One of the best Westerns of the 1960s
Many people would think that Stagecoach (UA, 1939) is the best film
about a stagecoach. They’d be wrong. Stagecoach
is a very famous Western and was hugely influential, being the first
serious adult example of the genre in modern cinema. It also had a message, that society’s
outcasts were the ones who did the real work, the brave ones. But it has
considerable flaws. It has too many static studio settings, too much low comedy
and the characters are too stereotypical. The 1966 remake was certainly no improvement.
The best stagecoach movie is in fact Hombre, a lesser-known picture of the
late 1960s directed by no great Western master but by Martin Ritt, known for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but
for only one other Western, the theatrical The Outrage. Unless you count the excellent Hud
as a Western that is, in which case he was more than qualified. Whatever his
track record, though, he gave us in Hombre one of the best Westerns of the 60s.
Of course he was helped by a stupendously good
Elmore Leonard story, Hombre. This is Stagecoach with subtlety. This is Stage to Lordsburg but better. It is Maupassant’s Boule de Suif in true Western key. Eight
entirely different people are thrown together by circumstance and forced to
confront harsh reality.
We have a green young boy (Peter Lazer) and his
tarty new wife (Margaret Blye); there is crooked Indian agent Fredric March,
magisterial and more convincing than the banker Berton Churchill in Stagecoach, and his rather sleazy wife
(Barbara Rush). The stage driver is the sympathetic Mexican Martin Balsam (no
hammed-up Andy Devine he). And the steely, stoic, alienated John Russell is
superbly played by Paul Newman, white boy brought up by the Apaches and far
more than half on their side. But the greatest of them all is Jessie, the woman
Newman has in effect dispossessed, Diane Cilento, a Dallas with depth. She runs a boarding house inherited and then sold by Newman. She's a working woman in the West; what's she going to do now? It's tough. She's grittier and less ladylike than her boarding-house colleagues in True Grit or The Shootist, but
she turns out to be the one with the most courage and decency of all the stage passengers.
The sinister, charming, evil bad guy is the excellently named Cicero Grimes, played by Richard
Boone in, I think, his finest ever role. In a sense he reprises his role from The Tall T a decade earlier, only better. Boone’s entrance is stunning –
chilling and fear-inspiring. He is a true bully. As a result we fear him as the
tension builds and his gang approaches.
Hombre is a proper Western because it describes tough
people in a lawless frontier situation and how they deal with adversity with
varying degrees of courage and decency. The characters develop and play off
each other. The Elmore Leonard story is outstandingly
good (even if quite a lot is altered in this cinematic version).
When we see Newman in the opening shots we might
be tempted to think, ‘Oh no, not another blue-eyed Indian like Burt in Apache’,
but of course this is different because Newman plays a white boy captured by
Indians and brought up in their ways. The character was modeled on one Jimmy
(Santiago) McKinn, who is pictured in the final credits.
This is a fascinating story. In May 1885 on a
farm in the Mimbres Valley of south-west New Mexico eleven-year-old Jimmy
McKinn was kidnapped and his brother killed by Geronimo and a band of Apaches.
The boy’s father, who had been away in Las Cruces at the time, gave chase upon
his return and was relentless in his efforts. We think of films such as The Searchers or The Missing. But after finding his son’s coat with a bullet hole
in the back, the poor man gave up and gradually descended into insanity.
In fact, however, the boy had been taken by
Geronimo into Mexico where the band was pursued and eventually trapped by
General Crook, and Santiago was among them. The party escaped but was later
caught again, by forces under General Nelson A Miles. A reporter, Lummis, wrote "When
told that he was to be taken back to his father and mother, Santiago began
boo-hooing with great vigor. He said in Apache—for the little rascal has
already become quite fluent in that language—that he didn't want to go back—he
wanted to always stay with the Indians. All sorts of rosy pictures of the
delights of home were drawn, but he would have none of them, and acted like a
young wild animal in a trap. When they lifted him into the wagon which was to
take him to the [railroad] station, he renewed his wails, and was still at them
as he disappeared from our view."
Later the reporter wrote, "Santiago McKinn,
the 11-year old white boy, the Apaches' prisoner taken with Geronimo’s band,
will be sent home tomorrow. It is learned that his parents were not killed, but
reside at Hot Springs, at Hunter's, N.M., near the railroad from Deming to
Silver City. During his half-year of captivity the lad had grown fully
Indianized. He joins their sports, and will have nothing to do with the whites.
He understands English and Spanish, but can hardly be induced to speak in
either. He has learned the Apache language and talks it exclusively."
In reality, McKinn re-integrated and remained with
the whites in Grant County, New Mexico where he later married, had children,
and worked as a blacksmith. Later, he moved to Phoenix where he died in 1941.
This is not what happens in the movie, however!
Boone
and his excellent heavies hold up the stage and there is gunfire (I won’t say
more). Russell/McKinn/Newman/Hombre leads the party across wild terrain, with the
money, to escape the bandidos. He suddenly becomes the group's leader, no longer the
despised outcast but the one who can save them if anyone can. He doesn’t appear
to care much whether they are saved or not, and this gives his role great strength.
This is by far Newman’s best Western and knocks spots of his hammy Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun or his
Judge Roy Bean or Buffalo Bill, all of which parts he overdid. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid he was a little more restrained and that was a pretty
poor Western. No, Hombre was his
peak.
It becomes now not a stagecoach movie but a
slow, inexorable chase story as the scary bandits close in on the motley group.
I love Frank Silvera as heavy. He was actually from Jamaica but did sterling
duty as a stock Mexican bandido in countless TV westerns and was later to be good
as Diego in Valdez Is Coming, another
fine Elmore Leonard-based Western.
Like Valdez,
Hombre is a sensitive study of racial discrimination. To its credit, the
Western genre did not always treat minorities badly (though it often did).
There is a thread of movies that think about racism and have something
important to say about it. From Devil's Doorway and Broken Arrow in 1950 especially, films
began to show the other side of the story. Think of Flaming Star (Fox,
1960), on the one hand a commercial Western with Elvis but on the other
a challenging treatment of racial hatred.
Hombre is also finely
photographed by James Wong Howe in sweeping Arizona locations. The panoramic
high country is very beautiful and accentuates the isolation of the characters.
The gripping Irving Ravetch/Harriet Frank Jr. screenplay keeps the tension high right to the end: we really don't know what Russell is going to do.
The gripping Irving Ravetch/Harriet Frank Jr. screenplay keeps the tension high right to the end: we really don't know what Russell is going to do.
Mr. Ritt was a master of intimate, exciting
films with tension, ensemble pieces with a small cast, dark undertones and
important messages. He was no John Ford or Howard Hawks but he was clearly influenced by Anthony Mann and for a taut little quality
Western you won’t do much better. And when you think that this mini-masterpiece
was released during the full junk spaghetti spate, you realize what proper American
Westerns were all about.
Excellent review. I keep looking on Youtube for the scene where Richard Boone climbs up to the cabin to negotiate and Newman has a question for him; "How you gonna get down?" Thanks for the story of the McGinn boy. I hadn't known of it and assumed that the story in Hombre might have been based roughly on that of Mickey Free.
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