Three Westerns by William Wellman

It was tough to be a busy director in Hollywood during the 40s and not do Westerns, and William Wellman was no exception. I've recently taken a look at three he made in a five-year span. One is a masterpiece, another is an under-appreciated gem, and one is complete claptrap.

The masterpiece is The Ox-Bow Incident, from 1943. Based on a book by Walter Van Tillburg Clark, this short, searing film is a keen-eyed look at mob justice. It stars Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan (yes, Colonel Potter) as two cowboys in 1885 Nevada. They pull into town and take a seat at a bar to wet their whistles. Soon news comes that a local rancher has been murdered and his cattle stolen. A posse grows, and the leader (Marc Lawrence), a friend of the deceased, wants instant justice. An elderly shopkeeper, Henry Davenport, urges that they simply capture the criminals and hold them for trial.

Clark wrote the book in 1940, during the spread of Nazism across Europe, and was afraid that the same thing could happen in America. The notions of a fair trial and justice are derided as womanish. Even the only woman in the posse, Jane Darwell, is depicted as masculine. The bloodlust goes so far as to push aside religion, represented here as an African-American preacher (Leigh Whipper), whose quiet calls for reasonable behavior are ignored (in a pointed bit of dialogue, he tells Fonda that his own brother was lynched).

Three men are found and presumed to be the killers, as there's circumstantial evidence against them. The leader, Dana Andrews, is incredulous as his pleas for waiting for trial go unheeded. The other two are a senile old man, Francis Ford, and a Mexican, Anthony Quinn, who seems resigned to his fate.

Fonda and Morgan are our eyes to the action. They object, as any reasonable person would, but can do nothing to stop the revenge lest they be considered suspects as well. They, along with the viewer, watch in horror as the mob carries out their vigilantism, in what must have been a shock to audiences in those days (a similar early film, Fury, had a kinder ending).

In order to get The Ox-Bow Incident made, Wellman agreed to make two other films for Darryl S. Zanuck of Fox, sight unseen. One of them was Thunder Birds, the other was Buffalo Bill, a biopic of the Western hero and showman. Originally Wellman thought about making a film about the real Buffalo Bill, debunking the legend, but decided he didn't have the heart to do it, and instead went the other way, making a cartoonish film that has practically no facts in it.

I'm coincidentally reading a biography of Buffalo Bill, so I knew immediately it was a load of horseshit in the opening scene, when Bill (Joel McCrea) rescues a stagecoach from Indians and meets the beautiful Maureen O'Hara, who will become his wife. In reality, Bill met his wife in the relatively safe streets of St. Louis, and she was not the daughter of a Senator. At least they got her name right.

Wellman was embarrassed by this film, and he should have been. Although it is sympathetic to Indians, it's in a patronizing manner (Linda Darnell, looking like the maiden on a butter box, plays an Indian girl) and is completely alien to anything that actually happened in the West. The central scene is when Bill kills an Indian warrior, Yellow Hand (Anthony Quinn). That much is true, though the Indian's name was Yellow Hair, and the film discreetly leaves out that Buffalo Bill scalped him.

The film also depicts Bill as a reluctant celebrity, which is laughable, since he was on stage cashing in on his legend in the 1870s. The film ends right before he starts the show, but has an epilogue as he retires from the stage. He says, waving his hat while on horseback, goodbye to the crowd, and a small boy (on crutches no less) says, "God bless you, Buffalo Bill." When discussing this scene years later Wellman looked physically ill.

Finally there's Yellow Sky, a fascinating morality tale from 1948. The film starts very similarly to The Ox-Bow Incident, with some men on horseback (one of them Harry Morgan) pulling into town and walking into a bar. They ogle a sexy painting on the wall, as Fonda and Morgan did in Ox-Bow, and even the bartender and town drunk are played by the same actors. But these cowboys are actually bank robbers, led by Gregory Peck.

After pulling off a job they are pursued by soldiers into a salt-flat, and they have no choice but to surrender or attempt to cross it. They push on, and soon are out of water, their horses starting to falter, their faces blistered by the sun. It looks like the end for them until they see a town in the distance, but when they get to it they find it's a ghost town.

But there are two residents--a grizzled old prospector (James Barton) and his tomboyish granddaughter (Anne Baxter). She is reluctant to help them, but Barton insists on sharing food and water. Peck's colleague, Richard Widmark, suspects that they've found gold, and he wants it, and at first Peck agrees, but he's attracted to Baxter and the good man deep within comes to the surface.

I'd never heard of this film before my Wellman retrospective, and I'm glad I saw it, as it's a fine example of the genre, utilizing just a few characters in a simple setting and drawing sharp psychological distinctions among the characters. The dual between Peck and Widmark is especially well done. And there are the typical Wellman touches, such as the final shootout, as in The Public Enemy, taking place in a building but viewed from the street, as the viewer can only see muzzle flashes through the window. When all is quiet Baxter goes inside, and she provides the view for us as to who is dead and who is not.

The black and white photography by Joe McDonald is excellent. You'll get very thirsty watching the scenes of the bandits crossing the desert.