Best of the Badmen

Robert Ryan was another of the people honored in Summer Under the Stars this past August. That gave me the opportunity to DVR several of his movies that I hadn't seen before. One of these is Best of the Badmen, so recently I finally got around to watching it in order to do a review on it here.

The movie opens with title cards telling us about a forgotten chapter of American history. After the Civil War ended in April 1865, there were still some isolated areas where things didn't become peaceful right away, such as in southwestern Missouri thanks to the presence of Quantrill's Raiders. Now, if you've read my reviews over the years, you'll recall that there are a couple of movies that deal with famous outlaw Jesse James (played here by Lawrence Tierney) and how he and the males in his extended family were part of the Raiders. Walter Brennan plays a character named Doc and gives voiceover narration about the remaining stragglers in the Raiders.

Into all of this rides Maj. Jeff Clanton (that's Robert Ryan, if you couldn't tell). He served with the Union Army, and has terms regarding the late President Lincoln's proclamation. If people like Quantrill's Raiders who served in uniform for the Confederacy will sign an oath of allegiance to the Union, the Army and federal government will grant them parole, which means a chance to start over. They're not certain, largely because they have good reason to believe that the carpetbaggers that came in from other places and are now in high government positions won't give men like Quantrill's raiders a fair chance.

One such man is Matthew Fowler (Robert Preston), who ostensibly runs a detective agency but is hated by Maj. Clanton because he knows how dishonest Fowler is. Indeed, Fowler is well aware that there's reward money out there for unpardoned confederates, and he'd like to get him some of that sweet, sweet money. He'd very much like it if those raiders don't get pardoned. Fowler is even willing to use violence to keep the oath from being administered, having a deputy shoot Bob Younger. Clanton shoots back, which is the right thing as long as he's in the army. But once he's out, Fowler is going to use his bought and paid for sheriff to try to prosecute Clanton, eventually obtaining a guilty verdict and death sentence.

But in jail, a strange woman named Lily (Claire Trevor) shows up, claiming to be Jeff's lover. She springs Clanton from prison, and we eventually learn that she's Lily Fowler, the estranged wife of Matt Fowler. The two of them flee before eventually running into some of Quantrill's Raiders, who also had to flee because the pardon proclamation never got finished. Eventually everybody winds up in what is now the Oklahoma panhandle, looking for a way to gain revenge against Fowler and right historical wrongs.

Best of the Badmen is the sort of western programmer that was big in the 1940s, but within a few years would be much less common thanks to episodic TV as well as more psychological westerns like the ones Randolph Scott made with Budd Boetticher. It's not the greatest movie ever made, but it's not bad, and entertaining enough.