The Westerns of Katy
Jurado
This replaces and synthesizes a four-part article posted in March 2013, which I have now deleted.
The Western career of María Cristina Estela Marcela Jurado García, known as Katy Jurado (1924 – 2002), spanned approximately two decades, from High Noon in 1952, her first Hollywood role and perhaps her most famous, to the small but astonishingly powerful part she had in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in 1973. Altogether, she appeared in ten Western movies and six TV Western shows.
Katy Jurado
She was a woman of outstanding beauty, with a
voluptuousness about her and a grace that make her instantly recognizable. In
addition, she was a wonderful actress, capable of communicating complex and
nuanced emotions.
In 1951, having been ‘discovered’ by John Wayne and
Budd Boetticher, she appeared in The
Bullfighter and the Lady playing opposite Gilbert Roland. In reality, of
course, she was already an established star in Mexico and Bullfighter was in fact her twentieth appearance. She had also worked
as a movie columnist, radio reporter and bullfight critic.
With Gilbert Roland in The Bullfighter and the Lady
But Bullfighter brought
her to the attention of Hollywood for the first time and she accepted an
invitation to go there to talk to screenwriter Carl Foreman, director Fred
Zinnemann and actor Gary Cooper about taking the role of Helen Ramírez in High
Noon (click the link for a full review of this movie).
High Noon
It was a great part and wonderfully well done. At a
time when women were stereotypes in Westerns - saintly homesteaders, prim
schoolma’ams or saloon prostitutes - Jurado suddenly provided a different kind of
woman, a person who had made her own way in the world and achieved if not total
‘respectability’ (she was a saloon owner, after all) then at least a status in
the community and an independence. Despite the fact that she has been the
mistress of the badman Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), the marshal (Cooper)
and now the deputy (Lloyd Bridges), she exudes a decency and pride that allow
of no sneers or innuendo. The way she silences an incipient inappropriate
question from the choir-singing storekeeper with a jut of her chin is
magnificent. She carries herself like a lady, she is her own woman and she is
the one with the courage and fortitude to tell Kane’s prissy, rather wet Quaker
bride, “If Kane was my man, I’d never leave him like this.” On the set, as Katy
Jurado deployed her usual way of looking directly, penetratingly into a
person’s eyes as she spoke, Grace Kelly wilted under the ‘glare’ and fluffed
her lines several times.
Helen Ramirez in High Noon
Apparently Jurado had a cool relationship with
Kelly, a woman who, according to Katy, appeared weak as a way of manipulating
men (quite the opposite of Jurado’s approach!) and this was in fact ideal
because it introduced an iciness between the two women into the movie. Jurado,
the passionate, sultry Latin mistress in a dark dress confronted the very pale,
overly demure prim-and-proper wife in white. As they ride in the buckboard to
the railroad station together, each for her own reasons having decided to leave
town on the same noon train that Frank Miller is coming in on, they could not
be more different. No prizes for which of them comes across as the more
impressive!
High Noon was
(justly) nominated for best picture, best director and best screenplay of 1952.
Katy Jurado’s magnificent supporting role was ignored by the Academy, though
she would win a Golden Globe for the performance. She returned to Mexico and
starred in Luis Buñuel’s El Bruto
with Pedro Armendáriz. She was at the height of her fame.
San Antone
Jurado’s success in High Noon led her to be invited back to do another Western, San Antone, released by Republic the following year (1953). On one level, San Antone (not to be confused with the 1945 Errol Flynn vehicle San Antonio) was just another black & white Rod Cameron B-Western from Republic, but actually it was more than that.
In San Antone
The cast, for one thing: Forrest Tucker, Rodolfo Acosta, Harry Carey Jr. and Bob Steele; with Jurado, it’s a great line-up. And the picture has plenty of action and even a grand historical sweep to it. It may not be John Ford but it’s no zero-budget knock-off either.
Arrowhead
San Antone was quickly followed, the same year, by Paramount’s Arrowhead. Although a Technicolor picture with higher production values than San Antone, it was basically an unpleasant film. San Antone may have been a Republic B-movie but it did make an attempt to comment on ethnic discrimination; in Arrowhead, racial discrimination is almost the whole point. It’s the sort of motion picture that made Native Americans hate Hollywood.
The trailer presumptuously begins, “In
the great Western tradition of the immortal Shane,
Paramount NOW presents Arrowhead” (as if the two movies were even in the same league).
With Charlton Heston in the unpleasant Arrowhead
“The least known of the Indian scouts was Ed
Bannon, portrayed by rugged Charlton Heston,” announces the trailer,
sonorously. Well, there’s a reason that Ed Bannon was the least known: he
didn’t exist. In some vague way Charles Marquis Warren,
who directed the picture and wrote the screenplay, adapting WR Burnett’s novel Adobe Walls, based the character of this
‘Bannon’ on Al
Sieber (1843/44 – 1907). Sieber was a most interesting man but he was
nothing like Heston’s ‘Ed Bannon’. Heston plays him as a bloodthirsty
racialist. “Now the secret history of the Apache war is revealed for the first
time!” shouts the trailer. “The most amazing story to come out of the West! All
the more THRILLING because it’s TRUE!” This isn’t really just commercial
hyperbole. It’s what's commonly known as a lie.
As for Heston and Katy Jurado, “violence was to be his
destiny,” apparently, “even from the women who loved him. Katy Jurado, the
sensation of High Noon, as Nita,
whose blood mingled the PASSION of Spain and the DEATH LUST of the Apache.” She
tries to kill Bannon (quite understandably, really; I would too). He holds her
down viciously, sneering at her through those clenched teeth, “The Apache in
you finally came out.”
An odious movie, unwatchable if it were not for
Jurado.
Broken Lance
Fox’s Broken Lance in 1954 was a big Western. It was big-budget and released amid big bally-hoo. It had a towering performance by Spencer Tracy in the lead. It had huge, sweeping Arizona vistas photographed in CinemaScope by Joe MacDonald. It was one of those passionate family dramas so beloved of Americans, written by Philip Yordan and Oscar-winning. It had big stars. It was about as far from a Republic B-picture like San Antone as you could possibly get.
Tender to Tracy in Broken Lance
And there is, as in San Antone, a treatment of racial (in)tolerance. Matt Devereaux’s wife is an Indian woman presenting herself as Mexican (Jurado, replacing Dolores del Rio – Ms. del Rio was to get to play a similar part, though, in 1960 in Flaming Star). The first three sons are by a previous marriage of Devereaux and therefore ‘white’, while Joe, the baby of the family (Robert Wagner), is by Señora Devereaux and thus a ‘half-breed’.
Katy Jurado’s Señora Devereaux is wonderful. She is
quietly loyal and loving to Tracy’s Matt Devereaux yet once again shows
independence, spirit and courage. It is a subtle, sensitive, nuanced
performance and she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for it
(though the Award went to Eva Marie Saint for On the Waterfront). Her performance ranks with High
Noon as her greatest Western work.
In a 1955 interview with Louella Parsons, Ms. Jurado
commented on the Indian roles she was given, "I don't mind dramatic roles.
I love to act, any character at all. But just once I would like to be my
Mexican self in an American motion picture".
Man from Del Rio
Two years after the big production of Broken Lance, in 1956, Katy Jurado was
back, in a small, black & white B-Western with her friend and compatriot
Anthony Quinn. Man
from del Rio is in fact not at all bad, and it repays a watch - what
you might call a 'sleeper'.
With friend and compatriot Anthony Quinn in Man from Del Rio
It was hardly a Fox megastar big box-office smash but
Quinn’s complex characterization and Jurado’s sensitive strength make it a cut
above the average.
TV Westerns
In 1957 Katy Jurado
appeared on television in an episode of Playhouse 90, entitled Four
Women in Black. This was a series of one-and-a-half hour live drama shows
which CBS put out from 1956 to 1960 for a total of
133 episodes. Many of the episodes were directed by big names like Sidney
Lumet, George Roy Hill or John Frankenheimer and attracted big stars (Charles
Laughton, Claude Rains, Maximilian Schell, an early Robert Redford). They were
critically acclaimed and won several Emmys.
Jurado’s episode was written, produced and
directed by Bernard Girard who directed some Bat Masterson, Wagon
Train and The Virginian episodes and wrote a couple of minor Western
feature films. I’m afraid I haven’t seen it, and don't know if it exists to buy or download, so I can’t tell you much. It seems to
be about nuns - Jurado is Sister Monica - and Jim Davis plays a sheriff.
Dragoon Wells Massacre
Later the same year Katy was Mara Fay in a Harold
D Schuster-directed Allied Artists/RKO B-picture, Dragoon
Wells Massacre. The premise of this story is fairly improbable, as
three conveyances turn up in isolated dangerous Indian territory all at the
same time - an Army train, a prison wagon and a stagecoach (Katy Jurado is one
of the coach passengers). So we get a mixed bag of people: a cavalry man, the
lone survivor of his troop; some marshals with a couple of prisoners; and an
Indian trader who has been trading guns and whiskey with the Indians, a most
heinous crime in 1950s Westerns, of course.
In Dragoon Wells Massacre
But what is interesting about the so-far predictable
story is the relationships between these people. Stage passenger Katy fancies
the cavalryman Capt. Riordan (Dennis O’Keefe – appearances in six 1930s
Westerns and a few B-movies and TV shows since) but, what a coincidence, on the
stage is also Captain Riordan’s girlfriend Ann (Mona Freeman – Ruth, the
‘sister’/love-interest of Alan Ladd in Branded)
so there’s a certain, ahem, tension between the two ladies. There’s even a
faint reprise (a distant echo anyway) of the fire-and-ice relationship between
Katy Jurado and Grace Kelly in High Noon.
The two women descend to fighting, as in San
Antone.
Still, by now Katy Jurado was establishing herself as
a well-known actress in Westerns. Then in 1958 came Ernest Borgnine.
The Badlanders
The Badlanders was an Alan Ladd Western, and like all of those, with the exception of Shane, it was distinctly average despite being directed by Delmer Daves. In fact neither Borgnine nor Ladd was ever really convincing in Westerns (I make an exception for Borgnine in The Wild Bunch). In fact Daves said he only made it as a favor to Alan Ladd.
Katy plays Anita, who is helped by Ernest Borgnine’s
character, Mac, when she is assaulted in town. Mac treats her respectfully,
ignoring her past as a prostitute, and love blossoms. The relationship between
the bullish Borgnine and the proud but graceful Jurado is almost tender and of
course was mirrored in real life because they married on the last day of 1959.
(It was a tempestuous relationship and they divorced acrimoniously in 1963).
The Badlanders: with soon-to-be husband Ernest Borgnine
An indifferent picture maybe, but Katy Jurado’s part
rests in the memory. And that is true of many of her films. They weren’t all
great works of art and some were decidedly B-pictures. What’s more, some of her
parts in them were small. But her performances elevate them and remain one of
the first things we think about when remembering the movie.
More TV
The episode of The Rifleman that is graced (there is no other term) by Katy Jurado, The Boarding House (1959), is an example of how very good these TV Westerns could actually be. I’m not really talking about Chuck Connors here, though he is perfectly adequate. If there were a contest in thespian skills between Mr. Connors and a block of wood, Chuck would win easily. But I am talking about the superb writing and directing by Sam Peckinpah and the absolutely magnificent performance of Ms. Jurado.
In only 25 minutes, we get a brilliantly constructed
and tautly directed story to rank with any good Western movie. Jurado is Julia,
a Basque woman who runs a boarding house in North Fork, but the Rifleman
recognizes her: she has ‘a past’. She used to run a ‘gambling house’ (a 1950s
TV euphemism) in another town and was known as Big Anna. At first Chuck tries to
drive her out – he doesn’t want his kid growing up round ‘her kind’. Then she
convinces him that she had no choice in those days but has succeeded in getting
out of that life, and she deserves a chance. The Rifleman sees her point of
view and becomes her supporter. However, her past catches up with her when a
ragged bunch of ‘women gamblers’ led by the sleazy Sid (Alan Baxter, very good)
turn up. They want to make the boarding house their new center of operations…
In an excellent episode of The Rifleman
Do watch this show if you get the chance. It is a
model of a TV Western. And Katy Jurado is absolutely superb. She is decent,
honorable, proud, courageous - and beautiful, of course - and manages to
communicate all of these qualities to the viewer in a matter of a few lines and
a few minutes. And the show even has something important to say on the role of
the woman in the West. Real quality.
In 1960 Katy was in Ghost of a Chance, an episode of The Westerner. This one was written by Sam Peckinpah but not, as The Rifleman episode was, directed by him but by Bruce Geller, who also worked on The Rifleman, and did Have Gun - Will Travel and Rawhide episodes, among others.
In 1960 Katy was in Ghost of a Chance, an episode of The Westerner. This one was written by Sam Peckinpah but not, as The Rifleman episode was, directed by him but by Bruce Geller, who also worked on The Rifleman, and did Have Gun - Will Travel and Rawhide episodes, among others.
In this story, Dave Blassingame (Brian Keith) crosses
the border over into Mexico to deliver an important message but finds the
village deserted, though food is still on the plates. It’s the Mary Celeste…
The ghostly element is played up with almost surreal dialogue, such as this
exchange with Carlotta (Jurado):
Dave: Now this town was
empty twenty minutes ago. Why?
Carlotta: Empty? I have been here waiting for you.
Dave: How long you been here?
Carlotta: All my life. You know, señor, the Jornada del Muerto - the desert - it has a way of making a man see things that are not there.
Dave: Well, I never heard it could make a man not see things that are there.
Carlotta: Empty? I have been here waiting for you.
Dave: How long you been here?
Carlotta: All my life. You know, señor, the Jornada del Muerto - the desert - it has a way of making a man see things that are not there.
Dave: Well, I never heard it could make a man not see things that are there.
Peckinpah trying to be Samuel Beckett. Well, it’s only a 30-minute TV Western and was hardly
Jurado’s finest hour but she’s still good even in the tiny bit of camera time
allowed her.
One-Eyed Jacks
Marlon Brando was not good in Westerns and One-Eyed Jacks, which Paramount brought out in 1961 (“The motion picture that starts its own tradition of greatness” – I mean, really, what balderdash) and which he both directed and starred in, is a curious mixture of the violent and the soppy. We have whippings and hand-crushing and shooting in the back all against a backdrop of lurid color, tropical lushness and slushy music. It’s not a usual Western setting: Monterey, California, with many beach scenes and much crashing Freudian surf.
Loving mother in One-Eyed Jacks
Katy plays the wife of Karl Malden, the sheriff who double-crossed Brando back in Mexico when they were bandits together. They have a beautiful daughter, Louisa (Pina Pellicer). Brando tells Malden that all is forgiven but it isn’t. He cynically seduces Louisa and plans to kill Malden.
Jurado's part does not allow her much scope but she still comes across as tender, wise and decent - far too good for the odious Malden's character.
There is the inevitable shoot-out at the end and love
blooms. It’s all rather turgid, really. But it’s worth watching for Katy
Jurado. Once again, she shines with nobility, grace and beauty.
The 1960s
Between One-Eyed
Jacks in 1961 and Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid in 1973, Katy Jurado had no Western role
worthy of her ability and talent. In this decade of dearth of good roles, she
did work on some Westerns, however.
In 1962 she appeared in La Tules, an episode of the TV series Death Valley Days. She stars as la Tules, with Rodolfo Acosta, her Mexican bandit brother in San Antone nine years before. Again, it’s a thirty-minute TV program of modest quality.
In 1962 she appeared in La Tules, an episode of the TV series Death Valley Days. She stars as la Tules, with Rodolfo Acosta, her Mexican bandit brother in San Antone nine years before. Again, it’s a thirty-minute TV program of modest quality.
Then in 1966 she was in a film version of the ever-popular story Smoky about the famous horse. The well-loved Will James novel had naturally been filmed before, starring Victor Jory in 1933 and Fred MacMurray in 1946. This one had Fess Parker, then of Davy Crockett fame, in the lead. Katy Jurado is Maria. It also has Robert J Wilke as Jeff and Chuck Roberson as, well, Chuck.
You know how it goes: a cowboy, Clint, finds and comes
to love an ‘unbreakable’ horse. His brother, in debt, wants to sell the animal
but is killed by the horse while trying to steal it. The cowboy has to go to
the Army and his horse is sold to the rodeo circuit, and when he comes out, he
sets out in search of the nag.
In 1966, Katy reprised her role of Helen Ramírez from High Noon in a TV pilot called The Clock Strikes Noon Again, which co-starred Peter Fonda as the son of Will Kane. The planned series didn’t happen.
In 1966, Katy reprised her role of Helen Ramírez from High Noon in a TV pilot called The Clock Strikes Noon Again, which co-starred Peter Fonda as the son of Will Kane. The planned series didn’t happen.
In 1968 Katy Jurado was in Stay Away, Joe, a ghastly Elvis Presley ‘comedy’ which we will not dignify with the name Western. It’s embarrassing. She plays Elvis’s half-Apache mother (a nod to Broken Lance perhaps). Days before filming, she broke her foot and removed the cast prematurely, which explains her limp throughout the movie.
They had fun on the set. With Elvis in Stay Away Joe.
In 1970, Katy Jurado was in The Best Man, an episode of The Virginian. Trampas (Doug McClure) is invited to be best man at the wedding of Pick (James Farentino) to Teresa (Susana Miranda) only it turns out Pick hasn’t asked her yet. Or something. Katy is ‘Mama Fe’.
But by far the best performance of these later drought years came in 1972. In that year, Katy Jurado starred in an episode of another popular TV Western series, Alias Smith and Jones. Now, this is not a series I much enjoyed. It was too MOT (Middle of the Trail) and too similar to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the movie, in its ‘amusing’ banter between the buddies, yet the protagonists didn’t have the charisma to carry it off at all. It was anodyne and bland. “In all the trains and banks they ever robbed, they never shot anyone,” the voiceover intro reassures the family viewers. And Kid Curry has a 1970s girl’s hat and Hannibal Heyes has 70s hair.
But The McCreedy
Feud episode had three huge advantages that lifted it out of the swamp of
mediocrity: Burl Ives, Cesar Romero and Katy Jurado. And if you only watch one
episode of AS&J, make it this
one.
From Katy’s first appearance, statuesque, all in
black, she shows up the two boy TV actors for what they are. She was a real
lady in every respect, a star, and had such presence.
It’s a tale of how Smith & Jones act as
intermediaries for bad-guy McCreedy (Ives). “They breed cattle in Texas. They
also breed swine,” says Katy of McCreedy. But gradually she is won round to the
idea of marrying the rogue, who has a terrible, disgraceful secret which comes
to light: he is a Roman Catholic. Katy’s brother, hacienda owner Cesar, doesn’t
like the idea at all.
Romero, Jurado and Ives are outstanding and they
overcome the trite writing and loose direction with aplomb. They are
heavyweights in a lightweight show.
And Katy Jurado is the best of them all, subtle,
beautiful and noble.
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Katy Jurado’s short part in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in 1973, her final true Western appearance, ranks with that in High Noon, her first.
She plays the wife and equal partner of Slim Pickens.
We’ve talked about Slim before, so click the link for more, but here let’s
concentrate on Katy. When the bandit rabble start shooting and LQ Jones and
James Coburn are firing at each other, there she is, letting one of them have
it with both barrels, dressed in her man’s vest and hat, then she methodically
reloads. The white trash Black says to Garrett, “Us old boys oughtn’t to be
doing this to each other. There ain’t that many of us left.”
Extraordinarily moving in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Just at that moment we spy Slim Pickens rise and
stagger from a mortal wound. Katy sees, drops the shotgun (it doesn’t matter
any more) and runs after him. She skirts round him, not approaching at first.
Then she kneels as he sits on the river bank, puzzled and bleeding, and
the strains of Knocking on Heaven’s
Door rise and swell. She smiles sadly at him and tears stream down her
face. It is almost unbearably moving.
The Hi-Lo Country
The Hi-Lo Country (Polygram, 1998) is a very good movie, even if it’s not really a Western and Katy Jurado is only a fleeting presence in it. You can click if you want to read more but we’ll just say here that Katy Jurado has a tragically small (yet stunningly good) part. She is a fortune-teller. The two central characters visit her and want to know if "all of us who are here will be alive and prosperous next year." She gives them a brutally abrupt answer.
Still acting in her seventies
So yes, a very good motion picture, to be seen, and to
be seen, if possible, in a movie theater rather than on a small TV screen. But
it’s not a Western. Not as I understand it. Many people think of it as a
Western and the actors wear cowboy hats and ride horses and have guns, so it’s
in these notes. But it’s not a Western because it’s too much a love story and
too modern and not enough of a frontier tale. The voiceover narrative makes it
an introspective piece and Westerns were never that. Even if one of the
characters does ride, er, drive off into the sunset at the end.
Adios, Katy
Katy Jurado had that wonderful oval face and
extraordinary eyes, beautiful and expressive (Brando called them "enigmatic
eyes, black as hell, pointing at you like fiery arrows"), and her
grace and beauty shone from the screen. But in addition she was an
outstandingly good actress.
She was always convincing in Westerns. In 1992, she was
honored with the Golden Boot Award for her notable contribution to Western
movies.
She said, “No one steps on me and the one who tries had better be a brave man.”
She said, “No one steps on me and the one who tries had better be a brave man.”
Katy Jurado
Her true love was said to be the Western novelist Louis L’Amour. She said,
"I have love letters that he wrote me until the last day of his life. For
our work, we could never match, but he was the man of my life and I, the woman
of his life. I should have married that man". Wow.
Of course she would have said that about me if only she’d
only known me. Ah, what might have been, eh?
Jeff.
I didn't liked Stay Away Joe either, but you could show a little respect for him.
ReplyDeleteI meant like.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think I don't respect Elvis?
DeleteGood artists can be in bad films, you know.
Jeff