Night Passage

Looking for something to blog about that I hadn't before, I took out my James Stewart westerns box set and put on Night Passage. It turns out that I mentioned it briefly in the blog's early days, although not in a full-length post, and got a plot detail wrong, which suggests that I had seen it quite some time before writing that post. So it had probably been a good dozen years since I saw it.

The movie starts of in a railroad work camp where nobody is actually working, and everybody seems to ahve their wives around for some reason. Anyhow, part of the reason nobody is working is that it's been quite some time since they've been paid, what with the outlaw gang led by Whitey (Dan Duryea) having held up three trains carrying payrolls.

Into all of this comes Grant McLaine (James Stewart), who used to work for the railroad but got fired, and is now eking out a living as an itinerant busker, singing and playing his accordion. (Back in 2008 I wrote that he sang and played the harmonica, but it's only the accordion. At least they're both reed instruments.) Some think he should go back to working for the railroad as a troubleshooter, but he's not so certain.

Still, he needs the money, so when railroad boss Kimball (Jay C. Flippen) comes up with the idea that Grant should carry the payroll money on his person instead of putting it in the train's safe, Grant reluctantly agrees to the job. Along the way, he picks up a young boy Joey (Brandon De Wilde), who was being mistreated by another outlaw, Concho.

As you can guess, the bad guys stop the train. One of Whitey's gang is the Utica Kid (Audie Murphy), who it turns out is also Grant's brother. Grant bailed him out of a jam once, which is what cost Grant his job. Whitey and his gang take Kimball's wife (Elaine Stewart) hostage to a mining camp, which is where we eventually get the climactic shootout.

Night Passage was originally set to be directed by Anthony Mann, who had directed Stewart on several previous occasions, but Mann pulled out for whatever reason. A lot of people suggest that the resulting movie is not quite as good as what Mann might have done, and I think I'd have to agree. It's not that I have all that much of a problem with the movie; it's more that it's one of those movies that's just there. Solid enough entertainment, but the sort of thing that won't be as memorable as the great movies.

But there's also a lot going for Night Passage, including a nice cast of supporting actors, and some really lovely color cinematography of the Rockies in the Durango, CO area.

I can certainly recommend Night Passage, although people who are bigger fans of westerns than I am will probably consider it a lesser western.