Audrey Hepburn, Native American?

Another of those movies that I recorded quite some time back and didn't get around to watching until not long before it expired from the DVR was the 1960 western The Unforgiven, which is of course not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven. Anyhow, having watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts for some time when I didn't have other westerns coming up on TCM to do posts about.

The action opens with a panoramic view of a ranch somwhere in west Texas where the nearest civilization is Wichita, KS, or at least where Ben Zachary (Burt Lancaster) returns from. Before that, however, we see the only two people on the ranch at the current time are Rachel (Audrey Hepburn), adopted kid sister of Ben, and their mother Mattilda (Lillian Gish). The camera also pans to a grave stone, which is that of the patriarch, Will Zachary, who was killed by the Kiowa.

And then a strange old guy named Abe Kelsey (Joseph Wiseman) shows up, claiming that Audrey was actually stolen from the Kiowa and adopted by the Zacharys, which might have something to do with why they wanted to kill Will and why Mattilda is ticked with the presence of this man. Meanwhile, the family is working with another family in the area, the Rawlins family. They're headed by patriarch Zeb (Charles Bickford), and have a son Charlie (Albert Salmi) who is thinking of courting Rachel. Kelsey shows up again now that Ben Zachary is back, and this time Ben ticks off Kelsey. Enough so that he starts telling anybody else who will listen the story of Rachel's supposed provenance. That, and he gets a couple of Kiowa to show up at the Zachary place, looking to buy Rachel from the family, a sort of bride price if you will, except that this man says he's actually Rachel's brother.

Best, I suppose, that they marry Rachel off now, and give Charlie permission to court Rachel. For this Charlie gets himself shot by the Kiowa, not that he's actually guilty of anything. But it gets the rest of the Rawlins family pissed at the Zachary family, especially Charlie's mom who gets to have one of those big emotional scenes cursing Rachel and the rest of the Zacharys. Making matters worse is that a posse goes out to catch Kelsey, and when they catch him and bring him back, Mattilda and Ben basically engage in vigilante justice which gets Zeb to believe that the story about Rachel is actually true.

The Kiowa show up again demanding Rachel, who really ought to be allowed to make the decision herself since she's now an adult. But instead Ben and brother Andy kill one of the Kiowa, who respond by laying siege to the Zachary homestead. It's a siege they ought to be able to win because they've got time and numbers on their side. But the Zacharys seem willing to fight to the last man, and woman.

The Unforgiven was produced by Burt Lancaster's production company and suffered a troubled production including Audrey Hepburn falling off a horse and the original director being replaced by John Huston. Huston and Lancaster apparently clashed over the artistic vision of the movie, and I think it shows somewhat in a movie that takes some odd twists and turns tht don't always work. Everybody's professional and the movie is visually nice to look at for the most part, but there's always this feeling that something isn't quite right here.

Still, even though The Unforgiven is a bit of a misfire, it's an interesting misfire.

World in My Corner

TCM did a tribute to actress Barbara Rush after she died last year, which included a movie I'd never heard of, World in My Corner. It sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it to do a post on it.

Barbara Rush is the female lead, but the real star here is Audie Murphy. He plays Tommy Shea, a would-be boxer who isn't very successful. As the movie opens, he's fighting in a bout where boxing "owner" Harry Cram (Howard St. John) is in attendance, but loses. However, he seems to impress at least one person in the crowd, Dave Bernstein (John McIntire), who works out on Long Island for wealthy ball-bearing manufacturer Mallinson (Jeff Morrow). Dave gives Tommy a business card with Mallinson's address and tells Tommy to come see him if he's interested in a better class of training.

Tommy isn't really interested, at least not until he loses his blue-collar job over in Jersey City, which is definitely the wrong side of the river. So on a lark, he heads over to Long Island, only to find Dave isn't currently. So he talks with the guy who is training at the makeshift gym, and is rather dismissive, not realizing that he's talking to Mr. Mallinson himself. Mallinson is so impressed that he offers Tommy a job on the estate while Dave can train him up to be a real professional boxer.

And then Tommy sees Mallinson's daughter Dorothy (that's Barbara Rush). She's so beautiful that Tommy immediately falls for her, except that there's no way he can possibly be in her league because of the class difference. And besides, Dad certainly wouldn't appreciate it. But then, this is a Hollywood movie, so you know things aren't going to go as expected, or at least you expect things aren't going to go the way real life would expect. In this case, that means that Dorothy wants to become a writer, but she's constantly thwarted by her father who wants to run her life and, one can guess, marry her off to someone suitably of her social class. So it goes without saying that Dorothy is going to fall in love with him.

Tommy finally makes it to the top of a card, and Cram shows up again, together with Tommy's old manager Ray (Tommy Rall). And, in the audience unbeknownst to Tommy, is Dorothy: she took the ticket Tommy gave for her father. Tommy wins the fight, and Ray informs Tommy and Dave that Cram wants to horn in on the racket and "arrange" better fights for Tommy, in exchange for his share of the purse. Tommy isn't so sure because of Cram's bad reputation and suspected Mob ties.

The dilemma for Tommy is that the money made fighting for Cram could be good enough to be able to marry Dorothy. But it would be in exchange for selling his soul. Matters come to a head when Cram wants Tommy to throw a match against someone else he's promoting.

World in My Corner is another of those movies that feels like it's breaking no new ground. Murphy does the best he can, although he was always an actor who was generally competent without the sort of performance that could earn an actor awards nominations. Barbara Rush is in the same boat, and the rest of the cast is the sort of character actors who aren't bad, but not normally given to bigger roles, especially not in anything with the pretense of being an A movie.

Gunfight at Comanche Creek

I recorded a series of westerns to my cloud DVR several months back, and they're getting close to the point of expiring, so I have to watch them all and write up posts on them. Next up is one that I mentioned briefly a few weeks back, Gunfight at Comanche Creek.

The movie starts off intriguingly, with the dulcet tones of Reed Hadley informing us it's summer, 1875 in Comanche Creek, CO. A bunch of strangers ride into town, and first thing in the morning, as someone from the hotel brings a hot meal over to the town jail, he's ambushed by a gang. They then take the meal to the jail themselves in order to be able to free the prisoner being held there, Jack Mason.

However, Jack Mason doesn't know the people who are freeing him! A reward is put on Mason's head, and that reward is increased as the gang commits more hold-ups, with only Mason being recognized. Eventually, the reward gets to $3500, at which point the gang kills Mason, with the intention of getting the reward money since Mason is wanted "dead or alive". It's a pretty nifty little scheme, and the authorities have no way of proving that whoever brought Mason in would have been involved with breaking him out of jail and using him in those robberies.

Mason wasn't the guy's real name, although that's not important since he gets bumped off in the first ten minutes or so of the movie. What is important is the fact that he was working for the National Detective Agency, based in Wichita, KS. The agency bosses understand this isn't the first time this has happened, and want to catch the gang leaders responsible for this. With that in mind, they come up with the idea of putting yet another of their detectives in the same situation Mason was in: get a guy arrested on some bogus charge and then have the gang break him out. To that end, they select Bob Gifford (Audie Murphy) to pass gold certificates allegedly stolen in a train robbery. This time, however, they'll send a second guy along, Nielson, to spy on the whole operation to try to keep Gifford from getting killed.

Gifford, taking the name Judd Tanner, goes to Comanche Creek to start the operation. Soon enough, he winds up in jail, and on the first night he's in jail, a sheriff named Simms shows up. Except that Simms isn't his name; it's Amos Troop (DeForest Kelley), and this is the plot to break Tanner out of jail and do to him what the Troop gang did to Mason previously.

Gifford tries to figure out exactly what's going on at the gang compound, without being revealed as an employee of the National Detective Agency. Things get complicated when there's another criminal who's not part of the gang and the gang discovers they might have a mole in their midst.

Gunfight at Comanche Creek is an effective little second-tier western, although it's apparently also a remake of a movie from the mid-1950s. Audie Murphy does well enough, and it's a lot of fun to see Bones from Star Trek as the bad guy in a western. It's nothing spectacular, but it certainly entertains.

Apache Rifles

Another of the movies that I watched off of one of the streaming channels was of a type that I haven't done much of a dive into, mostly because the movies have been on StarzEncore Westerns, one of the premium channels. That is the Audie Murphy western, and the specific movie was Apache Rifles.

A voiceover at the beginning of the movie tells us that the setting is the Arizona Territory in 1879. The Apaches, one of the tribes in that portion of America, have nominally been defeated, at least to the point that they've agreed to live on a reservation where they're supposed to be left to their own devices away from white settlers, dealing only with one of those Bureau of Indian Affairs agents who's probably corrupt. But the Apache have grievances, which they're airing by going off reservation to attack the encroaching whites.

Audie Murphy plays Capt. Jeff Stanton, a captain in the cavalry of the US Army. He's been brought in because he has a reputation for being able to deal with tribal uprisings. He also has a past relationship to the negative with the various tribes. He and his men are eventually able to capture Red Hawk (Michael Dante), the son of the leader of this branch of the Apaches, and uses Red Hawk as a bargaining chip to get the Apaches to agree to a truce. The truce states that the Apache will stay on the reservation, while the Army will ensure that the settlers won't wind up on the reservation.

Stanton, being a good soldier, intends to uphold the terms of that truce regardless of what he thinks of the Apache. But, unsurprisingly, there's gold in them there hills, and there are a bunch of white settlers who would like to get at that gold. Greer (L.Q. Jones) and Hodges (Ken Lynch) are two of those settlers, and they have what they think are very good reasons for wanting to get at that gold. One is that they think they have a legitimate claim to the land and that they've been dispossessed by the truce. But they're also up to their eyeballs in debt, having negotiated terms back east that their funders will get a percentage of the proceeds from the gold. And of course back east is going to want their money.

So Greer and Hodges try to agitate against the Apache and get them to break the truce so that the cavalry will have a legitimate reason to go after the Apache and let the white settlers on the Apache reservation. Complicating matters for Stanton is the presence of Dan Gillis (Linda Lawson). She's a missionary teachin the Apache the English language and how to read, but she's also in the movie as a romantic interest for Stanton and to provide that other bone of contention. Stanton finds himself falling in love with with Gillis, and things get really complicated when it's revealed that she's mixed race and Red Hawk has opinions of the relationship between Stanton and Gillis.

Apache Rifles is the sort of movie that before the advent of widespread television would have been standard Saturday matinee fare, probably made a bit more cheaply at one of the Poverty Row studios. But since the movie was made in 1964, it's got a different feel from those old Saturday matinee pictures. The production values and more intelligent story line are definitely a cut above. But, at the same time, it's also definitely a cut below the sort of bigger movie that Hollywood was making by the mid-1960s, with material like this now seeming more suited to television.

Still, Murphy does a competent job and it's not as if the material is bad. It's more that the material is past its prime. It is, however, definitely watchable.

Walk the Proud Land

I hadn't intended to blog about two westerns back to back, but I noticed yesterday evening that a movie sitting on my DVR, Walk the Proud Land is coming up on StarzEncore Westerns tomorrow at 2:43 PM. With that in mind, I watched it to do a review on today.

Audie Murphy stars as John Clum, a real person who would go on to be mayor of Tombstone, AZ at the time of the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. But this movie is set several years earlier, in 1874, when Clum first shows up in the Arizona Territory to be an agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the San Carlos Reservation for Apaches. It's a difficult job, in part because the restive Apaches under chief Eskiminzin (Robert Warwick) and rebellious Geronimo (Jay Silverheels) don't care for the white man or their agents, and in part because the Cavalry only supports force. Clum has a more humanistic attitude toward the Apache.

At the reservation, Clum meets Tianay (a hilariously miscast Anne Bancroft), an Apache widow who is attached to Clum's residents and acts as a sort of wife-in-waiting even though Clum has a fiancée in Mary (Pat Crowley). Boy isn't Mary going to be surprised when she gets out to the reservation and finds Tianay and a husband who can't quite satisfactorily explain how Apache culture led to his and Tianay's relationship.

In any case, as I said earlier, Clum wants to treat the Apache with more dignity, although it's going to require some work on their part as attacking the whites creates obvious problems. Not all of the provisions Clum orders are reaching the reservation, and the Apaches say that they would be just as comforable hunting for their meat, leading Clum to request that the Apaches be armed. If you've seen enough westerns, you'll know that the Cavalry is alarmed by this, but Clum gets his way. He even gets the Apache to have some autonomy on the reservation, setting up a sort of police force and parallel justice system that will enforce the laws on the reservation, which causes problems when a couple of white hunters get caught hunting on Apache land.

Clum's actions do win sume grudging respect for the Apache on the part of the cavalry, and some respect for him personally from Eskiminzin. But Geronimo still isn't happy, and plans a revolt with the guns that they've gotten from Clum. Clum and the tribal police force have to go round up Geronimo or face being killed....

Audie Murphy wasn't a bad actor, but as with Elvis Presley in the 1960s, Murphy get typecast by the studio and never really given a chance to show his range. Walk the Proud Land is interesting in that Murphy isn't quite playing the sort of Old West action hero that he would in a lot of the other westerns. Murphy does a good job here. The less said about Bancroft, the better.

Having read a little more about Clum, I get the impression that Walk the Proud Land has a lot of the same problems with reality that many Hollywood biopics have, having to fit a real person's story into the coventions of Hollywood, and even more so, western, storytelling. The romantic conflict is irritating, and the Apache dance sequence at Clum and Mary's wedding goes on too long. But overall, Walk the Proud Land is an interesting enough western.

Walk the Proud Land is available on DVD from a pricey Universal MOD disc.

Cast a Long Shadow

For whatever reason, when I've had free preview weekends on DirecTV, one of the channels I haven't recorded all that much despite the present of older movies is StarzEncore Westerns. One of the few movies that I did record off the channel is Cast a Long Shadow. It's going to be on StarzEncore Westerns several times over the next week, starting tomorrow morning at 8:25 AM.

Audie Murphy plays Matt Brown, who at the start of the movie is in a saloon somehwere in Mexico, since he's playing poker for peso stakes despite not having a gun, and drinking heavily. A man comes into the saloon looking for Matt just in time for a fight to break out, and is thankfully able to help Matt.

That man is Chip Donohue (John Dehner), who has been the foreman on the Keenan ranch in New Mexico. Keenan recently died and left the ranch to Matt because Matt is technically his son, even though everybody knows that there is some question of Matt's parentage and he feels like he doesn't even have his own name, which is what led to his leaving the ranch years ago and leading the dissolute life he's led. Donohues informs Matt that the people working the land have chipped in and are willing to buy the spread for a substantial sum, which Matt should probably take since he knows nothing about running a ranch. They just have to draw up all the paperwork at the ranch.

Matt accepts at first, and everybody else seems suspiciously happy, as though this is all some sort of trick to get Matt off the land, even though $20,000 was nothing to sneeze at back in the day. And considering the way people treat Matt at the ranch, you can forgive him for wondering if there's something going on. Even though he now technically owns the ranch, he can't really go into his father's office and sit at the desk and really feels like he runs it. One other thing that makes Matt think about changing his mind is the presence of pretty Janet Calvert (Terry Moore). She and Matt had a relationship of some sort before Matt left, and now Matt is thinking of resuming that.

There's a bigger problem, however, which is that in the time Donohue was looking for Matt, news reached the ranch that Keenan had been borrowing heavily using the ranch as collateral, and not been paying back the loans. The bank would understandably like those loans paid back, and is planning on foreclosing if the loan isn't paid off in the very near future. So if Matt sells the settlers won't own the place, and if Matt doesn't sell he'll lose it to the bank.

Except that there is one way out, which is to drive a bunch of cattle to Santa Fe and sell them, using the money to pay off the loans. This will also give Matt the chance to finally be what the western movie stereotype expects a "real" man to be by leading the cattle drive. The only problem is that it's going to require a lot of help and hard work, and Matt decides that he needs to enforce such strict discipline that it causes Matt so fire some of the ranch hands from the drive for things like drinking. They figure they'll sabotage the drive.

There's a lot of interesting ideas in Cast a Long Shadow, but unfortunately it doesn't quite come together particularly well. It felt to me as though there were a lot of loose ends, as well as things that were resolved way too quickly. The movie was also in black and white, where I felt color would really have helped it. Audie Murphy is professional but it's in service of fairly pedestrian material.

As far as I could tell, Cast a Long Shadoe isn't available on DVD.

To Hell and Back

During the June TCM spotlight on World War II movies, they ran To Hell and Back, which I had seen once quite a few years back but hadn't blogged about. So I put it on the DVR to watch and do a full-length post on now.

It's fairly well known that Audie Murphy was the most decorated soldier in World War II, and the fame garnered from all of this is one of the things that resulted in his becoming an actor. He wrote an autobiography of his experiences in the war, titled To Hell and Back, and that was later turned into the movie we see here, with Murphy playing himself.

He isn't playing himself at first since the movie begins when Murphy is 12 years old, the eldest son in a family of sharecroppers in east Texas with only a single mother, Dad having abandoned them. Young Audie realizes that the only way the family is going to survive is if he drops out of school to get a full-time job, which Mom ultimately lets him do with great reluctance.

Fast forward a couple of years to December, 1941. As you can guess from the date, Audie is about to be affected by the US entry into World War II. First he sees his boss' son realize he's going to be called back into service. As for Audie, he isn't going to be serving just yet, since he's underage. (I've seen his date of birth listed as 1924, 1925, and 1926, but in any of these cases he wouldn't have been 18 yet.) That, and he's helping take care of Mom, who dies in fairly short order. (Wikipedia suggests she died before the US entered the war.)

With Mom dead and the younger kids sent to an orphanage, Audie decides he's going to enlist, but none of the services want him because he's too small and too young. But eventually he is accepted by the Army and sent to the North African theater. The US Army marches on, eventually kicking the Nazis out of Africa and enabling the invasion of Sicily. It's here the Murphy really starts learning about the horrors of war, as the Germans are better dug in. Murphy begins to lose his friends and learn that you really shouldn't make friends in the military since they're going to die. But he also starts getting field promotions.

Murphy's plan at the time, at least as implied in the movie, was to make a career for himself in the military. Having dropped out of school, he wasn't a suitable officer candidate, but he was taking all the extra courses the Army offered and sending as much money as he could back to his siblings, both of which earn the notice of his superiors, as does his unexpected heroism, everybody having felt he was too small and mentally weak to be a truly good soldier.

The Americans continue to advance fitfully, facing fierce resistance from the Axis powers first in southern Italy, then in southern France and finally in Alsace. It was in Alsace that Murphy would earn his Medal of Honor, standing atop a burning tank and single-handedly stopping an advance of German soldiers. But he also suffers an injury that would prevent him from staying in the military after the war.

To Hell and Back is about as well-made as you can expect a military movie from the mid-1950s to be. Washington state substitutes for Italy and France, with Universal's soundstages being used for the interiors. However, there's also a fair amount of stock footage from World War II interspersed. Since the movie is in wide-screen with Cinemascope having been introduced two years earlier, and the World War II footage is all originally in roughly 4:3 and cropped for this movie, the difference between the two sets of footage is quite noticeable.

Audie Murphy disliked this movie in part because he thought it really sanitized his experiences, but to be fair to the filmmakers, there probably isn't any way to show the true horrors of war without being able to film an actual war and the concomitant death and destruction. And even if it had been, audiences of the time probably wouldn't have wanted to see it. Still, Murphy's thoughts are understandable. As for his performance, he does a reasonably good job one the action shifts to Europe; the American scenes of Murphy's juvenile life are maudlin and something a lot of actors wouldn't be able to rise above.

All in all, To Hell and Back is a worthy movie in the World War II cycle. It's available on DVD in multiple releases should you wish to watch it.

The Red Badge of Courage

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I took a look at the TCM schedule to see if there were movies available on DVD that I hadn't done a post about before. I noticed that among them was The Red Badge of Courage, so I recorded that, and sat down to watch.

This is based on the 1890s novella by Stephen Crane, who having been born in 1871 had no first-hand knowledge of the US Civil War. Henry Fleming (Audie Murphy) is a young soldier from the North who joined a regiment in the Civil War which is moving south to take on the Confederates. Fleming is worried about what's going to happen when they have to go into battle, as he doesn't want to die.

Probably Henry's best friend in the regiment is Tom (Bill Mauldin), with Jim (John Dierkes) being the voice of experience. For everybody, the war is very much a case of hurry up and wait, as none of the enlisted men seem to understand at first why they're going north to go south in a flanking action. Eventually, they get to engage the Confederates in battle. Henry makes it into the trenches with the rest of the men, but when the time comes for the charge -- he flees.

Henry considers himself a coward, and could probably be court-martialed for desertion if it weren't for the fact that the battlefield can be a very chaotic place. While dealing with some of the other Union regiments, he accidentally gets hit in the back of the head. It changes his outlook, as now he has a wound, even if a slight one. It's his "badge of courage".

On his way back to the regiment, he meets other soldiers who have been injured, such as a cheery soldier (Andy Devine), as well as a regiment mate known as "the tattered man" (Royal Dano). All of it gives Henry a renewed sense of courage the next time he has to go into battle.

There's really not all that much going on in The Red Badge of Courage. Part of that is because the movie was cut down. Director John Huston had considered himself to be making a war epic, but the studio bosses said there were terrible previews that necessitated edits. Huston by this time was in Africa to make The African Queen, so he was in no place to protest. The result is a B movie running just 69 minutes.

The movie that we have is nothing terrible, but it's nothing great either. Murphy was not yet a star, but he already shows he was going to be a more capable actor than people tend to give him credit for. Everybody else is pretty much just there, but does nothing to make the movie bad. For me The Red Badge of Courage was just one of those movies that comes and goes.

It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, so you can always judge for yourself.

The Quiet American

I saw The Quiet American on the TCM schedule as part of the spotlight on reporters, and since I got it on DVD last year, I decided to watch the DVD to do a full-length post here.

The movie starts off at Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebrations, in Saigon circa 1952. This was when French Indochina was still a thing, divided into several provinces, but there was a war for independence going on that eventually drove the French out in 1954. Anyhow, during this particular celebration, a dead body washes up in the river. Apparently, the dead man was a westerner, the titular American, so a British journalist named Fowler (Michael Redgrave) who knew the American is brought in for questioning by the police.

Fowler flashes back to an early meeting with the American (whose name is never given, and is played by Audie Murphy). While Fowler and a lot of the other westerners in Saigon had grown cynical, our American is a fresh, unused mind who doesn't know the difference between an ism and a kangaroo. He works not for the US government, but for one of those organizations that is supposedly providing relief aid, but may in fact be doing something else. Meanwhile, the American meets a local woman Phuong (Girogia Moll) and falls in love with her. This is a problem in that Phuong is Fowler's mistress; further complicating things is that Fowler has an estranged wife back home who isn't going to grant him a divorce.

Fowler covers the Communist insurgency as a reporter -- and keeps bumping into the American, who somehow seems to be everywhere and knows everyone or something like that. It leads Fowler to investigate, helped by Mr. Heng (Richard Loo) who knows something of what is going on, but leaves it to Fowler to fill in the blanks. Apparently one of the shipments the American's organization had sent was opened, revealing barrels of a plastic used for injection molding, which means the American is doing something far more serious.

I have to admit that I didn't care for The Quiet American as much as many other reviewers seem to. I found it talky with a whole lot of nothing going on, and I found the expats to be largely as tiresome as the ones in Soldier of Fortune which I watched not too long ago. The love triangle didn't particularly interest me, either. Audie Murphy definitely has a different role here than he essayed in most of his movies, and he does about as well as I think he could have considering that I didn't feel the screenplay helped his enigmatic character. Redgrave is better, but that shouldn't come as a surprise.

Some of the shooting was done in Vietnam -- the movie was filmed in 1957 and released a year later, so this is when South Vietnam was solidly pro-Western. That shooting is definitely a plus, although it would have been nice to see it in color. The rest of the movie was shot in Italy, which is why you have an Italian actress playing a Vietnamese woman.

Considering everybody else's glowing reviews, this is probably one you should watch for yourself. The DVD I bought isn't very expensive, so even if you don't like it, you're not out much money.

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.

Battle at Bloody Beach

A movie I watched off of my DVR not too long ago is coming up again on FXM Retro: Battle at Bloody Beach, at 3:00 AM and 12:30 PM tomorrow (July 12).

Audie Murphy stars as Craig Benson, an American who is helping the US military during World War II by running arms to the rebel groups in the Japanese-occupied Philippines; after all, the islands had been an American territory before Japan moved in at the end of 1941. The first person he meets is his American radio contact, Marty (Gary Crosby). Marty knows the lay of the land, so to say.

Although Benson is ostensibly there to deliver arms, he has another purpose: he's looking for his wife Ruth, from whom he was separated when the Japanese invaded. He never heard anything about her death, so he's certain she must still be alive, and he wants to find out her fate. The first person Marty leads him to is McKeever (Warren Mims), who doesn't know about Ruth's location but desperately wants those arms. However, Craig decides it would be too risky and continues on to the next rebels, led by one Julio Fontana (Alejandro Rey). Benson decides that these are a good group of rebels, but there's more to it than that. Craig finds that his wife Ruth (Dolores Michaels) is there, along with several other westerners looking for a way off the island, which Craig is certainly willing to give them.

Unfortunately, there's a problem. Ruth was under the impression that Craig had died during the Japanese invasion, so she's quite shocked to see him show up! Further complicating matters is the fact that, figuring she was a widow, she didn't really have a problem falling in love with Fontana and his noble purpose. Now that she discovers she's still married, there's an obvious problem. There's even more to it than that. Craig doesn't particularly care about the part of the war effort he's involved in; he's only running arms as a pretext to looking for his wife. Now that he's found her, he wants to take her, go home, and sit out the war to the greatest possible extent. Ruth, on the other hand, has come not only to have romantic feelings for Fontana; she's come to believe he's got a just cause, and may well be willing to stay behind for that cause.

Amidst all that tension, the Japanese attack. After all, they're the ones occupying the islands, you had to expect it for that reason, never mind the fact that you also need it for the movie plot. So now Craig has to get himself, his wife, and a bunch of even less fit westenerers down to the shore without getting them all killed by the Japanese. Good luck with that.

Battle at Bloody Beach is one of those movies that was made at Fox during the time period that the studio was having enormous problems getting the Taylor/Burton Cleopatra made. I've seen quite a few movies from Fox that time period that have an extremely low-budget look about them, and Battle at Bloody Beach is one of them. (Enjoy Catalina Island subbing in for the Philippines.) It's unfair to say, but that's a strike against it. It also doesn't help that the movie is fairly predictable and has a cop-out ending that's probably there to satisfy the Production Code. The performances are OK, but nothing trule memorable. Overall, it's not a failure, but it's not great, either.

Battle at Bloody Beach is, as far as I know, not available on DVD. Worse, the last time FXM showed it, they ran a panned-and-scanned print.