Quantrill rides again
William Clarke Quantrill, sometimes written as Quantrell (1837 – 1865) often appeared in Hollywood
Westerns. Studios liked the subject of a vicious guerrilla leader attacking
Lawrence, Kansas, and there was often a Confederate, er, confederate in the
story who participated but was disgusted at the violence and looting and turns
against the warlord. Think of Audie Murphy as Jesse James in Kansas Raiders, Alan Ladd in Red Mountain or Randolph Scott in The Stranger Wore a Gun. Yep, it was a
tried and tested plotline. And Allied Artists got the slightly less stellar
Steve Cochran to do the same in Quantrill’s
Raiders in 1958.
Lurid potboiler but well, you can't help watching
And various
Hollywood heavies were drafted to play Quantrill. Even in the silent days Otto
Lederer and Harry Hall were playing him in 1914 and 1921 respectively, and
after World War II there was a veritable flurry of talkie Quantrillistas: Ray
Corrigan in Renegade Girl in 1946,
Brian Donlevy in Kansas Raiders in
1950, John Ireland in Red Mountain in
’51, James Millican in The Stranger Wore
a Gun in 1953, Bruce Bennett in a 1954 episode of Stories of the Century on TV, Broderick Crawford in another TV show in 1959,
Forrest Tucker in a 1967 Hondo
episode, and plenty of more recent ones too. Donlevy, Ireland, Millican,
Crawford, Tucker, these were high class Western heavies, ideally cast as the
ruthless marauder. And none better than Leo Gordon the Great, the Quantrill in
1958.
Leo was a
classic. Tough as old boots, 6’2” tall, gravelly voice, San Quentin ex-con, he
was the ideal tough guy in oater after oater. He doesn’t get much to say in Quantrill’s Raiders, just grunt and
shoot people, but he does it with aplomb. Leo Gordon did aplomb.
The ideal movie Quantrill: Leo Gordon
Sadly, Steve
Cochran as the goody opposite him wasn’t quite so impressive. Husky and hirsute
bad guy (usually), many ladies sighed for him. He was Mae West’s leading stud in her 1949 revival
of Diamond Lil on Broadway. He was often
a gangster, convict or thug. He only did six Western movies, all small-scale
affairs. He was pretty awful in Sam Peckinpah’s first outing, The Deadly Companions. But in the late
50s he wanted to reinvent himself as a hero, so the role in Quantrill’s Raiders was ideal for him. Here
he could be a pro-Union horse trader in Kansas romancing the dames, while in
fact being an undercover Confederate officer bringing secret orders to
Quantrill. Quantrill is to attack the US Army arsenal at Lawrence, but no
looting, of course - Steve wags an admonitory finger at Leo. Then, when he
learns that there are no weapons in the arsenal, he orders the guerrilla leader
to cancel the mission, but of course Quantrill won’t; his blood is up and he
ties Steve up and rides on the town. Heroic Steve must escape, warn the
Lawrencians and save the day.
Complete
balderdash, of course, all of it. But then movies about Quantrill usually were.
He often dies in the Lawrence raid, and Leo is duly shot down by Steve in this
one too (spoiler alert – oh, too late). In fact, of course, later in the war he
and his men (about 400 at the height) quarreled and at the end he was leading a
mere dozen in raids in western Kentucky. Finally, Quantrill was caught in a
Union ambush, a full month after Lee’s surrender, and the guerrilla leader was
shot in the back and paralyzed from the waist down. He died from his wounds in
a military hospital in Louisville in June 1865. He was only 27. (Most of the
actors who played him were stocky men in their forties).
The farrago
was directed by Edward Bernds, a former sound technician who graduated to
directing but probably shouldn’t have. He was once nominated for an Oscar but
the Academy had mixed him up with another director. He still kept the
nomination and displayed it proudly, framed.
The real William Clarke Quantrill
The movie was
shot in among very unKansas-like Californian high rocks (I mean, have you ever
been to Kansas?) by William Whitley, the Cowboy
G-Men cameraman, and is in Color De Luxe and CinemaScope. AA were trying to
produce big, color movies at the time. Mind, the budget still only runs to about
20 raiders: no 400 for Quantrill, I fear. And movies with Quantrill often have
him burning the town down, with lots of looting and hinted-at rape, but in this
one they just ride down the main street of the movie-set town and attack a
barricade of wagons, get shot down, recoil and then do the same again. A bit
dumb, honestly. In reality, they killed about 180 men and boys (some as young
as 14) and did indeed leave many buildings in flames.
Capt.
Cochran surrenders honorably at the end and is told that he will only be
imprisoned for the war’s duration. “I’ll be back”, he tells Diane Brewster. She
has a young nephew whom Steve has befriended and so they will form a family
unit and settle down, à la Hondo, The Tin Star, Yuma, and about a thousand others.
Family unit
I have
no objection whatsoever to historical bunkum in Westerns. It doesn’t worry me
that Quantrill is killed in Lawrence in 1863, if it’s dramatically necessary. We
don’t watch Western movies for history lessons. But if the film is a turgid
clunker, now, that’s a different thing. And I’m afraid Quantrill’s Raiders is firmly in the Turgid Clunker category.
Still, Leo is great, and Will Wright is the judge. Will was like an emaciated
walrus. I always like him in Westerns. Better yet, Glenn Strange is Quantrill’s
right hand man. Wasn’t Strange just marvelous? I mean, a guerrilla band led by
Leo Gordon and Glenn Strange, now that would
be scary.
I live in northeast Kansas within an hours drive of Lawrence. I've seen plenty of strange "Kansas" landscapes in movies, including snowcapped mountains.
ReplyDeleteWhen Leo Gordon was filming Riot in Cellblock 11, which was filmed at an actual prison, the guards insisted on searching him when he came to work. His tough reputation as an ex-con preceded him.
Richard
Great Leo story.
DeleteJeff