Charles Bronson and Marisa Pavan, American Indians

Some time back, I recorded a block, or at least a double feature, of Alan Ladd movies. I already did a review of The Deep Six; the other movie that I recorded was Drum Beat. Once again, having watched it, I can now do the requisite post on it.

The movie is based on a real historical event, the Modoc War of the early 1870s between the Modoc Tribe and the US. The Modoc, like a lot of tribes, had been put on reservations not always on their traditional lands, with the result that some tribal members were unhappy and resorted to violence. The Modoc were originally in northern California but moved north to Oregon, and by 1872 some dissidents were resorting to violence.

Against that background, an Indian fighter named Johnny MacKay (Alan Ladd) is summoned to Washington by President Grant to discuss the issue and what can be done. Johnny's job will be to go back west and renounce violence in the effort to bring peace between the Modoc and white man and subdue those members of the tribe who don't like the status quo. Also heading west is Nancy Meek (Audrey Dalton), whose uncle had fought on the frontier and decided to retire there. Unfortunately, they don't make it to Oregon without incident, as the stagecoach is attacked, and Nancy discovers that there's been an ambush on her uncle's farm with her uncle and aunt having been killed.

The man responsible for all of this is a member of the Modoc calling himself Captain Jack (that's Charles Bronson), and he's a bright if violent man who knows how to use violence to keep the white man at bay. But, as mentioned earlier, there are some Modoc who are also willing to live in relative peace with the white man, or perhaps even in the white man's world and not just on a reservation. Among that latter group are Toby (Marisa Pavan) and her brother Manok, and they can function as a sort of go-between the Modoc and the whites.

Sadly, while there are Modoc dissidents who still want to fight, there are also white dissidents who see the violence from the Modoc and want revenge in the most severe way possible. This threatens to scupper the delicate peace negotiations between the US government, who really do want peace albeit with them in control, and the Modoc. When some whites do bollix things up, that's only bound to make Captain Jack more violent.

Of course, we know how history turned out, and that the Americans wound up victorious; after all, there's no Modoc country today. That requires the defeat of Captain Jack, and the rest of Drum Beat deals with how that happens.

Drum Beat is well enough made, although despite the disclaimer in the opening about how "Fictional incidents and characters have been introduced only where necessary to dramatize the truth", I wonder just how much of this follows the real history, and the extent to which it needed to. Alan Ladd and Charles Bronson both do well, although it is a bit difficult to believe Bronson as a member of the Modoc. It's even more difficult to accept Marisa Pavan as a Native American.

Of course, back in the 1950s when Drum Beat was made, it was normal to cast not just white Anglo Americans in odd ethnicities, but foreigners as well, and everybody does the best they can. Drum Beat is ultimately entertaining enough, if not a particularly great movie.

The shallow six

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for several months is one from the later part of Alan Ladd's career, a new-to-me war film called The Deep Six.

Unforunately, the first thing I noticed is that the print TCM ran was in 4:3, and considering the image quality, it really did look panned and scanned. (IMDb says the original aspect ratio was 1.85:1.) After the opening credits, we go to Madison Avenue in New York, in September 1942. The war is on, of course, so we've got a lot of women working, such as Susan Cahill (Dianne Foster). One day, she travels out to Long Island to meet with one of the graphic artists, Alec Austen (Alan Ladd). It's quite surprising that he hasn't been called up into service yet, since he was in naval ROTC in college and the navy needs officers like him. Of course, that call up is going to come the following day. In the meantime, Alec develops feeling for Susan even though she's engaged to another man, and spends an afternoon with her on the beach.

Alec does eventually tell both Susan and his mother (Jeannette Nolan in a small part) about the call-up, since he kind of has to lest everyone wonder why he suddenly disappeared. This presents a problem, because Alec was raised Quaker, and Mom's still a practicing Quaker. Now, as you may know, one of the tenets of Quakerism is pacifism, so you might wonder why a Quaker would go into ROTC, but apparently Alec isn't particularly practicing any religion. Alec is stationed aboard the USS Poe, which is scheduled to sail from Brooklyn to San Francisco before heading out to action somewhere in the Pacific.

On the Poe, Alec meets the captain, Cmdr. Meredith (James Whitmore) and the executive officer, Lt. Comm. Edge (Keenan Wynn). Edge is responsible for assigning duties to each of the officers, which includes Alec who has the rank of lieutenant. So of course Edge is going to find out that Alec is Quaker by birth. Edge hates hates hates Alec for this, as he just knows that Alec is never going to be able to be a proper military man. Alec is quartered with the ship's doctor, Lt. Blanchard (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), although the only true friend he makes over the course of the voyage is CPO Shapiro (William Bendix), nicknamed Frenchy for, well, reasons that are explained although it's not particuarly relevant to the plot.

Of course, the other officers eventually learn that Alec is a Quaker, and it also goes without saying that Alec's ability to perform combat duties are put to the test and found wanting because without that the movie wouldn't have much in the way of conflict or plot development. When the Poe makes it to San Franciso, Alec finds Susan waiting for him. She's willing to marry him now, and I mean now, and is also out there to visit her sister. But then a telegram comes that Susan's brother-in-law has been killed in action, and Alec doesn't want to put Susan under the emotional anguish of wondering where she too will lose a husband to the war.

The final destination for the Poe is Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands, which is one of the last outposts before the US Navy can head southwest to Japan. Of course, the Japanese did take Attu Island, one of the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands, and that's a plot point in the climax of the movie.

For me, the problem with The Deep Six is that it doesn't feel terribly original. Granted, there's only so much you can do with a war movie, but in the case of The Deep Six the unorigionality felt like a lot of clichés. There's a subplot about an Armenian-American sailor (played by Ross Bagdasarian) that to me came across as particularly tedious comic relief. It also doesn't help that it feels like the stars are mostly going through the motions. So The Deep Six is a decidedly lesser World War II movie.

Timberland guns

Another movie that I had on my DVR for a little while was Guns of the Timberland. TCM ran it I think in July, and then ran it again in August for Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars. But I had enough other stuff to post about that I didn't get around to posting about it then. Besides, I noticed that it was coming up again in September, for a daytime of movies starring Alan Ladd. That showing is coming up tomorrow, September 3, at 1:00 PM.

Alan Ladd plays Jim Hadley, and as the movie opens, he and a bunch of other men are on a seeming freight train, no passenger cars, heading to parts unknown. Or, more specifically, a place called Deep Well. Ladd and his business partner, Monty Welker (Gilbert Roland), have a contract from the government to do a lot of logging in the area because the train line that's getting built needs more wood for rail ties. Ladd is bringing a bunch of men with him, and a bunch of money to provision the men, which seems like it should be a good thing for the townsfolk. Yet all of them seem unhappy when Jim reveals that they're loggers.

The deeper reasoning behind their antipathy is revealed by Laura Riley (Jeanne Crain). She owns a ranch and a bunch of horses that Jim is hoping to rent for his men. But when she finds out that he's a logger, she's fearful, for an understandable enough reason. Her, and everybody else's cattle, need land to graze on, and that land needs topsoil to grow the grass. The trees up in the mountains lock in that topsoil, and if somebody clear-cuts the trees, which is pretty much what Jim is going to do, the ranchers think the land below will become much less nutrient-rich.

Jim takes his men up in to the forest, which is in part an excuse for the moviemakers to show scenery, although this movie was made in 1960. If this were one of the early Technicolor forestry movies from the late 1930s, the scenery might have worked better here. In any case, the weekend comes, and the men want to go back into town to blow off some steam, or at least to have a few drinks. They get to the saloon while the townsfolk are holding a dance in a different building, which is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to show off its new star, Frankie Avalon, singing a very out of place song. Avalon plays Bert Harvey, one of Riley's ranch hands, but winds up having a more substantial role.

The townsfolk learn of the loggers' entry into town, which gives them an idea to come up with some way to try to delay the loggers' progress. They eventually do this by dynamiting the access road back to where the loggers are working. They can walk back, but getting the logs out of the forest is going to be tough. There's another approach, but it goes over the Riley spread.

So the rest of the movie plays out like the sort of western that saw the relatively common theme of the rancher who wanted an open range versus the homesteade who wanted to fence in the land, only with ranchers versus loggers this time. Guns of the Timberland is one of the many movies where it's again easy enough to see why people were interested in the source material (a Louis L'Amour novel) that would give them the chance to film in some very pretty locations. But the plot winds up being a fairly tepid affair and slow going despite the film's putative action and shortish running time of only 91 minutes.

Ultimately to me, Guns of the Timberland felt more like the sort of thing that would in later years be made as a TV movie of the week.

The Iron Mistress

Another of my recent movie watches in an attempt to free up some space on my DVR was The Iron Mistress, yet another of those movies that got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Alan Ladd plays Jim Bowie, who has a famous type of knife named after him and who famously died at the Alamo, although the movie doesn't deal with the Alamo. And anybody with a knowledge of history would probably say that it doesn't deal with any other real aspect of Bowie's life. The movie starts in 1825, in a corner of northeast Louisiana where the Bowie family is involved in forestry, selling the trees for lumber and making their living that way. Each year, one of them has to go down the river to New Orleans to contract for selling the lumber, and this year, Jim happens to earn that right.

In New Orleans, Jim gets into a dispute with Narcisse de Bornay (Douglas Dick), resulting in Bornay challenging him to a duel as was the thing in polite New Orleans society at the time but not up in the backwoods parts of the state where the Bowies come from. So Bowie gets out of the duel by scheduling it for the next time it snows in New Orleans! Bornay and Bowie become friends, with Narcisse taking Jim to his big house where Jim meets Narcisse's sister Judalon (Virginia Mayo). Jim falls in love with Judalon, but she can't marry somebody like him who's not a gentleman, so she goes off and marries Philippe de Cabanal (Alf Kjellin) instead.

Meanwhile, Jim learned in New Orleans that cotton is becoming a big deal and virgin land for cotton is more valuable than land for growing lumber. Jim sells the family mill to raise seed money to buy land, and becomes a bit of a land baron on the side of the Mississippi opposite from Natchez, MS. However, this also brings him into conflict with the current land owners there. They try to keep him from getting loans; with capital drying up, he'll have to forfeit the land. Jim is able to get a fast racehorse and win a big stakes race to get that money, although his enemies will try not to pay up. This leads him to get that knife made, as he knows he's going to have to use it in a fight.

Jim wins another fight but is going to have to escape west to Texas (still a part of Mexico at the time) to stay alive, because his powerful enemies are going to chase after him. In Texas, he meets beautiful Ursula de Varamendi (Phyllis Kirk) and falls in love with her, although to be able to marry her he's going to need money, which will require him to go back to Louisiana, where he'll meet Judalon, Philippe, and his enemy Black Jack Sturdevant (Tony Caruso) again....

The Iron Mistress is a movie that made me think of some other biopics, like Lady Sings the Blues or the technically not a biopic Young Man With a Horn. The material here is pretty good, if a fairly standard action movie plot from the first decade after World War II. There's more than enough fighting and romance going on to satisfy viewers of the day. There's also good Technicolor photography and colorful costumes.

The problem, of course, is that The Iron Mistress is supposedly about Jim Bowie. If it had been about a fictional person and drawn loosely from some events in Bowie's life, we'd have that serviceable movie. Instead, what we have is a film that will likely lead people to go to Wikipedia to see what really happened, and that isn't at all like what happens in the movie. In real life, Bowie traded in slaves, and was also fairly dishonest in his business dealings. Apparently he did have any number of duels, although he was just as responsible for them as the other parties, unlike what we see in the movie. And of course, if it weren't Jim Bowie, we probably wouldn't think about the Alamo either.

So enjoy The Iron Mistress for what it is, a period piece with a fair bit of action. Don't expect it to be accurate history.

13 West Street

A couple of months back, TCM had a spotlight of "Juvenile Delinquent" pictures. This gave me the chance to catch another one that I hadn't seen before, 13 West Street. It's just gotten a new DVD release as part of an Alan Ladd box set from Mill Creek, so I recently watched it to do a reivew here.

As you can probably guess, Alan Ladd is the star here, although it's one of his final movies and he died suddenly, so he's beginning to look a bit haggard here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however, considering the character he's playing and what happens to him. Ladd is Walt Sherrill, a rocket scientist living in Southern California with wife Tracey (Dolores Dorn). He's got a fair amount of stress in his life, since this isn't very long after the Soviets sent Yuri Gagarin into space, and NASA really wants that next rocket, so there's a lot of work for Walt to do.

One night he's driving home through what looks like an industrial district. Not having paid attention to his car, he runs out of gas, which means getting out to walk to the nearest gas station and buy a gallon or two. As he's walking down an otherwise deserted street, another car shows up, this one with five teenaged boys who have taken the car for a joyride. For whatever reason, they decide to get out of the car and beat the crap of out Walt!

Walt is unsurprisingly pissed, at least once he begins to recover from the concussion. He somewhat vaguely remembers that one of the boys might have been named Chuck (Michael Callan), and that they may have said something about getting thrown out of a bar. Police detective Sgt. Koleski (Rod Steiger) takes all of this information down, and surprisingly gets to work on the case. Nowadays they'd probably just treat it as a cold case right from the start and get to easier things that allow them to engage in asset forfeiture.

Somehow, Chuck and his friends find out that Walt has been talking to the police. So they decide that they're going to threaten Walt some more, first telephoning him since they got his name and address from the ID his wallet, and then even coming over to the house to harass him more personally. That seems rather stupid, but who ever said petty criminals are smart?

So even though Koleski has continued on with the investigation, Walt decides he's going to do some investigating of his own. His brother-in-law is even the prinicpal of one of the big high schools, and might be able to help with yearbook photos of the various Chucks for Walt to see if he can positively ID any of them.

Of course, Walt gets so obsessive in trying to find his assailants that he starts harassing anybody who looks like they could be a possible match, such as when he tails a car that looked like the one the kids were riding in when they assaulted Walt. Big mistake, since it's the wrong car. The kids read the daily paper, too, and find out about the incident, which only makes life more difficult for Walt.

A lot of reviewers bring up Death Wish when mentioning this movie, and it's understandable why. Of course, this is a full decade before Death Wish, when societal norms hadn't yet broken down so much and there was still a Production Code that had to be followed. Still, 13 West Street isn't a bad little movie.

I do think, however, that you're going to have to going to have to suspend some disbelief. The detective spending days on this one case seemed unrealistic to me, as did the extra harassment or the blurb in the newspaper that the teens just happened to read. I know these are cinematic tropes, but still.

This being a Mill Creek box set, I don't know how good the prints are going to be, but the one or two other Mill Creek sets of Columbia movies I've picked up really aren't that bad for the price point.

The Badlanders

TCM ran a spotlight on remakes back in December, and one of the pairs that they ran was The Asphalt Jungle together with its western remake of sorts, The Badlanders. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recorded it and sat down to watch.

The setting is the Arizona Territory in 1898. We start off at the federal prison there, and meet a pair of prisoners who are about to be released: Peter Van Hoek, known as the "Dutchman" (Alan Ladd), and John McBain (Ernest Borgnine). The two prisoners have no particular friendship for each other, as we see when the hotheaded McCain nearly comes to blows with one of the prison guards over the guard's brutal treatment of a third prisoner -- the Dutchman stops McBain from hitting the guard, but doing so with violence.

The Dutchman, after being released, heads for his old stomping grounds in Prescott, where he had worked as a metallurgist at a gold mine. He was cheated out of his share of gold and framed for arrest when a gold bar was put in his hotel room, so he wants revenge. The marshal knows about the Dutchman's past, and is only going to let him stay in town long enough to catch the next stage out.

The Dutchman's revenge plan involves the fact that he knows where an untapped and very good gold deposit is in the mine. It's down a shaft that's been closed off because it's too dangerous to exploit. So he plans to exploit it and make a big killing. The only problem is that he's going to need somebody to smelt the gold, so he's going to have to go in with somebody else on this deal. That somebody is smelter owner Lounsberry (Kent Smith), who has a mistress in the form of lovely Ada (Claire Kelly).

But the Dutchman isn't the only one with a connection to Prescott, and a desire for revenge. McBain was a rancher who owned the land under which the gold deposits were located, and he had the land stolen right out from under him; his first attempt at revenge is what landed him in jail. So he'd like revenge too, as well as getting back together with his wife of sorts Anita (Katy Jurado). The Dutchman approaches Mac for help in the revenge plot, and is kind of appalled at robbing what he thinks is technically his own property. But there's not much else he can do, and he can use the money, so he joins in.

Also joining in is explosives expert Vincente (Nehemiah Persoff), a Mexican who's been subject to some bigotry as have most of the Mexicans in town. The three are going to have to work according to a strict schedule, since they've only got one day on which they can pull off the heist, and there are the legitimate miners working a section of the mine that's not too far from where the passageways in the abandoned shaft are located.

If you know that The Badlanders is a remake of The Asphalt Jungle (both are actually based on a story by W.R. Burnett), it's easy to spot some of the similarities. But there's also a lot different. The plot has been pared down, since this one runs almost a half hour shorter than the original. In some ways that's to the detriment of our film, since parts of the movie feel rather rushed. There are also some differences in the ultimate fates of certain characters that I found quite interesting but that I'm not going to give away.

On the whole, if you didn't know about the relationship between The Badlanders and The Asphalt Jungle, you'd probably find The Badlanders to be a nice way to spend 80 minutes on a rainy day. The story, with its differences, still works, and the performances are more than adequate. But of the two movies, you'd definitely want to see The Asphalt Jungle first, since it's a great movie while The Badlanders is merely good.

This Gun for Hire

I mentioned a few days ago that I had watched This Gun for Hire because of an upcoming TCM appearance but was going to hold off on doing a post about it because it's already on DVD and there was something else on that I wanted to blog about. So now that I don't have much else to blog about, it's a good time to do that post on This Gun for Hire.

Alan Ladd plays Philip Raven, who lives in a rooming house and seems to have no friends save for a cat who lives on the fire escape and whom he feeds. Raven gets a letter, giving the address of where he's supposed to go for his next job. That job is... shooting a blackmailer! Worse, the blackmailer was supposed to be alone but there's a woman there, so Raven has to kill two people!

Raven gets paid off by Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), who makes it a point to give Raven bills that are known to have been stolen, from Gates' boss Brewster (Tully Marshall), a noted industrialist. Apparently the blackmailer knew somthing about either Gates or Brewster, but damned if Raven can figure it out. Looks like a chemical formula or something.

Meanwhile, I mentioned that there was money stolen from Brewster, although that's probably more of a set-up to get marked bills in Raven's hands. The police don't realize this yet, and have a police detective Michael Robert Preston) on the case. He's got a girlfriend in Ellen (Veronica Lake), and she's about to get involved in the whole case too.

World War II has recently started, and folks in Washington think there might be something hinky going on with somebody in Brewster's enterprise. So a US Senator get Ellen, a nightclub entertainer, to audition for a job at a club owned by Gates. Ellen heads out to Los Angeles to get to that club, while Raven heads there because the murder he committed was in San Francisco. Not only does he want to get away, he realizes he's been set up by Gates, and wants revenge.

Ellen and Raven meet on the train to Los Angeles, and the sparks fly, even though she's got a boyfriend, and even though they're ostensibly on opposite sides of the law, Raven being a hired killer after all. But sometimes the enemy of your enemy is indeed your friend, and once Ellen falls afoul of Gates, they're both going to be on the run, with both Gates and the police looking for them.

This Gun for Hire has a pretty complicated plot for a fairly short movie, so you're going to have to pay pretty close attention. If the movie has one problem, it's not the plot's complexity, but the fact that with the existence of the Production Code, a hired killer like Raven is going to have to face justice at the end, even though he is in many ways as much a hero here as the cops.

The acting is uniformly good, with it being really nice to see Laird Cregar away from his home studio of Fox. He died way too young, and it always makes me wonder how his career would have gone had he lived. This movie is the one that made Ladd a star, and deservedly so. Robert Preston is nominally top-billed alongside Lake, but he has the least to do.

If you haven't seen This Gun for Hire yet, it's one I can definitely recommend.

The Glass Key (1942)

TCM ran the 1942 version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key not too long ago. I had seen the movie quite a few years back but never did a blog post on it, so with the recent airing, I DVRed it to watch again and do a post here.

Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy) is a "boss" in one of those medium-sized cities that has an underworld problem, and a political establishment that's looking the other way because they're getting paid off by the underworld folks. And in fact, Madvig has been allied with the folks getting paid off. That's about to change, because Paul has met Janet Henry (Veronica Lake). She's lovely to look at, so it's no surprise that Paul has fallen in love with her. She's also the daughter of Ralph Henry (Moroni Olsen), who is the mayoral candidate of the reform coalition. So to get in Janet's good graces, Paul decides that his organization is going to support the reformers.

The family situation for both of them is complicated, however. Ralph has a son Taylor (Richard Denning) who is an inveterate gambler and heavily in debt to underworld boss Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia) as a result. Worse for Paul, Taylor is in love with Paul's much younger sister Opal (Bonita Granville). So there are quite a few people who have good reason to have issue with Taylor. Eventually, he winds up murdered with a lot of people being potential suspects.

Paul has a fixer of his own in the form of right-hand man Ed Beaumont (Alan Ladd). Ed didn't particularly care for the idea of Paul throwing in with the reformers, but he's the boss. And now Paul has Ed investigate to try to figure out who really killed Taylor (and of course it may actually have been Paul after all). As Ed investigates, Janet begins to fall in love with him. She's never really been in love with Paul, only being polite to him for the sake of her father's political fortunes. Ed rebuffs Janet, if only because he doesn't want to hurt his boss.

Ed faces a lot of other danger, in the form of Nick and his henchman Jeff (William Bendix). Nick would be more than happy to see Paul be the guilty one, since that would doom Henry's candidacy, leaving the city wide open for the underworld bosses like Nick.

The Glass Key is a movie that has a pretty convoluted plot, one which requires a lot of careful attention to watching it. But it's not a bad movie at all. Ladd and Lake were rushed into making this after the success of their first pairing This Gun for Hire, and they have similar chemistry here. Bendix doesn't have the looks or the range to be anything but a supporting character, but given a role that fit, he's able to run away with it as he does here with the brutal enforcer for Nick.

While The Glass Key may be a bit too complicated to be truly great (although that doesn't stop people from overrating the Bogart/Bacall The Big Sleep), it's still a pretty darn entertaining movie. It's available on DVD both in a Universal noir box set, and a standalone.

The Proud Rebel

A few months back, I got the chance to see The Proud Rebel for the first time when TCM showed it. TCM is running it again at 10:00 PM tonight as part of 24 hours of Olivia de Havilland films, so now would be a good time to do a full-length blog post on the film.

The movie opens up with John Chandler (Alan Ladd) approaching a town somewhere in southern Illinois together with his son David (real-life son David Ladd) and the best sheepdog in the world. It turns out that the elder Chandler is a southerner who fought for the Confederacy in the recently-concluded Civil War. But he's going north looking for doctors. Apparently his young son saw his mother die when the Union Army burned down the farm, and ever since then David has been either unwilling or unable to speak. Since it's probably some sort of mental block instead of a physical block, there's a chance that David might be able to speak again, and John is going to do anything he can to see that his son does speak again. This particular town has a doctor, Enos Davis (Cecil Kellaway), who might be able to help in that regard.

He's not able to help directly, but he does have an acquaintance at the Mayo Clinic up in Minnesota who might be able to help. Of course, there's the issue of getting the money to make a trip all the way up to Minnesota. And to complicate matters, John and David get waylaid in town. The Burleighs -- father Harry (Dean Jagger) and sons Jeb (Harry Dean Stanton) and Tom (Tom Pittman) ride into town, and their entrance spooks a flock of sheep. However, the Chandlers' dog is able to herd them back into some sense of normalcy. The Burleighs want that dog, although it's absolutely not for sale. Things get heated, and Harry's sons wind up getting in a fight with John, and lying about what really happened at the resulting trial. The only other witness is David, and he's not talking.

So John has to either go to jail or pay a fine with money that he doesn't have. Ah, but who does have it? The widow farmer Linnett Moore (Olivia de Havilland; after all, it is her day on TCM). She can use a man around the farm, especially since the Burleighs are trying to drive her off her land. Unsurprisingly, despite the fact that both John and Linnett intend for their relationship to be all business, you know that some sort of emotional bond is going to develop between the two, as well as between Linett and David, since he's now got a sort of foster mother. Not that it will help him to talk.

I mentioned earlier the problem of getting David up to Minnesota, and John can't just save up for it because the doctor at the Mayo Clinic who could help is going to be leaving in a month's time. It seems increasingly certain that the only way John can get the money is to sell the dog, but that will just devastate poor little David. John eventually does sell the dog without telling David, and the Burleighs find out which gives them a chance to get back at John....

The Proud Rebel a movie that I found squarely in the camp of your typical Hollywood studio era output, this time in the same sort of area that Friendly Persuasion falls into: it looks like it could be a western, but it's not really set out west now, is it? The ranchers, the conflict between the two farms, and a lot of other western tropes are there. But I really think of The Proud Rebel as more of a straight drama that just happens to be set in the post-Civil War era. The cast does well, including young David, who has a difficult part since he's not allowed to speak during the film. The cinematography is nice, and the film has a satisfying ending. I think it's also good for adults and kids alike.

The Proud Rebel is also available on DVD.

One Foot in Hell

I didn't want to say anything this morning, but the real reason I wasn't going to blog about Closely Watched Trains today is that there was somwthing else I wanted to blog about. FMC showed One Foot in Hell earlier today, and are showing it again tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM.

Alan Ladd plays Mitch Garrett, who at the start of the movie is migrating westward with his wife. The two left their home in Georgia after the Civil War, since Sherman's march through the state resulted in their home being burned to the ground and their being left with nothing. The couple are near the town of Blue Springs in the Arizona Territory, with Mitch's wife heavily pregant but also seriously ill. Mitch takes her to town to see the doctor, and has to spend his last two dollars on a hotel room for the night -- cash up front since he's a stranger. This means that when Mitch sees the pharmacist, he doesn't have the $1.87 to pay for the medicine his wife needs. Mitch tries to take the medicine at gunpoint, which leads to the sheriff being called in. This delay ultimately results in the wife dying. Thw townsfolk, in order to try to make it up to Mitch, offer him almost any job he wants.

Mitch takes up the job of deputy sheriff, but he really only does so because he's got ulterior motives. The first time the cattle come in, Mitch meets itinerant laborer Dan Keats (Don Murray). Dan is, like Mitch, a transplant from the vanquished South, his parents having owned hardscrabble farmland in Virginia that was destroyed by the Union. Dan's been reduced to a drunkard who makes a little extra money by offering to draw portraits of people. Mitch, seeing somebody who has no real goal in life, decides he can use Dan in his ultimate plan, which is going to be robbing the Bank of Blue Springs, which holds all of the town's money. Mitch still holds a grudge against the town's citizens whom he sees as responsible for killing his wife. Dan goes off to Royce City on the border with Mexico, followed a couple of days later by Sheriff Mitch. Unfortunately, Dan has complicated things a bit by getting drunk, and telling Mitch's plan to Julie, one of the women working in the bordello (Dolores Michaels). She by default has to become part of the plan. Mitch elists two other aimless men, a British man with a gun up his sleeve Harry Ivers (Dan O'Herlihy), and quick-draw man Stu Christian (Barry Coe), since neither of those two have ever been seen in Blue Springs.

The five all return to Blue Springs for the heist, which of course you know is eventually going to go wrong. Thanks to the Production Code, you couldn't have a heist that worked out in the end. Everybody had to expiate their since. So, the reason to watch a movie like this is to see what goes wrong and how. Sometimes, it looks like the original heist works, as we saw in the recently-recommended The Sicilian Clan, or to a lesser extent in The Asphalt Jungle -- although an alarm gets tripped off in the latter complicating things almost immediately. Here, there's no alarm, so instead something is going to go wrong after the heist. That something turns out to be Mitch. In addition to hating the townsfolk, he deliberately hired aimless men for his plan so that, while playing the part of sheriff, he could round them up and kill them, leaving him as the only one with the money, and allowing him to retire with his ill-gotten gains. Of course, things don't work out that way, but you're going to have to watch the movie to see exactly how things fail.

One Foot in Hell isn't the world's greatest movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, either. Alan Ladd isn't a particular favorite of mine, but there's nothing wrong with him here, at least in terms of Ladd's acting. Sure his character is a jerk, but that's not the actor's fault when a character is written that way. Don Murray is pretty good as the guy whose character changes when he sobers up, while Dolores Michaels is inoffensive while being nice to look at. Coe and O'Herlihy are more nondescript, but then their characters were hired precisely because they were throwaway characters.

Unfortunately, the FMC print is panned-and-scanned except for the credits, which is a shame because you can see from the credits that the cinematography looks like it would be nice. Amazon lists the movie as having gotten DVD release from the Fox Cinema Archive MOD scheme, although I'm not certain of the aspect ratio of that print. Amazon lists 16:9, while some of the reviewers suggest it's the Cinemascope aspect ratio of 2.35:1, although some of those reviews are clearly not of the Fox MOD release, but of a European release.