3:10 to Yuma
by Spencer Warren

Westerns, until the 1960s the most popular movie genre, are rare birds nowadays, but I regret to report that the new version of 3:10 to Yuma is one of the three worst Westerns I have ever seen. Comparison with the original 1957 classic tells one much of what is wrong with our 21 st century culture and society, as well as what distinguishes a superb adult director (Delmer Daves in 1957) from a juvenile hack (James Mangold in 2007).

The classic Western – before the 1960s - was a moral fable about the noble knight on horseback standing up for the right and true, fearless in his defense of civilization and womanhood which were settling the savage wilderness. At its peak in the 1950s, the adult Western often dramatized one man’s struggle with a momentous moral choice. In classics like Shane (1953), High Noon (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), and Seven Men from Now (1956), heroic, charismatic stars like Gary Cooper, James Stewart and Randolph Scott wrestled with and stoically pursued timeless moral choices of right and wrong in epic dramas whose impact often was magnified by grand landscapes seen in the new widescreen processes of the fifties. (See my article, “Rediscovering the Classic Western www.americanoutlook.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article_detail&id=3019.)

John Ford is esteemed as the greatest Westerns director (see my “John Wayne’s First 100 Years” http://acuf.org/issues/issue87/070707med.asp ). Not far behind from the 1950’s are Anthony Mann, who directed James Stewart in The Naked Spur and five other Westerns (e.g., The Far Country (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955)), Budd Boetticher, who directed Randolph Scott in Seven Men from Now and six other Westerns (e.g., The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome (1959) and Comanche Station (1960)) and Delmer Daves.

Daves directed the original 1957 version of 3:10 to Yuma, one of seven Westerns he made from 1954 to 1959, three starring Glenn Ford: Jubal (1956) and Cowboy (1958) in addition to Yuma. Based on a short story by the still active author Elmore Leonard, it is a modest tale of a poor homesteader, Dan Evans (Van Heflin), who agrees to take a captured outlaw, Ben Wade (Ford) from the Arizona town of Bisbee all the way to Yuma, and place him aboard the 3:10 train with its jail car bound for Yuma prison. Dan accompanies Wade alone, with the help of the town drunk, as part of a ruse whereby the sheriff and the rest of the posse try to divert Wade’s gang in the opposite direction. Despite having a wife and small son, Dan decides to risk his life at the hands of the notorious Wade gang because he is broke and desperately needs the $200 offered him by the stagecoach line, which has just lost its driver and valuable cargo to a hold-up by Wade’s gang.

The central scene in the film is the psychological confrontation between Dan and Wade in the hotel room in Contention, as the clock ticks on toward 3:10. Dan has smuggled Wade here and is guarding him in hiding with his rifle until the train arrives. Wade is the outlaw with the charm, who tempts Dan, if he will release him, with far more money – thousands of dollars -- than the $200 he will collect for delivering Wade to the train. The temptation becomes much stronger when Wade’s gang, having discovered the ruse, shows up in town and the others in the posse, including even the stageline owner, decide discretion is the better part of valor and run away. Other than his family, Dan doesn’t have much in life – except his honor and self-respect. He is fearful, he struggles with the choice staring at him in the person of Wade’s smiling Mephistopheles (chained to the bedpost), and he knows he probably will be killed. But he decides he has to keep his word; he cannot live on the bribe of a killer. This sad man also figures his family would be better off even if he is dead, because they would receive the $200 fee promised him.

This 3:10 to Yuma is known as the “poor man’s High Noon” because in both films the protagonist faces a stark moral choice (Marshal Will Kane [Gary Cooper], just married, has also just retired, but decides he has to stay and fight Miller and his gang, who are coming after him). Further, in both films the action builds up remorselessly to a train arrival, the noon train bringing Miller to Hadleyville, the 3:10 arriving in Contention and bound for Yuma. Some critics, myself included, prefer the lesser known Daves film because Daves is a more spontaneous, organic director, in contrast with Fred Zinnemann’s typically studied, rather obvious manner with High Noon.

From its peak in the 1950s, the Western succumbed to the revisionist deconstruction of the 1960s, led by Sergio Leone’s three Italian Westerns starring the second banana from TV’s Rawhide, Clint Eastwood. A European sensibility turned the moral strength of the classic Western inside out, as summed up in the title, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). In place of the polar shoot-out in the deserted street between good and evil (as in High Noon), we have a three-way duel in a cemetery between three useless characters. The Western has never been the same.

Naturally, an art form has to evolve, but that does not mean it gets better. In the late 1960s and 1970s the Western often became a vehicle for anti-American lefist radicals like Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)) and Arthur Penn (Little Big Man (1970)); or a joke for a generation that was too “grown-up” to take moral truth seriously (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)); or an orgiastic descent into buckets of bloodshed for the highly talented but degenerate Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch (1969)). Its numbers declined through the 1970s, until the vastly over-rated Clint Eastwood was all that was left, and he found himself wallowing in mindless, nihilistic (and poorly directed) despair in the anti-Western Unforgiven (1992). The Cultural Marxists who now run Hollywood and dominate culture of course embraced Eastwood now that he had become one of them, and bestowed on him the Best Picture Oscar. His film joined the equally nihistic, poorly directed Dances with Wolves (1990) as the only Western ever to win this award, along with Cimarron way back in 1931.

Despite a modest increase in their numbers after Unforgiven, (e.g., Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), Wyatt Earp(1994) and Tombstone(1993)), Westerns have now become few and far between – perhaps one every few years. The last one of note was the utterly unprofessional Open Range (2003), in which Kevin Costner’s poor directorial talent as displayed in Dances with Wolves somehow managed to drop even further – endless, hackneyed, meaningless shots of open Western space, with none of the passion of the fifties Westerns.

This brings us to the new edition of 3:10 to Yuma. Like Open Range and Eastwood’s Westerns, it takes a staple theme of the classic Western – and doesn’t know what to do with it. As with Open Range, there is no moral commitment like that invested by the filmmakers of yore; only a desire to make a movie – and a buck.

Let us review some of the changes in 2007 from half a century earlier. First, the level of violence. In 1957, the Wade gang holds up the stagecoach and tries to avoid bloodshed, but kills the driver when he pulls out his rifle. This is the only violence in the movie until they reach Contention. The 2007 version turns the stagecoach into a 19 th century version of a German Panzer tank (with a gatling gun). This permits lots of killing and mayhem, including a cold-blooded murder in graphic red by the psycho in a gang of psychos, Wade’s number 2, Charlie Prince (Ben Foster). For kicks, he just wounds the Pinkerton (Peter Fonda) with a shot in his stomach, hoping to leave him to bleed to death out alone in the wild. Actually, this is the second violent scene. The film begins with the burning of Dan Evans’s (Christian Bale) barn by the big landowner in the area.

Judging by this film, the writers and the director, one James Mangold, are sadists.

Mangold treats those not averting their eyes to a big close-up of the Pinkerton’s open stomach wound as the town veterinarian removes the bullet. Later, the sheriff tortures Ben Wade (Russell Crowe). Wade murders a couple of his captors on the way to Contention. Prince brags how they once blew up a train filled with miners, he guns down in cold blood the Contention sheriff and his deputies, shoots up Contention, killing many in the street, and he gleefully burns alive another of his victims. Prince is violent enough for Al Qaeda, except he might scare off even that lunatic band of cutthroats. It seems the “filmmakers” first decided how much violence they could cram into the simple, modest 1957 story, and then added padding afterward. If the ratings system had any meaning, children and teenagers would not be allowed in, even with their parents. But the film is rated R.

The second change features the heavy hand of Political Correctness (more accurately termed Cultural, or neo-, Marxism). As noted above, Mangold adds a ruthless landowner whose henchmen burn Dan’s farm. The simple stageline owner of 1957, Butterfield, is now the railroad manager, who joins the ruthless landowner as another fire-breathing capitalist exploiter. And they are joined by – horrors – a Pinkerton! Worse, he also is a bounty hunter. The Pinkerton, we learn from Wade, once murdered three-year-old Apache children during an operation to safeguard white settlers. You see, dear readers, no one is better than anyone else. We must never be judgmental and it is discrimination to uphold moral standards, as the left never ceases to insist. (Remember Monica? Homosexual “marriage”?)

The third change is the addition of an older son for Dan, a 14-year-old who not only is openly disrespectful, but contemptuous, of his father. When Wade turns up a prisoner at their cabin, the wise-guy kid now has someone to admire. (Mangold’s reaction shots to show the boy’s admiration are beyond triteness, they are so obvious.) At the end the son learns better, but like everything in this film, his character is devoid of subtlety.

Now let us compare two scenes from the two films; they serve to illustrate what makes a good director as opposed to a hack. In the first, Wade makes a one night conquest of the female barmaid in Bisbee, where his gang has stopped after the robbery; this dalliance leads to his capture. In 2007, Wade has his hands on the girl’s neck within 60 seconds, then we see them in her room the morning after. By contrast, the seduction scene in 1957 is a little gem, one of so many from that period that illustrate true eroticism comes from restraint and allusion: less is more. There is extended, suggestive banter between Wade and the girl (Felicia Farr, the future Mrs. Jack Lemmon); we learn how lonely and desolate her life is, trapped in the middle of nowhere. Finally, they disappear behind a curtain to the back room, and the scene ends. Later, when Wade is removed by the posse in a stagecoach, the girl looks up at him forlornly; she has only two scenes, but we know her as a fully formed, sad character.

In the second scene, Wade has secretly been removed from the stagecoach and brought to Dan’s farm. Handcuffed, he joins the family at dinner. Mangold does nothing with this scene, save the above mentioned trite reaction close-ups of Dan’s older boy to show his admiration of Wade. Daves, however, uses this scene to set the context of Dan’s life, so we can understand why he agrees to escort Wade to the train. We see the toll Dan’s problems have taken on his loving wife (Leora Dana), and come to understand why Dan feels, in his depressed state, she might be better off with him dead and the $200 in her hands.

In the 2007 version, we don’t know much about the characters and feel even less about them because they are often disembodied heads in extreme close-up. Mangold relies so much on this contemporary manner of direction (perhaps derived from TV) that he gives no exposition. Evidently, he does not know how to stage a scene setting the characters in context, in full figures interacting in time and space. He is so lacking in subtlety that he relies on these close-ups to convey character, rather than dialogue, movement or acting. At times one feels the actors (their heads at least) are sitting in one’s lap. These pointless shots and the explosive sound effects of the frequent gunfire make this film a typical contemporary assault on the senses of the audience. (Other trite, pointless shots are Mangold’s frequent close-ups of horses’ hooves to begin a riding sequence; one never sees this with the master directors noted above.)

As a result of Mangold’s literal in-our face direction, the viewer cannot relate to the barmaid or to Alice Evans. Russell Crowe is a superb actor, but due to the clipped script and lack of scenic development he is not effective as Wade, except perhaps at the end. He also is bereft of the charm Glenn Ford brings to the part, which makes the grudging personal interaction between Wade and Evans credible; it is not credible in the 2007 film. As Dan Evans, Christian Bales is hard to see much of the time under his broad-brimmed hat and heavy stubble. Van Heflin, one of the great actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, doesn’t need the contrived gimpy leg sported by Bales to convey Dan’s defeats in life. He uses his bearing, his voice and manner of speaking – acted out in fully formed scenes, not Mangold’s clipped close-ups. (To show what a wonderful actor Heflin was, the next year he played a manly, swaggering cattle baron in one of the Western’s great performances, as Lee Hackett in Gunman’s Walk, which ends with one of the genre’s most overpowering cathartic moral climaxes.) Heflin had something that Crowe has, but which Bales lacks: screen presence.

Roger Ebert, in his laudatory review (he thinks this film follows in the tradition of the classic Westerns), wrote that the 2007 stars are superior to Heflin and Ford. He may have in mind that in films today actors show more id. But in 1957 actors had to use more subtlety because at that time American society was still ruled not by “freedom,” but by public decency in the form of self-restraint, right and wrong, and moral limits. The focus was on dramatizing a moral story, not grossing out an immature audience with vivid depictions of evil, violent men. Mangold’s sadism swamps the moral heart of the story, in which he evidently has little interest – it clearly is not what attracted him to the subject.

A final difference between the two versions is that the 2007 film makes no use of landscape and the photography is purely functional. Illustrating again the subtlety and intelligence of older movies, the 1957’s black and white photography has an unusual bleak quality, as if bleached, to help convey the disappointing, hard, drought-stricken life led by Dan Evans. This visual style is complemented by the understated musical score of the accomplished George Duning. The 2007 film’s music track sounds like it was lifted from a TV show.

The one part where the new version might do better is the ending, which arguably is the one weak part of the 1957 film. But the new version of 3:10 to Yuma has no organic life of its own because Mangold and company have no belief in the tale. All they seem to know is the excess, crudeness, and exploitation that are so often characteristic of much of our ever declining, nihilistic culture. Their film is one of the three worst Westerns I have ever seen (along with Open Range and Wyatt Earp, both starring the hapless Kevin Costner).

Let me end, however, on a positive note. Readers have all the wonderful Delmer Daves Westerns to discover. Jubal is a variation on Shakespeare’s Othello, as Ernest Borgnine’s good-hearted rancher is turned against his loyal foreman, Glenn Ford, by his treacherous wife. In an inspiring scene so typical of pre-sixties movies, Ford, wounded and the target of a lynch mob on horseback, has been taken in by a wagon train of religious settlers whom he had earlier rescued from danger. One settler demands of the elder that they send Ford away, because they want “peace.” To which the elder (a tall, distinguished actor and one-time opera star often cast by Daves, Basil Ruysdael) replies: “There are two kinds of peace. The head in the sand kind of peace. Or the peace that comes from loving thy neighbor, and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Hearing this, most of the others call out they want to give refuge to Ford. This scene of moral resolution, filmed in a huge Western meadow, is given more magnitude by being framed against a vast blue sky and imposing mountains, in glorious wide-screen CinemaScope. This is the ‘50s Western at its best.

Cowboy (1958) is Jack Lemmon’s only Western. Based on the real-life memoir by one Frank Harris, Lemmon plays a dude Chicago hotel clerk who joins Glenn Ford’s cattle drive in search of his Mexican girlfriend. Along the way, he observes the hard-bitten life of the real cowboy and himself learns to be a man. Another evocative musical score by George Duning.

Daves, a well-educated man (a Stanford Law graduate, believe it or not) who also wrote most of his scripts, grappled in several of his films with the Indian question. But unlike the anti-American ideologues Altman and Penn, noted earlier, he presents a nuanced, understanding picture. In 1950 he directed one of the first Westerns that showed whites in the wrong vis-à-vis Indians, Broken Arrow, with James Stewart. By the mid-fifties, when he had perfected his own distinctive, exciting visual style (he excelled at building up thrilling climaxes, as in Jubal and The Hanging Tree (1959)), he returned to the subject in Drum Beat (1954) and The Last Wagon (1956). Drum Beat dramatizes the Modoc War in Oregon, 1872-3, with Alan Ladd as a scout trying to mediate the conflict with the Indian leader played by the young Charles Bronson. In The Last Wagon, Richard Widmark is a suspected “half-breed” who leads Felicia Farr and the other survivors of an Indian massacre to safety through Indian country. In both films Daves portrays the complex inter-action of Indian savagery and white prejudice.

Daves’s masterpiece is his last Western, and one of Gary Cooper’s last, The Hanging Tree (1959). Cooper is Doc Frail, an aloof, feared doctor in a mining community, whose troublemaker is George C. Scott (in his film debut). Frail heals a girl blinded in a stagecoach hold-up (Maria Schell), but turns his back on her gratitude. Always dressed in black, we learn he is a silent penitent. We learn the reason why in a vintage Daves moral, cathartic climax, built like a great orchestra crescendo, as Frail is dragged by Scott’s howling mob to the hanging tree, where only the girl whose love he spurned can save his life.

Needless to say, one can hardly write about contemporary films in such terms. So the one value of the new version of 3:10 to Yuma is that it can raise appreciation of the great Delmer Daves and other filmmakers like him, from a bygone era, when America was a much more conservative country than today.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline’s movie critic