AMC ran a John Wayne marathon, mostly westerns, over the holidays and I caught RIO BRAVO Christmas Eve. It is one of my favorites and I think the best of the trio of films Howard Hawkes made with the same basic plot, with John Wayne the only consistent star in all three. It was based on a short story, Rio Bravo by B. H. McCampbell, with the script written by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett. Brackett also wrote the scripts for the remakes, El Dorado and Rio Lobo.
The plot is Wayne as a sheriff holding a rich cattleman’s brother in jail awaiting a Marshal to pick him up on a murder charge. Claude Akin plays the reprobate brother. Wayne’s only help is an ex-, now alcoholic deputy, who let a woman turn him into a drunk, played by Dean Martin and a crippled old man played by Walter Brennan. He’s later joined by an able young gunman played by teen heartthrob Ricky Nelson when his boss, Ward Bond, a friend of Wayne’s, is shot in the back.
A good portion of the film takes place within the walls of the jail as they take refuge to guard the prisoner. Brennan’s character rarely leaves the place and they eventually all hold up there as the cattleman’s men apply the pressure, and guns, to free the frankly no account brother.
Angie Dickinson plays a young gambling woman who falls for the burly sheriif and tries to help. Not to mention giving him a reason to survive. It ranks among
Robert Wise directed thid western three years before his seminal THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and many years before his pedestrian STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. The script was by Lilly Hayward from an adaptation by Luke Short of his novel Gunman’s Chance. Shot in black and white, cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, it had much the fell of noir films of the same period. Robert Mitchum, a mere stripling of thirty-one, is Jim Garry, a man come in response for help from an old friend, Tate Riling(Robert Preston).
Wet from the storm he’s riding through, he camps under a tree and just barely shinnies up a tree when a herd of cattle stampede through. Most of his outfit is ruined, he salvaging only one boot and his rifle. He’s accosted and taken back to a camp where he meets John Lufton(Tom Tully), a man suspicious, but nice enough, even willing to replace his outfit. They’d caught his horse mixed with the herd. Offered a job, he claims to be passing through. He’s advised to keep passing through. He likes Lufton in spite of that and agrees to deliver a note to his daughters.
There, as he’s about to cross the river, someone takes a shot at him from cover. A warning shot with several more delivered every time he tries to cross the river. Words seem to have no effect, so he turns and rides off, swiftly circling to find another crossing, sneaks up to learn a young woman was the one firing off at him. Her name is Amy Lufton(Barbara Bel Geddes of much later Dallas fame), though he doesn’t learn her name at the time. He amuses himself by returning the favor, spraying bullets to each side, driving her back until she falls in the river.
It’s at the house he learns the young woman’s identity when he delivers the message to the other daughter, Carol Lufton(Phyllis Thaxton, who later played Martha Kent in the first Superman movie). She wants to kill, but is stopped by a ranch hand, Frank Reardon(Tom Tyler, who’s last film role was in Plan 9 From Outer Space).
In town, he finds his friend, Tate, after being accosted by a group of men in the saloon. He learns why he’s been brought to town. Tate has a scheme, hatched with the new Indian agent, the new, crooked Indian agent, Jake Pindalest(Frank Faylen, father of Dobie Gillis, “and a good conduct medal!”). Lufton had been supplying beef to the army for the reservation. His 2500 head had been denied by Pindalest and he had a week to get them off the reservation. The plan was for Riling’s gunmen to harass him and keep him from getting them across the river. The army would seize them and Jim Garry was to be a stranger with money that comes along to help Lufton to cut his losses. Four dollars a head, then they would sell them to the army at regular contract price. Garry’s cut was to be twenty thousand.
Tate is goading homesteaders to help him, claiming Lufton will force them off their land for grazing land for his herd. Kris Barden(Walter Brennan) and his son, Fred(George Cooper) are two of them. Kris had once worked for Lufton before striking out on his own.
It takes only one stampede in which young Fred is shot by someone, with Garry right beside him, for him to get disgusted with his friend. He has a conscious and quits after telling Kris his son was killed.
You know how it goes from here. Garry ends up switching sides, after hard headed Amy persists in nagging him as he tries to ride away, following him for miles up until he camps for the night. She refuses to leave unless he returns with her.
And a bloody showdown follows.
For more overlooked movies, drop in on Todd Mason every Tuesday at his blog SWEET FREEDOM.
In THE GREEN PROMISE, Walter Brennan is a widowed farmer named Matthews with three daughters and a son. While the era of the film is not firmly set, the family is riding with a real estate agent to look at a farm for sale. Old Matthews mentions that it’s hard to watch everything you worked for dry up and blow away. That would put it in the middle or late thirties during the Dust Bowl of the middle portion of the country. Matthews is a stubborn old man, but had had the foresight to marry a smart woman. They had gotten insurance for the farm disaster something she had insisted they carry. Not a lot, but enough to get started again.
Matthews makes a big thing of the democratic process in his family. They have meetings for the important stuff and vote on them, majority rules. But it becomes apparent from that first meeting in front of the real estate agent over whether to buy the farm or not, that the democratic process Matthews touts is whatever HE wants it to be. The oldest daughter, Deborah(Marguerite Chapman), is hesitant about the farm. Matthews always at every vote calls for what he wants first and then glares at them until he gets his way. There’s the second daughter, Abigail(Connie Marshall), about fifteen, who’s a bit of a suck-up, a tattletale, who always sides with her father. The brother, Phineas(Ted Donaldson), is a weak young man who is easily pressured to vote with Matthews. He always gets his way.
Deborah and her youngest sister, Susan(an eleven year old Natalie Wood), get outvoted at every turn.
At the film’s beginning, another character was introduced when the truck breaks down and county agricultural agent David Barkley(Robert Paige) stops to help. Matthews is sure of the problem and is a bit angry to be proven wrong as Barkley gets it running again. We also see he has a quick interest in Deborah.
The farm is bought and a little money is left over. Another one of those family meetings happens over a tractor. Matthews wants to put their last money as a down payment on one and Deborah wants to rent one instead. Matthews wins. Another happens when little Susan wants to borrow the money to buy two lambs. She has it all worked out: raise them, sell the wool, and milk for cheese, paying off father, then increasing her herd over time. Matthews frames the whole thing as she doesn’t love her family wanting to do something on her own. They all must work together. Of course it gets voted down.
He won’t listen to any of the county agent’s advice about farming techniques. Changing the angles of the rows he’s plowing to promote soil conservation. A big hill of timber overlooking the farm that he wants to cut and sell to pay for the tractor. Barkley shows him a crack where the hill separated once. Granted it was a long time ago, but the trees kept the soil together. Cutting them would weaken the hill and maybe casue it to collapse during a heavy storm.
Matthews pays no attention.
Things change when an accident happens. A cut tree falls on the old man and breaks both his legs. Bedridden, and will be for a long time, Deborah turns to her preacher, Reverend Benton(Milburn Stone), for advice. He’d given a sermon on the dangers, the sin, of not using science to improve out lots. He recommends going to Barkley, which was what she had in mind all along.
She follows all his advice, changing everything her father had been doing. No cutting of trees is the main one. Which doesn’t set well with the old man. Tattletale Abigail had run to him with that bit of information and father and daughter clash over it. Deborah stands up to him and lets him know someone has got to do something or the farm is gone. It doesn’t set well and he sells the timber to a man without her knowledge. When she confronts that man and his crew with chain saws, the man says he will only stop when his money, and a suitable profit, is returned. Matthews takes great glee in telling Deborah that the money was already spent to pay off the tractor.
The 4H Club is prominent in the film. Barkley is one of the adult advisers. They must have had something to do with the movie as ne credit at the beginning says “Introducing 4H girl Jeanne LaDuke. She had a small role as the sister of Susan’s boyfriend, Buzz Wexford(Robert Ellis) and it was obvious from her lines, usually a put down of big brother, she was no actress. Little Susan gets her two lambs when she “borrows” seventy-five dollars from the bank president, obviously a put-up job by Barkley as they go through the formalities of signing a loan agreement, discussing interest, all with Barkley standing in the background with a sly grin on his face.
Barkley and Deborah look over the denuded hill, Everything is gone, even the stumps, something old Matthews had insisted on. He gives her advice on some things that would help. Fences should be put up at several spots across the old crack, a natural feed down to the farm. They should cach some of the bigger chunks if disaster struck and maybe build up a break. The roots should help for awhile.
Things all come to a head the night of the costume party for the 4Hers. At a neighboring farm, the plan is for Barkley to pick Deborah up when he gets back from business and go pick up the kids from the party. But a heavy electrical storm has hit and he gets stuck in the mud, forced to walk in the driving rain. It’s decided that the storm is to rough and the kids will all spend the night at the home of the party. Little Susan is worried about her lambs and sneaks out to save them.
Barkley arrives in the nick of time to find her squatting in the rain, exhausted from trying to carry her two lambs to safety. When he carries then inside, he finds another problem. Old Matthews is alone in the house, Deborah having gone up the hill to see what she can do. He finds her laboring to get mud and rocks into the break in the kland and has to drag her away just before it all collapses.
The farm is in ruins and Mathews realizes to late what his stubbornness about things he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, has cost the family.
But all is not lost as the 4Hers arrive to help with the clean-up.
Not a bad little drama and not nearly as sappy as I thought it might be when I started watching. The script was by Monte Collins and was directed by William D. Russell. It seems to be in the public domain. I saw it on Turner Classic films and a card at the beginning said the print came from The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK is a film that flew completely under the radar for me. I’d never heard of it and when I saw the listing and the brief synopsis for the showing on Turner Classic, I thought it was a western. To be sure, this John Sturges directed film combined some western elements along with film noir and made a thriller I quite liked.
The cast list reads like a who’s who of Hollywood with Spencer Tracy, Anne Francis, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Walter Brennan, and Dean Jagger, as well as some notable, though lesser lights of the period.
The time is shortly after WWII and a mysterious stranger(Spencer Tracy) gets off the liner when it stops at the small hamlet alongside the tracks. The railroad man is all agog. The last time the liner had stopped there was four years ago. John J. Macreedy says it will stop tomorrow as well to pick me up. Macreedy wears a suit, carries a small case, and has a stiff left arm that rides in a pocket on his jacket.
Right away, the stranger gets a hostile reception, no violence, just looks, nasty comments, and he’s denied a room at the hotel, told they are full. When he looks at the books, he points out they are empty and is told cowboys keep rooms on a kind of retainer for when they come to town. The stranger takes a key and says to let him know if the room becomes needed. Later when he comes back, a man named Hector David(Lee Marvin) lies on his bed and says it’s his room. At the diner, when he orders a bowl of chili, the town bully, Coley Trimble(Ernest Borgnine) tells him he’s sitting on his stool. The stranger pliantly moves over and then Trimble says his seat is a little rough today. “Just tell me which one is okay to sit in.”
The stranger won’t be pushed, resisting all attempts to rile him.
He asks a few people about the location of Adobe Flats and a man, Komoko, he’s looking for, which just brings more trouble. He rents a jeep from Liz Wirth(Anne Francis) and drives off to Adobe Flats, where he finds a house burned down and an unmarked grave. On the way back, the Borgnine character tries ramming him from behind several times. Even one-armed, he’s not helpless and controls the jeep. They find out shortly just how “not helpless” he really is when Borgnine jumps him about the damage he does to his car and, one handed, with a little help from judo, defeats him quite easily.
Black Rock harbors a secret and the town leader, Reno Smith(Robert Ryan), is determined it will stay secret.
The only two friendly toward Macreedy are Doc Velie(Walter Brennan) and Sheriff Tim Horn(Dean Jagger). Jagger is mostly a drunk and the Doc warns Macreedy. The phone lines are always mysteriously “busy” when he tries to get a call to the State police. The telegraph operator is under Reno Smith’s thumb.
We don’t find out till near the end why Macreedy is in Black Rock, tied into the secret the town is hiding.
In the introduction to ALONG THE GREAT DIVIDE on Turner Classic Movies, Tom Mankiewicz talks about Kirk Douglas’ rising star after WWII. He was in drama and noir films. But any young, healthy actor of the times would star in the most popular movie genre of the time. This was Kirk Douglas’ first western.
He plays Len Merrick, the new Federal Marshall in the territory. He breaks up a lynching with his two deputies, Billy(John Agar) and Lou(Ray Teal, Sheriff Roy Coffee from Bonanza), by the Roden clan, a rich ranch family led by Ed Roden(Morris Ankrum). They’d caught Timothy “Pop” Keith(Walter Brennan), a homesteader, with a dozen rustled cattle and had found Roden’s oldest son murdered alongside the trail left by the cattle. Pop admits to the rustling, but swears he never saw the son, let alone killed him.
Roden and his other son, Dan, along with a “posse” of other ranchers were about to lynch old Pop when Marshall Merrick stops it, nearly coming to a gun battle over it. The other ranchers want nothing more to do with a lynching when a Marshal is witness. Roden sends them all away and goes to get his son, Merrick following and offering to help. He is of course refused by the grieving old man, who loads the body on a horse and rides off. Merrick finds a silver pocket watch on a chain near where the body lay and calls after Roden who is too far away to hear.
All about the law, Merrick is determined to get Pop to a town where he can be tried for the murder. He cares not what happens, his job is to deliver the prisoner. It’s a court and jury’s job to determine his fate.
The journey won’t be easy. Roden and his men pursue them, along with Pop’s daughter, Ann(Virginia Mayo) across the desert they decide to risk, hoping to throw off Roden. It doesn’t work.
Dogged by Roden and his men, the extra water gone when Ed Roden shoots the water skin on the pack horse, Billy shot by another of Roden’s men, Merrick captures Ed Roden and carries him along for insurance that Roden will back off. He is soon alone against everyone else. The water hole they finally reach has bad water, Lou wants to head south toward a river on the border, which is were Pop wants to go also, and Ed Roden is trying to make deals with everybody but Merrick. If Pop can just get across the border…he likes Merrick but promises him if he turns his back… To complicate things further, feelings are growing between Merrick and Ann. She, too, promises she will free her father however she can. A trial is waiting at the end of the trail, one Merrick has come to regret. But he is all about the law. One time in the past, he forgot that and it cost him someone dear to him. It still haunts him.
I liked this film even though I figured out who the real killer was early on. Likely reading this, you can see it also. Too easy.
caught RIO BRAVO Christmas Eve. It is one of my favorites and I think the best of the trio of films Howard Hawkes made with the same basic plot, with John Wayne the only consistent star in all three. It was based on a short story, Rio Bravo by B. H. McCampbell, with the script written by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett. Brackett also wrote the scripts for the remakes, El Dorado and Rio Lobo. 
Martin and a crippled old man played by Walter Brennan. He’s later joined by an able young gunman played by teen heartthrob Ricky Nelson when his boss, Ward Bond, a friend of Wayne’s, is shot in the back.![1563rio_bravo_1959[1]](/makepkg/implementing-https-randall120.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/1563rio_bravo_19591.jpg)
Not The Baseball Pitcher 
