February 4 at 6:15AM | 8 Movies
On February 4, TCM presents a daytime potpourri of eight Westerns—big and small, A and B, classic and revisionist—made between 1954 and 1973. The showcase begins with two starring Randolph Scott. When the actor made Riding Shotgun (1954), he was at a peak in his long Hollywood career, having just appeared in the Top Ten Money Making Stars exhibitor poll for four straight years—clear evidence of his consistent drawing power. Well over half of Scott’s entire career output was in Westerns, and as he aged into his fifties, his increasingly weathered looks served him especially well in the genre. In 1956, he would embark on a series of seven celebrated Westerns for director Budd Boetticher, but before those, he made six with another filmmaking maverick, Andre De Toth; Riding Shotgun was their fifth collaboration.
The film was debated by critics and audiences, with some seeing it as a straightforward Western drama and others viewing it as a cleverly subtle Western satire. As The Hollywood Reporter declared, “A preview audience first found itself laughing at the picture, then as realization of the gag dawned, laughing with it. At the end, the film drew a healthy round of applause.” Variety said it was up to audiences whether the film was “a satire on western or a giddyap drama with a multitude of unintentional laughs.”
In an interview with historian Anthony Slide, De Toth reflected on working with Scott. “I believe [he] could have gone further as a performer,” De Toth said. “He was a handsome man; took showers twice a day, I believe. He was a man whose shoes shined. But he had a tremendous inferiority complex about his acting ability and that made him so stiff... Good actor, he wasn’t. He was Randy Scott. Which had advantages, but no surprises.” When asked why he ended the collaboration after their next film, The Bounty Hunter (1954), De Toth said: “I had the feeling that I was at a dead end. [Scott] was a nice, brittle old gentleman and I couldn’t get blood out of an abacus anymore.” Luckily, Budd Boetticher found no such problem two years later, when production began on 7 Men from Now (1956), the movie that revitalized Scott’s career.
Before that film, however, Scott appeared in four other Westerns, including Tall Man Riding (1955), directed by veteran B-filmmaker Lesley Selander. Selander said in an interview at the time that he had stuck to Westerns for most of his career because “I like the outdoors and I like action, and although a lot of people think that most westerns follow the same pattern, I find each one exciting and different.” The twisty plot, which The Hollywood Reporter said, “Caricatures everything that Scott has done before,” involves Scott returning to a town for revenge and encountering plenty of gunplay, a major fight scene and even a land rush sequence, while also finding romance with Dorothy Malone.
Malone’s career had been rising steadily for a decade, from bit parts to featured parts to second leads, and Westerns were a regular part of her filmography—including another in this showcase, Tension at Table Rock (1956). Here she plays opposite Richard Egan and Cameron Mitchell in a film directed by Charles Marquis Warren. Gunslinger Egan, wrongfully ostracized for murder, is a drifter looking to escape his past. He gets a job wrangling horses at a swing station run by a man and his boy, only for the man to be killed by bandits. Egan takes the boy to a nearby town, whose sheriff, Cameron Mitchell, reveals that the town is being terrorized by a violent gang. Egan now sees a path to redemption and stays to help, while romantic tension also develops with the sheriff’s wife, Dorothy Malone. While the film boasts a fair amount of action, it was only mildly received. As Variety said, “There’s more mood than pace in this western entry.” Malone’s career would pivot dramatically with her next film, Written on the Wind (1956), the Douglas Sirk melodrama for which she would win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Probably the least known Western in this group is Black Patch (1957), a vehicle for George Montgomery that was also produced by the star, alongside producer-director Allen H. Miner. Montgomery plays a Civil War veteran who not only lost an eye—hence the “black patch”—but has been scarred emotionally, too. He is now the marshal of a New Mexico town when his old war friend and rival, played by Leo Gordon (who also wrote this screenplay), shows up as a suspected outlaw married to Montgomery’s one-time girl (Diane Brewster). Tom Pittman plays a young gun, Carl, tempted by the dark side in what The Hollywood Reporter called an “intense and vivid portrayal” of a topic “that has never been adequately explored in the legendary chronicles of the west: how did the young badman go bad?” While Variety deemed the film merely “an elongated mood piece,” The Hollywood Reporter judged it “an excellent western and one of the best pictures Montgomery has ever made.” Black Patch stands as the first feature scoring credit for Jerry Goldsmith, who would go on to become one of Hollywood’s top composers for decades to come.
The final four Westerns in this TCM showcase all feature superstar performers mostly in their twilight screen years, starting with Gary Cooper in the top-drawer The Hanging Tree (1959). When Joseph “Doc” Frail, a doctor who drifts into the rough mining town of Skull Creek, Montana, helps a survivor of a stagecoach attack (Maria Schell), he soon finds himself at odds with a villainous miner (Karl Malden). In this film, Cooper gets a chance to continue exploring the darker side of his persona, as he had just done in Man of the West (1958). Cooper’s own production company found and produced this project for Warner Bros., an indication of what it meant to him personally and artistically. Filmed in Technicolor on location near Yakima, Washington, The Hanging Tree is visually ravishing, with the landscapes and compositions creating strong dramatic power, authenticity and emotional resonance. The film, equally beautiful and haunting, will stay with you.
About three-quarters of the way through the movie’s production, director Delmer Daves was hospitalized with ulcers, and Karl Malden, with Cooper’s encouragement, took over direction for the shoot’s final two weeks. Malden was not inexperienced; he had recently directed his first film, Time Limit (1957), and had been a screen actor in many major productions. He stayed on as director through this film’s post-production recording sessions. The Hanging Tree is also notable for George C. Scott’s film debut—in the scene-stealing part of Dr. George Grubb—and for Max Steiner’s excellent score. Daves and Steiner collaborated on eight films, and according to biographer Steven C. Smith, they were very much artistically in tune with one another: “Both men were unafraid of showing emotion, and both were noted for their warm sense of collaboration.”
The Train Robbers (1973) was one of writer-director Burt Kennedy’s personal favorites. An unpretentious vehicle for John Wayne, who plays a Civil War veteran hired by a widow (Ann-Margret) to retrieve stolen gold so she can clear her family name, the movie was shot in Durango, Mexico, with the fictitious town of Liberty, Texas, constructed there—and then destroyed as part of the story’s climax. Like other late-career Wayne films, The Train Robbers pokes fun at the actor’s advancing years and remains “clean,” as Wayne wanted. At one point, for instance, he wards off Ann-Margret’s advances with the classic line, “I’ve got a saddle that’s older than you are.” Kennedy and Wayne were old friends dating back to Kennedy’s early-career writing days, but Kennedy directed Wayne only twice, starting with The War Wagon (1967). “Directing a John Wayne picture,” Kennedy wrote, “is like riding a runaway horse with one rein. If you pull too hard the horse falls, and if you let go, you fall off.”
Also working together for only the second time were Henry Fonda and James Stewart on Firecreek (1968). Close pals dating back to their pre-Hollywood stage-actor days, Firecreek marked the first time they acted together since On Our Merry Way (1948). (They had both also appeared in 1962’s How the West Was Won, but not in any scenes together.) They would pair one more time on the big screen in The Cheyenne Social Club (1970).
In Firecreek, Fonda plays a rare heavy—and he enjoyed it. “I tried to kill Jim Stewart,” he noted wryly, “and you can’t get worse than that.” According to biographer Scott Eyman, it was a viewing of Firecreek that gave Sergio Leone the idea to cast Fonda as an even more cold-blooded villain in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Stewart greatly admired Fonda’s abilities, saying (again according to Eyman): “Fonda could read a scene, maybe five pages, read it again, and know it perfectly. His reactions to things happening in a scene [were] part of the genius of the man.”
The final Western of this assortment is Westworld (1973), written and directed by Michael Crichton, about robots at a future Western-themed amusement park that go haywire and terrorize unsuspecting visitors. Crichton’s sci-fi/Western hybrid was ahead of its time and remains almost scarily relevant today. Even a fine 2016 HBO adaptation has not diminished the power of the original. Yul Brynner, with a gunslinger persona dating back to The Magnificent Seven (1960), is perfect as a trigger-happy cyborg gunman. As Crichton mused, “It’s very hard to give the impression that you are a robot with no personality while at the same time having some sense of presence and personality. Brynner has this.”
Crichton said he got the idea for the story after visiting the Kennedy Space Center. “[I saw] how astronauts were being trained, and I realized that they were really machines. Those guys were working very hard to make their responses, and even their heartbeats, as machine-like and predictable as possible. At the other extreme, one can go to Disneyland and see Abraham Lincoln standing up every 15 minutes to deliver the Gettysburg Address. That’s the case of a machine that has been made to look, talk, and act like a person. I think it was that sort of a notion that got the picture started. It was the idea of playing with a situation in which the usual distinctions between person and machine—between a car and the driver of the car—become blurred, and then trying to see if there was something in the situation that would lead to other ways of looking at what’s human and what’s mechanical.”
