The traditional Hollywood Western arguably reached its peak in the 1950s, the decade that saw the release of classics likeHigh Noon,Shane,Rio Bravo,andThe Searchers, movies that have entered the cinema canon. Changes would soon come, as cultural shifts rendered Hollywood traditionalism obsolete, opening the door for the genre reinventions of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and others.
Everyone knowsthe famous 1950s Westernsof John Ford, George Stevens and Howard Hawks.But the decade featured plenty of other, less-heralded examples of the genre, from an array of directors like Samuel Fuller, Robert Aldrich, and Budd Boetticher, whose off-beat works inspired later cinematic individualists like Leone and Peckinpah, and eventually Quentin Tarantino.
Vincent Price will forever be known as a horror icon, but like most working actors of his era, he did more than his fair share of Westerns. Based on the real-life case of a master forger who attempted to steal the territory of Arizona using doctored documents and a peasant girl passed off as nobility,Baron of Arizonamakes perfect use of Price’s hamminess, casting him as a brazenly charismatic scam artist.
Samuel Fuller would later be hailed as one of the great maverick film directors. Just his second film,Baron of Arizonasees him already establishing some of his trademarks, including his fascination with brash, non-conformist characters, and love for sensationalistic material. His offbeat sensibilities pump life into what could’ve been a drearily average Western melodrama.
High Noon’s storyof a sheriff standing alone against a group of bloodthirsty gunmen is famous for taking on McCarthyism via thinly-veiled allegory.Silver Lodedid the same thing two years later, but removed most of the veil. Dan Duryea’s villain, a marshal who rides into town to arrest respected citizen John Payne for murder, is named “McCarty,” in case there was doubt about the film’s intentions.
Martin Scorsese praisedSilver Lodein his documentaryA Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Films
ButSilver Lodehas a more complex message than simple anti-McCarthyism. The marshal’s lies about Payne gradually convince the townspeople that he’s guilty, until Payne’s fiancée Lizabeth Scott saves him not with a gunshot as inHigh Noon, but with a fake telegram that ostensibly proves the marshal is himself a fraud. In this subversive Western, the duel is not between gunslingers wielding pistols, but desperate people armed with the ruthlessness to obliterate the truth in the name of their cause.High Noon’s townsfolk are mere cowards; inSilver Lode, they’re dangerously gullible, ignorant, and corruptible.
Kirk Douglas’ first Western is far from his best-known. Raoul Walsh directs the story of a marshal forced into protecting an accused killer from an enraged posse bent on dispensing frontier justice. As he did with James Cagney’s psychotic gangster inWhite Heat, Walsh penetrates beneath the genre’s surface,exploring the tortured psychology of Douglas’ character, and what motivates him to place duty above all else, even his life.
Starring alongside Douglas is prolific character actor Walter Brennan, who became famous for playing comic relief sidekicks to the likes of Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, but here gets to play a hardcore bad guy.
7Day of the Outlaw
Cold Westerns Are Their Own Genre
56 years before Quentin Tarantino made his own cold WesternThe Hateful Eight, Andre de Toth directed one of the sub-genre’s best examples, a bone-chillingly bleak square-off between Robert Ryan’s aggrieved rancher and Burl Ives’ ruthless homesteader, set in the aptly-named town of Bitters, Wyoming.
Day of the Outlawuses the windswept Wyoming mountains to similar effect, making frontier life look so thoroughly miserable, it seems a wonder anyone lived long enough to establish civilization.
Typical Westerns draw much of their metaphorical punch from the arid desolation of their desert settings (or the grandeur of their vistas, as in John Ford’s more romanticized movies).Day of the Outlawuses the windswept Wyoming mountains to similar effect, making frontier life look so thoroughly miserable, it seems a wonder anyone lived long enough to establish civilization.
Randolph Scott was the blank slate of Western stars. Most directors used him to convey the blandest sort of moral uprightness, and then there was Tarantino fave Budd Boetticher, who in the course of their eight movies together, found in Scott the perfect embodiment of unspoken inner-conflict.
Decision At Sundowncasts Scott as a man on a quest for vengeance, whose single-mindedness seems scary but maybe noble, until the rug is pulled out from under him, and the viewer, in a great reveal that drives home how revenge-lust is just narcissism.High Noonsaw frontier people as cowards in need of saving, butDecision At Sundowngives the civilized people ultimate agency,while the presumptive hero is outed as delusional, and cast out for being an anti-democratic, de-civilizing force.
Jimmy Stewart was the only actor earnest enough to sell Capra’sMr. Smith Goes to Washington. Beginning withWinchester ‘73, the Oscar-winner embarked on a collaborationwith hard-bitten B-movie director Anthony Mann, that found Stewart leaving behind his Mr. Smith boyishness altogether, and doubling-down on the world-weary quality he had begun displaying in Capra’sIt’s a Wonderful Life,unleashing the Hard Jimmy Stewart of the 1950s (before he evolved again into a corny grandpa).
Hard Jimmy Stewart might be a tough hang for those who only know the actor as George Bailey. Mann, like Hitchcock, saw in the star a crazed quality that could easily read as an obsessive sense of purpose. As the titular Man from Laramie, Stewart must dodge attacks from all sides, in the name of a cause almost righteous enough to justify his near-suicidal zeal.
AnotherHigh Noon-like portrait of a lone man standing up against the unscrupulously violent, but this time, instead of a gun, he’s armed with only a whaling harpoon (a weapon symbolic of his otherness). The sight of a harpoon-wielding Sterling Hayden facing off against a one-handed gunslinger is an oddity fully worthy of the ever-unique Joseph H. Lewis, director of the cult classic noirGun Crazy.
Terror in a Texas Townis reputed to have been shot in 10 days on a budget of $80,000
Terror in a Texas Townis thematically an anti-blacklist movie (that also has something to say about America’s anti-immigrant attitudes),but it was also anti-blacklist in other, more tangible ways, being written by Dalton Trumbo, and starring Hayden, both of whom had run afoul of HUAC’s witch hunters. Lewis was ready to retire by the time he made this, so he didn’t care about the hit his reputation might take by working with blacklisted talent.
They both started in movies in Germany during the silent days, so it’s a little surprising that Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich never worked together until 1952’sRancho Notorious. It’s a memorable sole collaboration, perfectly casting Dietrich as a mysterious ranch owner, who falls for hard-bitten Arthur Kennedy, not knowing his advances are insincere, and that he’s just after info about the man who raped and killed his fianceé.
It’s easy enough to imagine the perfectly fine work this Daniel Taradash-written movie could’ve been, if not for the Lang directorial touch, which elevates it to classic status. Lang’s non-noirs tend to be underrated, butRancho Notoriousis basically a noir thriller that happens to have a Western setting, and should properly be regarded as one of his most effective suspense exercises.
Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper headline a buddy Western where the two ostensible buddies don’t really like each other, essentially makingVera Cruza Bob-and-BingRoadmovie without the jokes (the real joke fueling those movies was the secret hatred the seemingly breezy main characters had for each other).
Robert Aldrich couldn’t get away with the level of violence Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah would later reach, but he could muddy up the morality in the manner of those later directors,both of whom were clearly influenced byVera Cruz. The film still belongs firmly to the era of traditional Westerns, which started in the silent days, and hit its peak in the late ‘50s, but points the way toward a future dominated by Spaghetti Western aesthetics, revisionist attitudes, and increasingly explicit brutality.
AFI’s list of the 10 greatest Westerns is headed up by three titles released in the 1950s:The Searchers,High Noon, andShane. Missing entirely from this list isthe actual best Western of the decade, Sam Fuller’sForty Guns,a movie so unhinged that, if it didn’t inspire Russ Meyer, it should have.
Fuller’sForty Gunsscript synthesizes all his disreputable, pulpy tendencies into something like a perfect potboiler, and then there are the movie-nerd shots, the most memorable being a POV shot down a rifled gun-barrel, a la James Bond.Barbara Stanwyck’s whip-wielding Jessica Drummondis at least a cousin to Joan Crawford’s Vienna fromJohnny Guitar, if not a sister-in-arms. Fuller’s off-the-wall perversity perhaps feels crude alongside the vaunted John Ford lyricism, but it also makes hisForty Gunsfeel fresher and more daring than anything by the sainted filmmaker behind the staid, overratedSearchers.
