3:10 TO YUMA - #657

Based on a story by Elmore Leonard (Justified [review]), 3:10 To Yuma is a tight little thriller of a western. Shot by Delmer Daves a year after he made Jubal [review], it flips the script on that earlier morality play. Though don’t be fooled by its stripped-back cast and lack of color, 3:10 to Yuma is anything but simplistic or black-and-white.

Glenn Ford returns to Daves’ set, but this time as the bad guy. Outlaw Ben Wade gets himself into trouble when he uses a farmer’s cattle as a roadblock to rob a passing stagecoach of its gold. Little does he know, this careless act makes a reluctant hero of Dan Evans (Van Heflin, The Prowler), who just wants to keep his home intact until the longstanding drought breaks and gives his farm life again. Echoing Heflin’s role as the father in Shane [review], Dan’s inaction during the initial robbery causes two separate reactions in his sons: the older sees the sense of avoiding a gunfight with a dozen crooks, his youngest son thinks his dad should have taken them out singlehandedly.

When Wade ends up getting himself caught stopping for a little romance in the nearby town, the local marshal (Ford Rainey) and the owner of the stagecoach (Robert Emhardt, No Time for Sergeants [review]) concoct an elaborate plan to distract Wade’s gang while Dan and the town drunk (Henry Jones) sneak him to Contention City (what a name!) where they can put their prisoner on the titular train to Yuma. Spoiler alert: things don’t go as planned.

3:10 to Yuma has plenty of shootouts, but the real thrust of the story is the dynamic between the two men, between the family man and the outlaw. Though their lives are very different, at the core, they are essentially the same, they just made different choices. Both abide by their personal sense of right and wrong, which is largely defined by their isolationism. Sure, Wade steals from other people for a living, but he’s mostly willing to leave anyone alone who leaves him alone. The cash his action brings him would solve plenty of Dan’s problems, and Wade uses that to lean on the farmer, to try to bribe him into undoing his handcuffs. At the same time, Wade sees something peaceful and honorable in the family life Dan has chosen. It’s a different type of security than money can buy, though for Dan to have his ideal and take care of his family with no outside help, it seems money is necessary. The tensest scenes come when the pair is locked in a hotel room, watching the clock, and the slick criminal is working on his captor’s conscience.

Ford strikes me as a better heavy than he is a straight leading man. Here he is confident and charismatic, aware that he is the smartest man in the room, and yet rarely showing that conceit to any of his marks. As the villain in this piece, he is defined by two conflicting actions: shooting his own man at the stagecoach rather than see the heist go south, and wooing the barmaid (Felicia Farr, also playing the opposite to her Jubal character, trading her blonde hair for dark) with what appears to be genuine affection. The cold first action is what heightens the urgency of the manhunt, and the warm second is what brings that hunt to a close. One can surmise that the dalliance with the girl was worth it, though one is also sympathetic to her poor decision. Daves chooses to film them after the deed in an uncomfortably close two-shot, Wade’s face partially obscured, hers fully exposed so that we can see she is at once satiated and broken-hearted, knowing that there is no tomorrow for this one-night stand.

On the other end of things, Dan’s thoughts are all about tomorrow. If he gets through this, he can get enough money to purchase temporary water rights from his neighbor. At the same time, he holds out hope that the rain will come, that a man will be rewarded for doing the right thing, that he won’t need to indebt himself to another. Though religion never really comes into it, not even in the tangential way it influences Jubal, Dan’s is the plight of the religious man, with his sons representing the angel and the devil on each shoulder, pride and reason, and his wife (Leora Dana) providing the center. She makes her own dumb choice in the final third of the film, but at the same time, it’s one motivated by her dedication to her marriage, and one that fortifies Dan’s resolve, even as most of his allies desert him.

Of course, this isn’t a true religious parable, nor does man need religion to adhere to an ethical code--something a lifetime of westerns and noir will teach any cinephile. The action here is all ground-level, and the temptation earthly. There is also a fundamental plot that is so pure here, James Mangold barely messed with it for his excellent 2007 remake [review]. That last rush to the station is still a rush! When it comes down to it, it’s all about keeping on the right path, about getting the bad guy to his destination regardless of the obstacles that appear in front of you. Thus, if Wade is the true devil, he offers Dan true redemption, even giving his own helping hand at the end.

JUBAL - #656

“You know, sometimes I think it’s giving the good Lord the worst of it to say He invented people.”

Loosely based on Othello, the 1956 western Jubal is a cowboy picture of intimate proportions. It focuses on Jubal Troop (Glenn Ford, Gilda [review]), a self-described victim of bad luck, who finds one good turn, only to be undone by another. From the sound of it, this is his circle of life. Same sheep dip, different day.

The script by director Delmer Daves (3:10 toYuma) and Russell S. Hughes, based on a novel by Paul I. Wellman, opens with a surprising image of a man falling down a mountain and onto the open road, where he is found nearly frozen to death before being taken to a nearby ranch to warm-up. This is Jubal, a lone wolf who left a gig sheepherding--a lowly position in the eyes of the other ranch hands--and stumbled into hard times on his search for someplace to hang his hat. The owner of the ranch, Shep (Ernest Borgnine, From Here to Eternity, and the star of the Marty motion picture) takes pity on the lost soul and offers him a job, despite the protest of one of his men, the acerbic Pinky (Rod Steiger, On the Waterfront, and star of the television version of Marty [review]). I suppose it’s just good instincts that make Pinky hate Jubal from the get-go, and not just the smell of lamb on him. Jubal is as honest as Pinky is craven, he is as hard-working as Pinky is shiftless.

So it is that Shep’s young wife Mae (Valerie French, The 27th Day) fails to seduce the new employee the way she did Pinky. Not that the truth matters. Pinky will later use the idea of an affair to turn his boss against his rival. He is the Iago who plants doubts in Othello’s head, only this time Desdemona has much to answer for, and the would-be Cassio takes center stage.

I would say that Daves works in broad strokes, but the charm of Jubal is not just how simple the plot  but how complex the characters. The landscape is wide, but the people are small and driven by specific mechanics. There is plenty of life being lived here, on the screen and off. Shep and Mae have a complex relationship, where he loves his wife completely, perhaps partially because he knows he is a bit of a Frog Prince and no one expected him to be the man she’d end up with--though, given that this is Borgnine performing at his most gregarious, we don’t begrudge him this good fortune. Jubal is the straight man, but he is also a bit of a brooding anti-hero, running from a trauma in his childhood, caught between the femme fatale and the sweet blonde who could give him a happy life (Felicia Farr, Kiss Me, Stupid). And just what the hell is wrong with Pinky? Steiger plays the bad guy with an indefinable weirdness. He has a certain charm, yet like everything else about him, it’s impermanent. Pinky is a chameleon of convenience, his lies transforming with such ease, no one around him seems to notice he is changing his story.

Even amongst the “Rawhiders,” ultra-religious nomads that end up on Shep’s property, Daves doesn’t paint an exact picture of moral goodness. In fact, their leader, Shem (Basil Ruysdael), named for the son of Noah who’s lineage gave birth to Abraham, notes that following the commandment of “love thy neighbor” is the hardest to stick to. The struggle of the characters in Jubal is to do right by one another. Jealousy, greed, and ego all threaten to knock man and woman alike from the proper path. Outside of the religious camp--which itself features dissenters and sinners--the most true to his code is Reb (Charles Bronson, Once Upon a Time in theWest). Even Jubal faces temptation and blinks (though just barely). Reb tells him, “You don’t have to play every hand you’re dealt,” yet Reb never once attempts to turn in his own cards and take care of himself first.

The ability to show how insignificant man is compared to the rest of the world is arguably exclusive to two genres: war films and westerns. In both, the landscape can overtake the individual, and the natural world tends to carry on while humans cut each other down. In Jubal, Daves and director of photography Charles Lawton Jr. take time to step back and enjoy the countryside. The widescreen photography shows the Wyoming wilderness in its full breadth, extending far beyond the petty concerns of the men who work it. Though we never see the characters going against the elements, there are hints of it, particularly how these transplanted predators are left to fear the unseen native predator, a mountain lion that is attacking their livestock. Pinky plays the wolf in sheep’s clothing when rescuing a calf whose mother has been taken down (maybe he’s the one who really stinks of sheep dip), and the cat is also used as a ruse to get Jubal alone with Mae on the night when it all goes wrong. But is that Mother Nature having the last laugh, or once again man using her as an excuse to do bad things?

The ending of Jubal has some predictable elements, but also some darker details. Punishment is meted out to just about all who’ve earned it (though Shep doesn’t really deserve his fate, and Mae’s comeuppance is disproportionate to her misdeeds, the usual outcome for a femme fatale), and happiness comes to those who deserve it, too. In that, it avoids being the sort of tragedy that gave the script its jumping-off point, but I guess that’s the Hollywood innovation on the classic, the addition of the American Dream to Shakespearian formula: in the saddle, the good guys usually win.