A great Western director
If I
described to you a noted film director who was born in the first decade of the
twentieth century in California, made his first (pro-Indian) Western in 1950,
used James
Stewart as his star, made his last Western in 1958 with Gary Cooper
in the lead, and in between made some first class pictures, though never
Oscared, a director who composed his pictures beautifully and was noted for the
cinematography, whose Westerns were uncompromising and tough, well, you’d
probably guess I was talking about Anthony
Mann.
I’m
describing Delmer Daves.
Delmer Daves
Like
Mann, Daves made ten or so Westerns in the 1950s (depending on how you define a
Western). They were of more mixed quality than Mann’s (i.e. some weren’t that
good) but overall they were top class and some were supreme examples of the
genre.
Delmer
Daves was born in San Francisco in 1904 (so was probably three years older than
Mann) and studied law at Stanford. He became fascinated with motion pictures. He
said, “My first career was the law - I did graduate law work at Stanford, had
my office picked out and everything. I'd acted in twenty plays and directed
some, too. Lloyd Nolan and I were classmates and he dearly loved the theatrical
profession. He said, ‘You don't want to be a lawyer, Del, let's go down to the
Pasadena Playhouse and do what we really love’. My father let me give up
eighteen years of schooling with hardly a murmur.” Aged 19, he worked as a prop
boy on The Covered Wagon, so we might
(just) consider this his first Western. He sought
work in Hollywood.
You might be able to spot young Del running around on the set somewhere
His
first credit was for writing the talkie comedy So This is College (sounds like an epic) in 1928 but all through
the 1930s he made a living writing screenplays and taking bit parts as an
actor. In the mid-30s he made a name writing popular Dick Powell musicals and
in ’36 wrote the Bette Davis/Humphrey Bogart hit The Petrified Forest. He made his directorial debut in the Cary Grant wartime adventure Destination
Tokyo in 1943.
1. This was all very well but they weren’t
Westerns, so what was the point? That was put right in 1950 when he directed Broken
Arrow. For this movie and all
Daves’s Westerns mentioned below, you can click on the live links for a full
review of picture. I’ll just say a few lines about each here.
Stewart superb in Daves's first Western
Daves’s first
Western was one of his best. It was a seminal work in that it made mainstream
films pro-Indian. Not that there had never been pro-Indian Westerns: right back
in the silent era early works like DW Griffith’s Ramona (1910, then oft remade) and The Vanishing American of 1925 had put the Indian side of the case
and described their plight at the hands of white settlers and the Army. But
after Broken Arrow Hollywood Westerns
usually showed Indians in a much more positive light. Usually, not always, and
B-Westerns continued shooting down nameless ‘savages’ as if they were tin ducks
in a shooting gallery.
2. In fact Daves’s own second Western, Drum
Beat in 1954, was rather a return to the bad old days. It was made for
Warners (which may be one reason; many of their early 50s Westerns were very
old-fashioned) and had an unconvincing Alan Ladd in the lead, and a
not-terribly-good Charles Bronson as the Indian chief. It was written by Daves
as well as directed by him, so there’s no one else really to blame. It was in
fact the least of his Westerns, in my view (he himself thought that The Badlanders - see below -was the worst).
Drum Beat. Indian fighter meets Modoc chief: unconvincing
[By the way, I
say Drum Beat was his second Western.
I am discounting Return
of the Texan which he made in 1952. This did have quite Western tinges
(Dale Robertson returning to a Texas ranch, Walter Brennan as crusty old
grandpa, Richard Boone as the baddy, horses, guns) but it was (a) a modern
story (it opens with a jeep bowling along) and (b) is really just a love story,
with Joanne Dru.]
Both Broken Arrow and Drum Beat were, though, beautifully photographed and composed, and
this was true of all Daves's Westerns, good or less good. He used lovely Arizona
locations for both the first ones (slightly odd for the second one as it was
about the Modocs in Oregon, but never mind). And he had excellent directors of
photography, Ernest Palmer (Belle Starr)
for Arrow and J Peverell Marley (The
Left-Handed Gun) for Drum Beat.
3. You could regard White
Feather (1955) as Daves’s third Western, and indeed the third volume of
a trilogy of ‘Indian’ films. Daves wrote it again, and was scheduled to direct
it but left Fox just at that moment and less distinguished Western director Robert
D Webb took over. It showed, because the film was rather slow-paced and
plodding, something Daves’s never were. The good news is that it is back to a
solid pro-Indian stance, this time up on the Plains. He moved in his Indian
films from the Apache to the Modocs to the Cheyenne. In fact as a young man Daves had spent six months living with the Hopi and Navajo peoples and saw things
very much from their standpoint.
Love triangle: White Feather
Visually, White Feather, filmed with a big budget
down in Durango with a very large cast of extras, and shot by the great
Lucien Ballard, is very impressive indeed. Once again white actors were used to
portray the leading Native American figures but that was the way back on the
50s. Studios were unlikely to cast unknowns and, there being no tradition of
Indian acting and plays, there was no line of Indian actors waiting for parts.
Debra Paget was in fact the beautiful Indian maid in both Broken Arrow and White
Feather (and other non-Daves Westerns later). Jeff Chandler was Cochise,
Charles Bronson was Captain Jack and Jeffrey Hunter was Little Dog.
These first
three Delmer Daves Westerns, even though they varied in quality and even (in
the case of Drum Beat) adopted a
different stance on the Indians, were a coherent body of work. They are Daves
Westerns. After those, though, the situation altered. True, Indians appeared in
The Last Wagon and Cowboy, but only as a shadowy threat to
the wagon train or cattle drive. In Jubal,
3:10 to Yuma, The Badlanders and The
Hanging Tree there are no Indians at all, and these films dealt with a
variety of subjects. Unlike other great Western film directors, there doesn’t
seem to be a recognizable Daves look or subject matter and the movies all seem
different. Perhaps it was because he was continually experimenting.
4. Daves’s fourth Western, in 1956, was Jubal,
this time for Columbia, based on the first part of the long novel Jubal Troop by Paul Wellman. The book
was adapted into a screenplay by Daves himself and Russell S Hughes (who had worked
on The Last Frontier for Anthony Mann
the year before). It starred a superb Glenn Ford,
one of the best Western actors, who in fact was to do three Westerns for Daves
(Jubal, 3:10 and Cowboy).
Unfortunately it also featured Rod Steiger, who only had two styles of
performance, (a) overacting and (b) overacting wildly, and endearing but plodding
Ernest Borgnine. Ford, who underacted to an almost Gary Cooperish level, was
polite, as ever, but his view was still pretty clear: "Rod...well,
in kindness I think I should say he did a great job with his role. However, the
'method' got a little too much for some of us, especially the wranglers … Look,
Rod won an Academy Award, didn't he? And so did Ernie, so whatever Rod was
doing in his role for Jubal probably worked for him. He was intense, I'll tell
you that."
A noir Glenn Ford, outstanding in Jubal
Still, it’s a fine film. It gets quite
Freudian, with Oedipus complexes everywhere, and in fact this was a feature of
Daves Westerns (as well as being quite 50s-fashionable). The Hanging Tree is probably the most ‘psychological’ of his works
but The Last Wagon doesn’t stint
either on childhood trauma and behavioral issues rooted in dark events of the
past.
Jubal is different, and good, because it
keeps women in a central place. It has been described as a sort of Othello of
the plains, and certainly Steiger’s character Pinky is rather Iago-like as he
poisons Borgnine/Othello’s thoughts with subtle hints of the infidelity of his
wife with Ford/Cassio. (Though Mae, the wife, is rather a racier and more
wanton Desdemona than the Bard’s). Still, you can’t help feeling sorry for Mae
(Valerie French), who is a beautiful woman married to a generally benign but
oafish and coarse rancher, stuck on thousands of acres of Wyoming miles from
civilization. The ‘other woman’ is Naomi (Felicia Farr), daughter of a wagon
train leader (Daves liked his wagon trains), and is gentle, sweet and loving, a
very different character from the rather brazen but much stronger Mae.
Most of Daves’s Westerns were, it must
be said, pretty male affairs. Women tended to be sidelined as appendices of the
heroes, creatures to be rescued perhaps. But then there was nothing unusual
about that in 50s Hollywood. They were Indian maidens, token white
love-interest, impressionable young girls, saloon girls, and so on. Only really
in Jubal (Valerie French), The Badlanders (Katy Jurado) and The Hanging Tree (Maria Schell) are they
strong, independent people, characters in their own right as it were.
Daves
was very good at the subtly erotic. Of course subtly erotic was the only kind
of erotic you could be in the 1950s but he does it very well. Glenn Ford’s tender
scenes with Felicia Farr in Jubal,
Alan Ladd on the river bank with Audrey Dalton in Drum Beat (though he hated love scenes and always looked
uncomfortable in them), Ford again as bandit Ben Wade softly wooing Felicia
Farr again as the saloon girl in 3:10.
These are brilliantly well done scenes.
Glenn romances Felicia
Daves
had a penchant also for the daring double
entendre. One thinks of Nancy telling Johnny in Drum Beat how she wants a farm, and saucily adding that she needs a
man who can plow and plant seed. Alan Ladd looks shocked and runs a mile. Even
more surprisingly Daves managed to get the exchange between Jubal and Reb in Jubal under the Production Code radar:
here, he is rolling a cigarette while watching sexy Mae in her lighted bedroom
window and there is a conversation about how difficult it is, when rolling
cigarettes, to keep one’s finger out.
But, as
I say, Daves Westerns are essentially male affairs. The whole genre is, really,
when you come to think of it, though modern examples are trying to redress that
balance a bit. If anything, there is a strand of (very sublimated)
homoeroticism running through Daves’s Westerns. Certainly anyway a lot of male
bonding goes on, often between the protagonists, Jeffords/Cochise in Arrow, Johnny/Captain Jack in Drum, Van Heflin/Ford in 3:10, Ford/Lemmon in Cowboy (they even end up bathing
together), and most especially the characters of Robert Wagner and Jeffrey
Hunter in Feather, which seems almost
a male love story. There is even a hint of something corrupt in the relationship
between Dr. Frail and his ‘bondservant’, the almost feminine young man Rune,
though a man less gay than Gary Cooper would be hard to imagine, so it certainly
isn’t more than a hint. Of course it was all understated and probably not even
understood by audiences. It probably needs a modern audience with finely-tuned
gaydar to spot it.
5. After Jubal
came The
Last Wagon, which Daves directed and co-wrote. This too contains many
Davesian themes. Given the character of the odious Sheriff Bull Harper (George
Matthews) this is probably the place to mention that lawmen rarely appeared in
Daves Westerns at all but when they did they were corrupt and brutal. 3:10 to Yuma is essentially a lawman tale,
and indeed the hero of the original Elmore
Leonard short story it was based on was a deputy sheriff, but in Daves’s
telling it’s an account of a brave farmer who acts for justice in the absence of
law. In The Last Wagon Harper is a rapist
and murderer, and a sadist. Both lawmen are rotten in The Badlanders, in the pockets of the chief town crook. But mostly
there are no lawmen at all. They are representative of an oppressive and
corrupt white society, and the hero is much better off riding off into the
sunset in the last reel, as indeed Richard Widmark does in The Last Wagon, to eschew ‘civilization’ and be at one with the wild
frontier.
Sadistic lawman
There is
also in Daves’s work a tint of anti-clericalism. In The Last Wagon Comanche Tod (Widmark) tells how he gave up his
Christian faith when it could not provide any help to him. In Drum Beat the pacifist clergyman Thomas
is shown as a naïve simpleton. As with lawmen, ministers almost never appear
but when they do they are negatively shown. The most loathsome religious figure
is the splendidly named George Grubb, in The
Hanging Tree, the evil ‘faith healer’, superbly played by George C Scott.
Preacher Grubb
Rivers are
the settings for key scenes in almost all Daves Westerns, from Broken Arrow, when Geronimo attacks the
stage there and Sonseeahray dies there, to the attack on the stage in Drum Beat, where the very same location
was used, and in the same film the climactic hand-to-hand fight between the
protagonists is at the river. In The Last
Wagon the youngsters go swimming in the river and thus escape their parents’ gory
death (and suffer pangs of guilt ever after). In Western after
Western the river was the symbol of a crossing-over in life, a traumatic moment
of change.
6. 3:10
to Yuma (the original 1957 one of course, not the 50th anniversary remake) is,
in my opinion, Delmer Daves’s masterpiece. It is superb and, good as some of his
other Westerns were, or even near great in the case of the last one, 3:10 pips them all.
There he goes, romancing Felicia again. 3:10.
I won’t
go on at length about it here because this post is getting a bit long and
anyway you can just click the link to find out why it is so fine. I’ll just say that it is above all the tension
and drama, the visual composition and symmetry, and the stunning black &
white cinematography that make it. It ought to rank in anyone’s top twenty of
best Westerns ever.
7. The
Badlanders in early 1958 really wasn’t very good, partly because it
starred Alan Ladd and Ernest Borgnine again. It was a remake in the key of
Western of The Asphalt Jungle of
eight years before, and I suppose remakes often suffer from lack of
originality. It did have its plus points, notably a social justice agenda (here
it is the Mexican Americans who are the downtrodden and exploited rather than
the Indians) and the wondrous Katy
Jurado in a key part. So it wasn’t all bad by any means. But in the last
resort it’s a rather conventional heist movie.
The Badlanders: Daves said he only made it as a favor to Alan Ladd
8. The penultimate Western of Delmer Daves was
a film version of part of Frank Harris’s unreliable memoirs, Cowboy.
It starred the excellent Glenn Ford again and also (very good casting) New
Englander Jack Lemmon as Harris. Like The
Badlanders it was a bit on the weak side, mainly because there really wasn’t
enough plot for a 92-minute movie. But once again it is visually beautiful (New
Mexico locations shot once more by Charles Lawton Jr.) and noticeably well ‘composed’
by the director. It’s enjoyable, if not at exactly the pinnacle of the Western
as art.
9. Delmer Daves’s last Western, The
Hanging Tree, was, however, a splendid example of the genre, mainly
because it starred Gary Cooper. It had a couple of weaknesses, notably the
dreadful hamming of Karl Malden, always a lousy Western actor. But it was
intense, slightly creepy even, fraught, psychological, interesting, complex,
moving, thought-provoking and – need I say? – beautifully shot. Above it all
towers Coop, the greatest ever Western actor, absolutely magnificent in every
way. The names are great in this movie and Coop is Dr. Frail, a man with ‘a
past’, as the heroes in Daves’s Westerns often were (but then so they were in
many Westerns; it was a pretty standard theme).
Coop rarely better: The Hanging Tree
A
recurring theme of Daves, almost a recurring nightmare, is death by hanging.
Pinky’s monstrous end in Jubal (suggested,
not shown, but no less awful for that) is a good example but in all his
Westerns except Badlanders and White Feather actual or near-lynchings
take place. In his last movie the eponymous gibbet looms over the town and the
story, gruesome and sinister in its import and impact.
Poor
Daves didn’t get to finish it. He became seriously ill on the set and Coop’s
production company Baroda replaced him for the last part with Malden, who seems
to have been able to direct anyway, even if he couldn’t act. Daves did recover
enough to direct and write other movies but he never did a Western again.
For what
it’s worth, here is my order of preference
1.
3:10
to Yuma
2.
The
Hanging Tree
3.
Broken
Arrow
4.
Jubal
5.
The
Last Wagon
6.
White
Feather
7.
Cowboy
8.
The
Badlanders
9.
Drum
Beat
but I
leave you to make up your own mind. In any case it is undeniable that Delmer
Daves was in the top rank of Western directors and some of his films are
absolutely superb. Thanks, Del.
