The baddest seven
Obviously,
if you are going to have a gang of badmen, you need seven. Seven is the
Mystical Western Number. The MWN of 7 appears again and again, and not just in The Magnificent Seven either. Do a spot
of counting next time a posse or gang of bandits gallops across your screen. Ten
to one there’ll be seven of them.
So, in
the ideal Western movie, that one that runs in your head at about 4
am, we are going to have seven heavies in the gang of bad guys.
Now the
big question is who?
Some
will pick themselves. You can’t have the ideal group of blackhats without Jack Elam, for example. Jack was in many ways the
henchman with a gun. 130 feature and TV Westerns and he was henching in
virtually all of them. Whether ‘Knife murderer, uncredited’ (Man Without a Star) or ‘Horse Face’ (The Comancheros), best of all in the 1951 movie Rawhide, skinny One-Reel Jack
was there, squinty-eyed, splay-toed and stooping. So that’s settled.
One-Reel Jack Elam
But he
couldn’t lead the gang. No, we’ll need someone eviler for that, someone clever
and ruthless and scheming. Well, there are several candidates. I might have Dan
Duryea. He was not only tough and mean, he was also an excellent boss. The
false US marshal in Silver Lode, the saloon
keeper who has the town treed in Rails into Laramie, the crazed bookkeeper who thinks he’s Robert E Lee in The Marauders. But then he might make it
into the gang even without being the boss, just as a snarling gunny. You know,
like Monte Jarrad in Along Came Jones,
manic Waco Johnny Dean in Winchester ’73 or the laughing bandit Whitey in Ride Clear of Diablo.
Duryea: devil in a frock coat
Richard
Boone could lead the gang. He was just great as the hard-as-nails badman Cicero Grimes
leading the stage robbers in Hombre,
or Mormon-bearded in his automobile gunning for JB Books in The Shootist,
or kidnaping Randolph Scott in The Tall T.
Boy, he was mean. Killing those people and shoving them down the well. He went in for kidnaping. He even kidnaped John Wayne's grandson in Big Jake. The
crazed Indian killer in Rio Conchos. Yes,
we could have the gang led by Boone.
Boone: boy, was he mean
Bruce Dern
is a must. Dern was so bad. I’ll
never forget him shooting John Wayne in The Cowboys. And the boy actor Jon Gries said he was genuinely afraid of Dern
on the set of Will Penny; he is
seriously nasty in that as one of the sons of evil Donald Pleasence. Wheelchair-bound Will
Plummer in Wild Bill, Miller in Hang ‘em High, Strawhorn in Posse, Hammond in The War Wagon. Oh yes, Bruce is a must.
A Dern bad man
We’ll
have to exclude the part-time bad guys. You know, the good guys who
occasionally moonlighted as badmen. Glenn Ford as the outlaw Ben Wade in 3:10 to Yuma, Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance or Henry Fonda as Frank
in Once Upon A Time in the West.
Sorry, but they’ll be elbowed out by the pros. Lee was nice and bad
occasionally but you can’t help thinking of him leading The Professionals or in comedies like Paint Your Wagon and Cat Ballou. No, we'll probably need a Lee but we'll have Lee Van Cleef (see below).
If we
want an out-and-out thug, no one will do a better job than Leo Gordon. Gordon
had been in San Quentin for armed robbery and his voice alone was enough to
instil menace. Not to mention his physique. Don Siegel once said, "Leo Gordon was the scariest man I have ever met". In Apache Territory, The Restless Breed, 7th Cavalry, McLintock!, and any number of TV shows, Leo frightened everyone.
Leo Gordon: scar-eee
I think Jack Palance would get in. Right from the get-go, in his first Western, Shane, as Jack Wilson the hired gun, he
was seriously good, by which of course I mean bad. It’s true he was in a lot of
spaghetti trash but he was at least the bad guy in those movies. And he was splendidly
evil as the railroad detective in The Last Ride of the Dalton Gang. He was the bad guy LG Murphy in Young Guns and even in comedy, as Curly
in City Slickers, he was suitably
sadistic. Yes, Jack can be in our gang.
Palance: the great Jack Wilson
Then of
course we couldn’t even envision a gang of thugs without including Lee Van
Cleef. Like Palance, his very first Western was as memorable bad guy, one of
Frank Miller’s heavies in High Noon.
And he was thuggish and murderous in a long list of Westerns from then on. Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Tin Star, The Bravados, Ride Lonesome, it’s a great CV. He was even two baddies at the
same time in The Desperado and also
in Diamante Lobo. Like Jack, he did a
lot of junk Italian Westerns but well, bad is bad. And naturally he was
supremely bad as The Bad in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. I mean, how bad can you get? Yes, I think we need Colonel
Mortimer in our side.
Van Cleef the Bad
Gene
Hackman would be interviewed, for his brutal Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven and for his cruel town boss
in The Quick and the Dead but I don’t
think he’d get onto the short list as he was good too much. You can’t have General Crook in Geronimo or Wyatt’s dad
in Wyatt Earp in the gang.
Brutal Bill: Hackman
Robert
Ryan might make it into the gang but I think he’s more of a loner bad guy.
Doing evil on his own, as in The Naked Spur. He was nicely mean as Ike Clanton, though, in Hour of the Gun. And he was kinda the leader, and very bad, in Bad Day at Black Rock. But he was a bit good in The Professionals, looking after those
poor horses, and rather pathetic as the broke-down sheriff in Lawman, and of course he was a goody in The Wild Bunch. No, Bob may not make the cut. Not sure he was
really bad enough.
Ryan: really bad in Naked Spur but too often good. Reject.
If we
need a corrupt sheriff, and they are always handy, then Ray Teal will fit the
bill admirably. The Kid from Texas, Rage at Dawn, The Secret of Convict Lake - you need a crooked sheriff? Ray is
your man. But even as a cowhand or ruthless rancher he was well bad. Think of his Gabe
Clevenger in Fort Worth, his Joe
Sutton in The Burning Hills, the
slimy horse trader in Gunman’s Walk, the
henchman in Streets of Laredo. But
while a corrupt sheriff is handy, I don’t think he should be a permanent member
of the gang. He was a goody too, sometimes.
Teal: need a crooked sheriff? Ray's your man.
We will
doubtless receive an application from Robert J Wilke and I would be sorely
tempted to recruit him, just for that sneering face. He was in no fewer than
175 Westerns, 1938 – 1979, and so often one of the heavies. We might want him
for sheer staying power. But was he evil enough?
Bob Wilke: what a great sneer
Let's go with the following seven: Jack Elam, Dan Duryea, Richard Boone, Bruce Dern, Leo Gordon, Jack
Palance and Lee Van Cleef. It’s between Duryea and Boone for the top dog post.
Let ‘em fight it out.
There you
go, the perfect gang.
En vrac for a 2nd list one day... Lyle Bettger, Raymond Burr, Lee J Cobb, John Mc Intire, Arthur Kennedy, John Dehner, RG Armstrong - In Peckinpah's Pat Garrett-, Robert Middleton, John Ireland, Neville Brand, Luke Askew, LQ Jones AND Strother Martin at their best in the Wild Bunch, Richard Widmark for Yellow Sky, Burl Ives in The Day 0f the outlaw, even Pernell Roberts or James Drury in the Boettichers, Eli Wallach who is the 8th Magnificent, Henry Fonda in OUATITW, Leo Di Caprio in Django, Brando in Missouri Breaks even if you are not very found of both the actor and the film, Sam Waterston in Heaven's Gate - an other one you do not like, Lee "Liberty" Marvin of course also excellent in 7 Men from now and Lancaster and his bunch in Vera Cruz - again...- even Karl overacting Malden because of the Hanging tree, Ed Begley, Lorne Greene facing Guy Madison - forgot the film's name - John Russell and Claude Akins pairing the Burdette brothers in Rio Bravo. Mercedes Mc Cambridge in Johnny Guitar in which Ward Bond was showing some interesting capacities...- Of course we could separate the villains with a touch of charm from the pure psycho killers with limited matière grise etc those used to get this type of role from the one-shot part...
ReplyDeleteThat's quite a list! There are many 'one-off' baddies who were excellent, including some of the ones you mentioned. But some were too good as goodies to be included in the Baddy Hall of Fame. I like the 'professional' baddies, the career henchmen and thugs, the likes of Robert J Wilke, Jack Elam and yes, for the smoothy type, Lyle Bettger. The kind that when they play a goody seem all wrong.
DeleteThe Madison/Greene picture is The Hard Man (see https://jeffarnoldblog.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-hard-man-columbia-1957.html)
Jeff
Neville Brand could be a good substitute in your top notch list of henchmen, or Barton Mc Lane who was such a good Jules Beni vs Mark Stevens-Jack Slade, don't you think.
ReplyDeleteI agree that very few could match Duryea - who could be so charming and even friendly - and Boone as the brain of this gang of heavies, wether in your outfit or not such as Cobb, Bettger, Dehner or Burr who all have a more classy-polite style, if not George McReady or Vincent Price, excellent actors but not as much western oriented.
Marvin's performance as Liberty Valance would allow to include him but I understand your point. Same case for Borgnine who could be very thuggish, or Bob Steele who was good in his earlier career.
What are you going to do with Skip Homeier, one of your favorites... Or Richard Jaeckel ? DeForest Kelly !?
Anyway I have understood that your goal was not a Hall of Fame but the best hence limited team. As is, it is quite impressive. Hard to be selective...
JM
Almost every Western had a heavy, so the bad guys are legion.
DeleteWe all have our favorites.
And there were thuggish bad guys, smooth city-slicker ones, cunning underhand types, ruthless rancher baddies, and other types.
Then to complicate matters, some 'goody' lead actors occasionally moonlighted as baddies. And some were in between (Robert Ryan, often).
But it's a wonderful field for research and development…
Jeff
Jeff, just got this offer from True West which might seduce your readers. I don't know these books and their author but True West is a respected magazine. So just in case...
ReplyDeletehttps://mailchi.mp/twmag.com/three-books-one-low-price-70835?e=6aea3bfe2b
JM