Angel and the Badman

A search of the blog claims that I hadn't done a post on Angel and the Badman before, so when it showed up on TCM a few weeks back, I DVRed it and sat down to watch.

John Wayne plays a man who is riding his horse at breakneck speed to get away from something, eventually winding up on the farm owned by the Worth family, where he collapses, but not before insisting they take him to the telegraph office. When he sends his telegram, he informs the operator his name is Quirt Evans, which obviously means something to the operator and other people in town, if not the Evanses.

Quirt is an outlaw, and that's something the Evanses figure out when they see that -- horror of horrors -- he's got a gun! Well, of course you have a gun in the Old West, even if all you ever use it for is shooting a rattlesnake to keep it from biting you. But the Evanses are Quakers, a religion known for its anti-violence stance and known in Hollywood for not being able to grasp the difference between "thou" (subject of a sentence) and "thee" (object). Not that Quirt's outlawry matters to the family's daughter Penelope (Gail Russell). She nurses Quirt and sees him with his shirt off, which obviously gets her turned on. Eventually Quirt recovers and begins to assess his situation.

He's still got people coming after him, with one particular case coming in the form of Quirt's enemy Laredo (Bruce Cabot). The Evanses have rather stupidly taken the ammunition out of Quirt's gun, so he has to bluff his way out of his situation. But Quirt finds that these are well-meaning people, and that that Penelope is just so damn gorgeous that he's beginning to fall in love with her too. He could begin to like this place, settling in and helping out the Evanses.

But there's still work to be done, in he form of a land claim Quirt has made, and when he spots Laredo trying to rustle some cattle, Quirt stops it in a way that you just know is going to bring more violence. In fact, the Marshal (Harry Carey) is expecting to be hanging Quirt at some point in the future for somebody's killing, it doesn't matter whose.

Quirt goes back to the Evanses again, and finds that the attraction is so strong that he's not certain what he's going to do. He can see himself settling down with Penelope, except that there's the problem of Laredo which isn't going to go away until one of them dies. And if Quirt shoots Laredo, that would cost him Penelope's love and possibly his own life what with the marshal waiting. How is Quirt going to solve his dilemma and stay within the constraints of the Production Code? Well, I'm not going to give that one away.

Angel and the Badman is a pretty good movie, although there were a few problems for me. One I already alluded to above, which is the script's misuse of "thee" and "thou", which is something that I find terribly grating. The extended scene of going to the saloon after dealing with Laredo's cattle rustling went on too long with a fight that didn't add much to the movie for my taste. One other thing had to do with the print. Angel and the Badman is available on a newish DVD from Film Detective, and I wonder if a newer print was used for TCM's showing because there were a couple of scenes that looked as though they were taken from a slightly different-quality print.

People who are already fans of westerns have probably already seen Angel and the Badman; for people who aren't or aren't the biggest fans of John Wayne, it's not a bad place to start.