Run of the Arrow

In addition to foreign films, I feel like I've got a somewhat disproportionate number of westerns sitting on my DVR waiting for me to watch and review them before they expire. One of those movies that I hadn't heard of before the last time it showed up on TCM was Run of the Arrow.

The movie opens with something that's a looming theme in quite a few Hollywood westerns, the US Civil War. Specifically, the movie informs us it's the last day of the war. Virginian O'Meara (Rod Steiger) shoots Union Army lieutenant Driscoll (Ralph Meeker), although Driscoll survives. O'Meara takes Driscoll to where General Lee is, although he learns that Lee is in the process of surrendering, thereby ending the war. O'Meara had been a farmer on one of those hardscrabble farms, so on returning home to his mother, there's not much of a life for such a defeated Confederate soldier to return home to. There's that frontier out west, of course, where a man can start life fresh, so O'Meara decides he's going to do just that.

Some time later, in a part of the west that still has more natives than Americans, O'Meara meets one of the natives, an elderly and dying Sioux, Walking Coyote (Jay C. Flippen, yes, playing a native American). The two, however, meet a band from a different sub-tribe of the Sioux, who threaten to kill the two men. Walking Coyote, being Sioux, knows the "Run of the Arrow", which involves running a gauntlet of men trying to shoot arrows at you. If you survive the gauntlet, you're basically free, or some such.

O'Meara survives and winds up with yet another sub-tribe of the Sioux, the Lakota, headed by Blue Buffalo (Charles Bronson). O'Meara falls in love with one of the women who tends to the wounds, and decides he wants to become a member of the tribe, largely because the Lakota also understand that the Americans are moving west and destroying another people's way of life much the same way that O'Meara thinks the northerners destroyed the southern way of life in the recently ended civil war.

Soon enough, the Americans do come, in the form of Capt. Clark (Brian Keith) and his cavalry who have been given the task of finding a suitable location to build their new fort. The Sioux have negotiated that it be built on land that's going to interfere less with their traditional hunting grounds, and give O'Meara the job of playing scout to the cavalry since he's got such a good command of English. And wouldn't you know it, but serving under Capt. Clark is... Lt. Driscoll!

O'Meara sees all of this as his chance to get back at the Americans for what they did to Virginia, while there are also a lot of US Army men who don't care for the Indians. As is usually the case in these movies, the treaty gets violated, and there's a decisive battle between the US Army and the Indians.

Run of the Arrow was made at RKO near the end of the studio's existence, so it has the feel of a movie that doesn't really have the budget it should have had. (At least the print TCM ran is much better looking than the one they run for Glory which is from a similar point in RKO's death throes.) The movie has an interesting premise, although it feels to me like it suffers from quite a bit of implausibility. Then again, it was directed by Sam Fuller, so one should expect it to rebel against the traditional constraints of Hollywood's view of what America should become: the idea of O'Meara's redemption feels like it's a metaphor for the post-Red Scare era of the 1950s.

Ultimately, while I find Run of the Arrow a bit uneven, I think it's got more pluses than minuses.

I Shot Jesse James

Some time back I recorded I Shot Jesse James, and recently got around to watching it. It's available on DVD on an Eclipse Series set from Criterion along with the excellent The Baron of Arizona, should you wish to watch for yourself.

As you may recall from your history, or if you've watched enough westerns, the notorious outlaw Jesse James was shot and killed in 1882 by the coward Robert Ford.



Jesse James, in our movie, is played by Reed Hadley, the stentorian actor who provided narration for several of Fox's 1940s docudramas. By the time the movie starts, not long before he's killed, he's in hiding in St. Joseph, MO, together with his wife Zee (Barbara Woodell) and the Ford brothers, Charles (Tommy Noonan) and Robert (John Ireland, who is only third-billed which is a bit surprising considering he's the main character). Zee is worried about her husband, and Robert has worries of his own.

He's got a sweetheart in Cynthy (Barbara Britton), an actress for producer Harry Kane (J. Edward Bromberg), who has been traveling from town to town performing. She's back in St. Joseph, and Robert would like to marry her, but as an outlaw, so he'd never be free to settle down. And not that Cynthy would want to marry an outlaw anyway. There's another man, a failed silver prospector named John Kelley (Preston Foster), who likes Cynthy, but for the time being that may be just a platonic relationship.

And then Robert learns of an offer. The Governor of Missouri has offered an amnesty to the person who brings Jesse James in, alive or dead. That, and a $10,000 reward, which would be more than enough to buy some land and settle down with Cynthy. Now, there's no way Jesse is ever going to give himself up to the authorities to face trial, so Robert does something that seems logical to him: he shoots Jesse in the back.

However, the authorities renege on the reward, so while Robert gets his amnesty, he only gets $500. Worse, he gains notoriety for having killed Jesse James, and not in a good way. Everybody sees him, and more or less shuns him. So the only thing he can do is join Kane's theater troupe and do a special scene on how James was killed. You'd think Ford would embellish this to not make himself look like a coward, but one guesses everybody knew what happened.

Thankfully, there's a silver rush in Colorado, so Robert goes there to try to shake his past, as well as to make his fortune so that he can afford to marry Cynthy. While in Colorado he meets Kelley again, and helps a drunk prospector who actually has struck silver, so that drunk lets Robert co-work the claim in order to earn his money to be able to mary Cynthy. The problem is, Cynthy may not want to marry him....

This was the first feature film directed by Samuel Fuller, who did things his way and has a fairly distinctive style. That makes I Shot Jesse James interesting, and the sort of movie that people are going to praise a little more than it deserves. It's more than good enough, but I also found it not quite as good as some of Fuller's later work. Then again, I saw it after seeing something like Gregory Peck's The Gunfighter which explores many of the same themes and had a big studio behind it; and after a fair number of Fuller's other movies, so I may have had too high of an expectation for it.

It's unfortunate that the Eclipse set with I Shot Jesse James only has three movies on it and is a bit pricier (the three Eclipse sets I've picked up have more films and cost less), because all three of the movies on the set deserve to be better known.