The Cheyenne Social Club

Henry Fonda was TCM's Star of the Month in February, which gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I haven't blogged about before. One of them is The Cheyenne Social Club.

Technically, the real star here is James Stewart, in real life a good friend of Henry Fonda. He plays John O'Hanlan, a cowboy in Texas in 1867, which was a couple of years after the end of the Civil War, when the states that had seceded were still in a fairly parlous economic state. John's best friend Harley Sullivan (Henry Fonda) is also a cowboy, and even though the two have been friends for years, there's still a lot they don't know about each other, which is a running joke throughout the movie. John gets a letter informing him that his brother has died up in Cheyenne, which is in the Wyoming Territory (actually a historical anachroism, as Cheyenne was only founded in the second half of 1867, and the Wyoming Territory not organized until a year later), quite a ways away from Texas. The deceased brother has included John in the will, so he's going to have to go to Cheyenne to deal with the inheritance.

Harley, being a good friend of John's heads up to Cheyenne along with John, an amiable portion of the movie that serves as character development while also showing how much the two friends really don't know each other. In Cheyenne, John meets with Willowby (Dabbs Greer), the lawyer executing the will, and is informed that his brother owned something called the "Social Club", and turned enough of a profit to bequeath not only the club, but also $1100, which was quite a sum to a cowboy in 1867.

However, when John starts asking about the club, some people seem rather offended by it. It's on the edge of town, over by the railroad tracks, and managed by Jenny (Shirley Jones). It takes John a while to figure out what's going on, but the place is actually a brothel, although Jenny and all the other young women there are actually the Hollywood stereotype of the PHG -- the Prostitute with a Heart of Gold.

John isn't so certain he wants to run a brothel, apparently having some moral issues with it. And since he's already met people unhappy with a brothel being in town, you can understand why he might not want a part of it. But the women are extremely unhappy with John's ideas about possibly turning the place into a rooming-house -- they don't really have anywhere else to go. And he starts telling the bartender in town about his plans, the town's men don't seem very pleased either. But what finally forces his hand is that he only owns the building, and not the land that it's on. That's part of the railroad right-of-way, and they let John's brother keep the building, on the condition that it host a brothel, I'm guessing for the benefit of the people constructing the railroad, but even then I find it hard to believe a railroad would want a brothel on its right of way.

To make matters worse, the movie suddenly switches tone because it needs to have an ending. John gets in a fight at the bar that winds up with someone drawing a gun on him and John shooting the guy dead in self-defense. That guy is one of the Bannister clan, and they've got a bunch of male relatives who are going to be pissed, and try to drive John out of his building and kill him.

However, The Cheyenne Social Club is for the most part one of those amiable westerns that bring a couple of older stars in for some entertainment that's not too taxing. Stewart and Fonda seem like they're generally having a lot of fun, and Shirley Jones and the rest of the supporting cast do a good job in support. There's nothing great here, but nothing terribly wrong other than the sudden plot swerves. Still, it's definitely worth one watch.