a star and makes him a U.S. Marshal with the assignment of, among other things, tracking down the posse members and bringing them in.

Along the way, Cooper becomes involved with a lovely young storekeeper named Rachel (Inger Stevens), who is searching for the men who murdered her husband and then gang raped her; a crazy-as-a-loon character who keeps screaming about the world coming to an end before his does (Dennis Hopper, in a role so small it makes the ones Eastwood had before A Fistful of Dollars look like leads); and an aging sheriff with a bad back and a liking for the guilty posse men (Charles McGraw).

It’s all very gritty and sun-baked, with Eastwood puffing again on one of those goddamn little cigars he hated so much.

The picture isn’t as frisky as the Italian ones, and while Pat Hingle, Ben Johnson and Charles McGraw are old pros who know just what they’re doing and do it well, there’s no one like Eli Wallach or Lee Van Cleef for Eastwood to bounce off of while showing any humor.

In fact, there’s damn little humor of any sort in the movie.
But it’s a good picture, competently if unimagintively shot, and it takes its genre more seriously than a lot of American westerns did at that time (as if there were a lot of American westerns in the late 1960s).

In This Our Life (1942)

Few things in nature are more wonderful and terrifying than a Bette Davis character in the throes of pure petulance and malice. That being the case, you can’t do better than spend an evening with In This Our Life.

This was John Huston’s second directorial assignment and while he doesn’t seem as close to this material as he was to the hardboiled milieu of Dashiell Hammett’s mean streets in The Maltese Falcon, he’s having one helluva good time with Ellen Glasgow’s southern gothic lite as scripted by Howard Koch.

The story takes place deep in the heart of The Land of Sociopathic Women. Davis is Stanley Timberlake, one of old Asa Timberlake’s (Frank Craven) two daughters. Olivia de Havilland is the other one, Roy. The male names are not explained in the film and I haven’t read the source novel. As the film opens, Stanley is about to be wed to a champion-of-the-oppressed local lawyer, Craig Fleming (George Brent). At the last minute, and for no apparent reason, Stanley abandons Craig almost at the altar and runs off with Roy’s husband, young Dr. Peter Kingsmill (Dennis Morgan, who acquits himself nicely and may come as a surprise to viewers who know him only from his musical roles).

Stanley and Peter leave town and Peter gets an intern’s position at a hospital. His salary is meager and his new wife is quickly and easily bored. Her constant nagging leads Peter to take Drastic Action, and soon Stanley is back home, where by now Roy and Craig have become an item. These southern girls don’t let the grits grow under their feet, by cracky.

Of course, Stanley sets out to re-capture Craig and there is some chance that she may be able to do it. She makes an appointment with him to meet at a bar that night at 7:00. While waiting, she tosses back a few and when he hasn’t shown up by 7:30, Stanley speeds off in her roadster. We’ve been told that she drives too fast and now we find out that with a few drinks in her she’s capable of hit and run driving. When the cops find out that the car involved was hers, she tries to put the blame on Parry Clay (Ernest Anderson), the son of the Timberlake’s black maid Minerva (Hattie McDaniel).

The other major player is the Timberlake girls’ grating Uncle William (Charles Coburn). William is their maternal uncle and it’s well known that he partnered in his brother-in-law’s tobacco company, then forced Asa out. Now he enjoys calling on the Timberlakes in their modest house and rubbing everyone’s nose in his dishonorable success. His only fan appears to be Stanley, who flirts with him because he’s the rich relative.

Coburn was 65 when he made this picture and Davis was 34, and still the characters play the “I’ve got a surprise for you in one of my pockets and if you find it you can keep it” game. It’s creepy, no doubt about it.

The picture is a hoot, with everyone playing just one notch above where people actually exist—not close enough to reality to turn this into drama but not so far up the wall that the whole thing becomes more camp than a field full of tents. Every time I watch this one, I’m wearing a huge grin on my face.