Pop Culture 101 - 3:10 to Yuma
Like High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma had an evocative theme song that became a hit record (with slightly different lyrics than heard on the soundtrack). It was written by Ned Washington and George Duning and sung by Frankie Laine.
Laine was a frequent performer of theme songs on the soundtracks of other Western films, including Blowing Wild (1953), Man without a Star (1955), and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), as well as his famous rendition of the theme to the Western TV series Rawhide. Laine's vocal presence on these movies was so iconic that Mel Brooks used him for the theme of his Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974).
British folk singer Sandy Denny (1947-1978) wrote and recorded a song called "3:10 to Yuma" in 1967.
3:10 to Yuma was remade in 2007 by director James Mangold with Russell Crowe as Ben Wade and Christian Bale as Dan Evans. The story sticks very close to the original but added a run-in with hostile Apaches and a scene about the construction of train tracks.
James Mangold has acknowledged that his earlier feature Cop Land (1997) was influenced by 3:10 to Yuma. Sylvester Stallone's character in that film, Freddy Heflin, is intentionally named after Van Heflin. Speaking about Cop Land, Mangold said in an MTV interview, "I was trying to make a Western fused with a kind of modern Jersey cop mob world. I think they are two of our most original forms, the mob movie and the Western. They're two of America's most original film forms where you get to examine issues of morality and loyalty in a much more interesting fashion than you generally get a chance to in other genres."
Elmore Leonard, who wrote the story on which 3:10 to Yuma is based, jokingly told a writer for the web magazine Slate that his lawyers were working on getting him the $2,000 owed him for the remake of 3:10 to Yuma under the terms of his original contract for sale of the film rights to his story.
Leonard later wrote the screenplay for a sequel to the earlier Western to which 3:10 to Yuma is often compared. His High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane (1980) premiered on television.
Elmore Leonard's work has also been the basis for the Westerns The Tall T (1957), Hombre (1967), and Valdez Is Coming (1971). He also contributed the screenplay for the Clint Eastwood Western Joe Kidd (1972). He is best known today, however, for adaptations of his modern-day crime and mystery stories, such as Get Shorty (1995) and Out of Sight (1998).
Here is one of the more odd pop culture connections to 3:10 to Yuma. According to an article posted on Slate, the online daily magazine, the film's title has become part of everyday speech in Cuba. Author Brett Sokol traces the evolution of the term "yuma" to mean "American" and "La Yuma" to refer to the U.S. itself. Cuban speech has long used the colloquial "yunay" to mean "united," and when the movie first hit Cuban cinemas in the 1950s, Sokol claims, the word morphed into yuma (although other writers on the subject cast doubt on that connection). Sokol continues: "Legend has it that in 1980, when a desperate Havana bus driver crashed through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy seeking asylum-subsequently sparking the Mariel boatlift that saw over 125,000 Cubans migrate to Miami-his anguished cry was, 'I want to go to La Yuma!'" Sokol says that Elmore Leonard told him he "does intend to return Cuba's linguistic tip of the hat. In his next book, he'll bring back from an earlier novel a Cuban character who left the island in the Mariel boatlift. Speaking over the phone from his Detroit home, Leonard assumed the voice of this Marielito and read me a line from his new manuscript: 'When Fidel opened the prisons and sent all the bad dudes to La Yuma for their vacation....'"
The old territorial prison at Yuma closed in 1909, but much of the structure remains and is now a state park and historic site. It has been used in location shoots for many pictures, ranging from the silent "documentary" Life in a Western Penitentiary (1914), the Alan Ladd Western The Badlanders (1958), and the modern-day prison break drama Riot (1969), starring Gene Hackman and Jim Brown.
The original short story on which 3:10 to Yuma is based is included in The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (William Morrow, 2004). On the audio version, the story is read by actor-musician Henry Rollins.
by Rob Nixon
