The Texas Rangers (1936)

In honor of the Texas Rangers making their second World Series appearance in a row (Go Rangers), I look at the epic western “The Texas Rangers.”

Director King Vidor was one of the cinema’s great visual artists. Just think about some of the memorable imagery of “The Big Parade” (1925), “The Crowd” (1928), “Our Daily Bread” (1934) or “The Fountainhead” (1948), among many others.

That visual eye is obvious in “The Texas Rangers” (1936) a big-budget western from Paramount. Vidor, a Texas native, co-wrote the script based, supposedly, on incidents from Texas Rangers history. That history book must have been written by a Hollywood screenwriter as “The Texas Rangers” is pure Hollywood hokum.

But hokum done in the best Hollywood tradition, and I don’t mean to use hokum in a pejorative sense. But was the following really drawn from Texas Rangers history?

A trio of outlaws are robbing stagecoaches in Texas. They are Jim Hawkins (Fred MacMurray), Wahoo Jones (Jack Oakie) and Sam “Polka Dot” McGee (Lloyd Nolan). Before their next holdup, they find out the stagecoach contains a Texas Ranger, a new breed of lawman determined to stamp out lawlessness.

Hawkins and Jones make their way to a Ranger station and enlist with the local Ranger troop, under the command of Major Bailey (Edward Ellis).Of course, the Major has to have a beautiful daughter living with him, Amanda (Jean Parker).

Amanda and Jim take to each other immediately, even though Jim and Wahoo go forward with their plan to send messages to McGee about Ranger plans to stop the bandits. Learning the Rangers plans means McGee can plan other robberies without fear of getting caught.

But the two outlaws eventually learn to like the right side of the law and the comradeship of the Rangers. They stay with the Rangers but McGee, now known as the Polka Dot Bandit due to his polka dot scarf, has a new gang and steps up his campaign of robbing and terrorizing the populace. Guess who gets assigned the case of bringing The Polka Dot Bandit to justice?

A fairly trite story to be sure, but Vidor’s eye is as magnificent as ever. This is no back lot evocation of Texas. Rather Vidor and crew went to New Mexico to film their exteriors and the film’s very lavish action sequences. (In that pre-Internet era, a movie called “The Texas Rangers” could be filmed in New Mexico and not raise a ruckus.)

Vidor does a fine job of framing individual characters against the majestic landscapes, which look like they could swallow a man whole.

The movie is remembered for two sequences. The first is the film’s big action set piece, a terrifically exciting clash between the Rangers and the Apaches. After a fierce fight on the plains, the Apaches cleverly maneuver the surviving Rangers to hide behind some rocks on the sides of the hills. With the Rangers pinned down and surrounded by the Apaches, another group of Apaches above push huge boulders down the hill toward the trapped Rangers. The sound effects here are really impressive, as the rocks sound like giant roaring monsters racing towards the helpless Rangers. (The film earned its sole Oscar nomination for Best Sound).

I can only imagine how many kids were talking about this sequence in school the next day. Major Bailey says something like, “Only an Indian would think of a trick like that”, but I’m sure the kids in the schoolyard were saying, “That was pretty smart strategy on the part of the Indians.”

The other famous scene takes place during a dialogue scene between Nolan and Oakie, where Nolan, feigning friendship and good cheer, pulls a gun out and under the table shoots his friend Oakie in the belly.

The cast can’t be beat. It’s an early role for MacMurray but he already possessed that laid-back charm which made him a favorite with audiences for several decades. Oakie is more subdued than usual, and any movie with Lloyd Nolan in it is an automatic watch. I do prefer him as the hero, or as a good bad man. Here he’s an out and out bad guy.

At the end, MacMurray and Nolan face off in gunfight and chase each other through some rock formations. The sequence looks ahead to Anthony Mann’s famous climaxes in such classics as “Winchester 73” (1950) and “The Naked Spur” (1953). As impressive as some of the Hollywood backlots are, even Hollywood’s ace production designers would be hard pressed to come up with as impressive rock formations and gullies on display here.

Paramount re-made “The Texas Rangers” in Technicolor as “Streets of Laredo” (1949) with William Holden, William Bendix and Macdonald Carey in the MacMurray, Oakie and Nolan roles, respectively. I’ve never seen it, but it’s generally considered an inferior remake. Still, its one of those maddeningly elusive Paramount titles I hope turns up on TCM.

“The Texas Rangers” was a big hit with 1936 audiences, though not as big as Paramount’s other “A” western that year, DeMille’s “The Plainsman” with Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as the loveliest Calamity Jane imaginable. But I think the Rangers trumps the DeMille, since DeMille’s film features too many action scenes shot on soundstages. Looking at the two, the Vidor is, visually, by far the more spectacular.

“A” westerns were not really common in the 1930s. There were a few, but not many. Universal lost a small fortune with “Sutter’s Gold” (1936) and M-G-M and William Wellman delivered a rather ho-hum “Robin Hood of El Dorado” (1936). (Wow, 1936 was quite the year for big budget westerns).

Paramount delivered another “A” western the following year with “Wells Fargo” with Joel McCrea and Frances Dee. I’ve never seen that one but always wanted to.

It would take the magic movie year of 1939 for the major studios, by some form of cinematic mental telepathy, to release a remarkable series of big budget westerns to critical and commercial success. Warner Bros. gave us “Dodge City” and “The Oklahoma Kid”; Universal happily gave the world “Destry Rides Again”; Paramount rode the rails of success with DeMille’s “Union Pacific”; 20th Century Fox delivered the biggest hit of them all in “Jesse James” with Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda. Even Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures delivered a very respectable and fairly expensive film about Sam Houston called “Man of Conquest.” The adult western would come to fruition that year with John Ford’s classic “Stagecoach.”

These films carried the western as a reputable and profitable genre for decades to follow.

“The Texas Rangers” is available on DVD in a beautiful transfer in a four pack of westerns including “Canyon Passage” (1946) with Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward; Raoul Walsh’s “The Lawless Breed” (1953) with Rock Hudson and Julia Adams; and “Kansas Raiders” (1950) with Audie Murphy and Brian Donlevy. I purchased it for $5 at Big Lots.

And for what it’s worth, I’m picking the Rangers over the Cardinals in six games.

Brief Reviews

THE SCARLET EMPRESS (1934) ***½
The director Josef von Sternberg was hardly a modest man. In the 1967 BBC documentary The World of Josef von Sternberg, included on the Criterion DVD of The Scarlet Empress, he claimed total creative authorship of his movies—not only writing and direction, but also production, lighting and photography, and editing, whether he was credited with these in the completed film or not. It's little wonder then that the American auteurist Andrew Sarris named von Sternberg one of his "pantheon directors," praising his mastery of visual technique and describing him as "a lyricist of light and shadow." The Scarlet Empress is a mind-bogglingly baroque surfeit of visual detail, by turns ravishingly beautiful, lushly decorative, and hauntingly bizarre. Many scenes contain as much visual embellishment—in set decoration, props, costumes, and human spectacle—as I've ever seen in one movie. And still von Sternberg manages to arrange all these objects (including the actors, whom he refers to in the documentary as "marionettes") in these elaborate settings with clarity and purpose. Of the great directors, perhaps only Eisenstein, Kurosawa, and Orson Welles were as skillful as von Sternberg at organizing objects within the frame to create mood and emphasis.

In The Scarlet Empress, Marlene Dietrich, who made seven movies with von Sternberg, plays the lead role, Catherine the Great of Russia. She is required to transform from a young innocent—engaged through an arranged marriage to the future Tsar Peter III (Sam Jaffe), a childish madman—into a mature woman who uses sexual favors to engineer his assassination and seize the throne. (The historical accuracy of this is debatable.) She is quite convincing as she proceeds from naiveté to a kind of survivalist acceptance of her situation and finally, after a binge of sexual libertinism, to the decision to take control of events. Is she a cunning schemer, or does she truly want to rescue the Russian people from the insane tyranny of her husband? Von Sternberg keeps the answer ambiguous.

Jaffe, with his goofy buck-toothed grin and wide-eyed leer, is appropriately demented. And Louise Dresser turns in a broad semi-comic performance as Peter's dissolute and manipulative aunt, the Empress Elizabeth. Still, the strong impression these performers make pales beside the one von Sternberg makes as the absolute, perfectionist master of his startling cinematic vision.

H. M. PULHAM, ESQ. (1941) ***½
King Vidor directed all or part of 67 pictures between 1913 and 1980, more than half of them silent. Along with some bona fide classics, he also directed two of the worst movies I've ever seen, Duel in the Sun (1946) and The Fountainhead (1949), so I approached this movie with some trepidation. The story of a privileged member of a rich Boston society family from birth to middle age, the movie opens with a striking, nearly silent sequence showing Pulham's (Robert Young) morning routine—from waking up to arriving at his law office at exactly 9:00 a.m.—that within just a few minutes plainly establishes the regimented sterility of his life. The rest of the movie is structured as an alternately serious and whimsical stream-of-consciousness narrative that moves between scenes of the present and the past as Pulham recalls his entire life from birth to the present.

As I watched, I was amazed at the fluidity of the direction and at how natural Vidor made the rather literary structure of the movie seem. Young, with his subdued and rather bland screen presence, was ideally cast in the title role. The most interesting parts of the movie are those that deal with Pulham's life in New York City immediately after World War I working as a copywriter in an ad agency. In doing this, he is defying his father (Charles Coburn), who wants him to come home and join the family law firm. For a while it appears that Pulham will escape the stultifyingly conformist future that awaits him in Boston, especially after he begins a romance with a fellow copywriter, Marvin Myles Ransome (Hedy Lamarr), an independent-minded woman who encourages him to break away from the stifling traditions of his class and heritage. Lamarr's freethinking character is one of the best things in the movie. She seems surprisingly modern, wanting a career and her own life over marriage and a family, and Lamarr gives an excellent performance. But it is precisely her (for the time) unconventional values, combined with circumstances which force Pulham to return to Boston and his family, that ultimately separate them.

The ending is a bit pat—and with its message that you can't escape your background, a bit disturbing in its complacency—but the rest of the movie is delightful, a felicitous mixture of excellent acting, writing, photography (by Ray June) and editing, with Vidor's assured direction holding it all together.

DOWNSTAIRS (1932) ***½
I must confess to having a fairly low tolerance for movies of the early 1930's. Even the most highly touted of them often disappoint me. Downstairs, though, proved to be a pleasing exception. It stars John Gilbert, who wrote the story himself, and the whole movie is built around his character.

The movie opens at the Mitteleuropean estate of a baron whose head butler Albert (Paul Lukas) is being married to Anna (Virginia Bruce), the personal maid of the baroness. Into the festivities walks Gilbert as Karl Schneider, the new chauffeur. Karl is an unrepentant cad who immediately proceeds to charm, lie, blackmail, and seduce his way into a position of power and influence both upstairs and downstairs, managing to outwit and outmaneuver everyone who tries to expose him. In particular he sets his sights on the luscious but innocent Anna. After the stuffy Albert discovers that Karl has indeed seduced her, Anna looses an astonishingly frank tirade that not only makes clear that Karl's power over women lies in his sexual prowess, but also strongly asserts the desire of women to enjoy sex as much as men do and be treated by men as equal sexual beings.

Besides its surprisingly modern sexual attitudes, Downstairs has several other things going for it: an amusing take on amorality among the rich, its satirical mockery of the class system, and very entertaining supporting performances by Reginald Owen as the "silly ass" baron and Olga Baclanova (Freaks) as the conniving baroness. Monta Bell, who did such a great job on the Norma Shearer silent Lady of the Night (1925), directs with great seriocomic flair and provides some nice auteurish visual touches, including those in the scene where Karl seduces Anna, and later when he dissolves from the sleeping Anna to the next scene with Karl so slowly that for a few moments Karl seems to be a hazy dream image hovering over her bed. This movie and Queen Christina, which Gilbert made the next year with Garbo, should put to rest in any viewer's mind the notion that Gilbert's career ended because he was unsuited to sound films.

TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH (1949) ****
I'm not a big fan of war movies. Nor am I a big fan of Gregory Peck, whose performances often strike me as wooden and unengaging. Yet I found both this movie and Peck's performance in the lead role outstanding. In Twelve O'Clock High the emphasis is not on combat, but on psychology and characterization. In England in 1942, the first American Army Air Force crews have arrived and are starting the first daytime bombing raids over Europe. (The British RAF flew only nighttime raids.) The number of squadrons is small and support is minimal. Although the war planners are convinced that in time this strategy will prove the decisive factor in winning the war in Europe, at the moment the missions are having little real effect. Losses of aircraft and crews are high, understandably leading to great stress and low morale among both men and officers. One bomber squadron, based at Archbury, in particular is experiencing problems, and General Savage (Peck) is assigned to replace his good friend Col. Davenport (Gary Merrill) as commanding officer of the squadron.

In early scenes Savage has been established as a nice guy but a shrewd analyst who believes that the problem with Davenport is that he has grown too close to his men and lost his objectivity. So when Savage arrives at Archbury and immediately begins behaving like a cold martinet, we know that this is a role he is playing, a psychological ploy devised to instill the spirit of selflessness and teamwork among his fliers. "Consider yourselves already dead and you won't have to be afraid of it happening," he tells them at his first briefing. The initial response is not good, especially after his unsympathetic treatment of a popular navigator results in his suicide. But Savage finds one man, the deskbound Maj. Stovall (Dean Jagger, in an Oscar-winning performance), who understands his tactics and is willing to help him. Slowly his efforts pay off and the squadron comes into shape. It is only towards the end of the movie that we actually go on a bombing mission, with Gen. Savage leading the formation, in an exciting and deeply affecting sequence.

The treatment of the characters and situations by director Henry King is refreshingly unsentimental and unjingoistic. One can easily imagine the heavy-handed treatment such a plot would have received in the hands of a less subtle director. Peck too is uncharacteristically subtle. His rather stiff acting style makes his "performance" as a by-the-rules martinet believable, while he also manages to suggest the true, more sensitive feelings of the character that lie beneath the surface. The movie runs a little over 2 hours 15 minutes yet doesn't seem that long. And by not fawning for the viewer's admiration, it earns our sincere respect. Few movies about World War II made so soon after the event have aged as gracefully as Twelve O'Clock High.

Brief Reviews

GUN CRAZY (1949) ***½
Film noir is one of my pet genres. I've been waiting years to see this one, a highly regarded work from the era when the genre reached its fullest expression, and it didn't disappoint me. Director Joseph H. Lewis spent years directing B-movies for various studios before gaining attention for a stylishly directed, noirish little thriller called My Name Is Julia Ross (1945). Gun Crazy was made the same year as Nicholas Ray's similar They Live by Night, and those two films were huge influences on Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which traces of each are plainly visible.

Gun Crazy is a crime-spree movie, the story of a young man (John Dall) and woman (Peggy Cummins) who throw off all societal inhibitions and go on an anarchic binge of bank and payroll robberies. The thing that first brings them together is a clearly erotic obsession with guns. The thing that distinguishes them from each other is his refusal to use his gun to kill, and her barely controlled impulses to use her gun for violence against others. Once they start on their spree, there is no turning back, and there is little doubt that they are ultimately doomed. It's no wonder Gun Crazy was such an influence on early films of the French New Wave like Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows and Godard's Breathless.

The photography by Russell Harlan is full of striking visual flourishes including asymmetrical compositions and unconventional camera placement. The numerous scenes shot from the back seat of the getaway car create a perceptible sense of heightened realism, especially one very long, unbroken take of a robbery in the middle of the movie, where Cummins gets out of the car to distract a policeman. The film's atmospheric finale, on a small island in a reedy, fog-shrouded marsh, is a model of achieving maximum effect with minimal means. The British Cummins—with her Bonnie Parker beret, full, sensuous lips, snub nose, insolent expression, and slightly lock-jawed speech—is the epitome of the alluring femme fatale, and Dall, as the maladjusted but sensitive young sharpshooter in sexual thrall to her, expresses just the right amount of internal conflict over their actions. The screenplay, co-credited to Millard Kaufmann, was actually co-written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using Kaufmann as a front. Highly recommended to all devotees of film noir.

DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) **
To make a truly terrible movie is not an easy thing to do. The movie must be intended to be taken seriously, made with reasonable care and an adequate budget, and involve respected and talented film artists. But for some reason, often a series of misguided artistic choices, it simply misses the mark completely, its only interest the mystery of how something with so much apparent potential turned out to be so dreadful.

Duel in the Sun, a Western directed by King Vidor and written and produced by David O. Selznick, is spectacularly bad. Its every element self-consciously inflated, the film is paradoxically both boring (as a narrative experience) and fascinating (as an example of cinematic awfulness). The unrelenting bombast of the movie is obvious as soon as it starts, with a seemingly interminable section titled "Prelude" that consists of a frozen image of a reddish desert landscape with symphonic music playing over it, followed by another section titled "Overture," consisting of another frozen image of a desert landscape with more music and a pompous voice-over by Orson Welles. The gaudy opening sequence, which takes place in a gambling den, is so lavish in its over-the-top decadence that it resembles a scene in a Roman epic by Cecil B. de Mille. It's all downhill for the next two hours until the movie reaches its labored and improbable conclusion.

So many normally capable performers (Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall) give such terrible performances in their one-dimensional roles that it must surely set a record of some kind. Only Walter Huston, chewing the scenery as a lascivious evangelist called The Sinkiller, seems to be having any fun. As the main character, a feral, sexually-charged, half-Caucasion, half-Mexican wench (there is no other word to describe her adequately), Jennifer Jones—with her absurd bronze makeup, wild, unkempt hair, lowcut peasant blouses, and bare feet—easily takes the bad acting prize in this marathon of terrible acting. Before Johnny Guitar, before Lonesome Cowboys, before Lust in the Dust, there was Duel in the Sun. If I had to use one word to sum up the overall effect of Duel in the Sun, that word would be camp (and not in the entertaining sense, because it is apparently wholly unintentional).

CROUPIER (1999) ***½
The British director Mike Hodges was in his late 60's when he made this film, but it doesn't seem like the work of a man of that age. The highly accomplished direction, unshowy and unfussy, is rightfully respectful of the taut, focused screenplay by Paul Mayersburg and has a hip sensibility that seems right in tune with the material. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a former croupier from South Africa now living in London, is a man at loose ends. Unemployed, he wants to be a writer but is not interested in the project his publisher proposes, a tale about soccer players with lots of sex. When his father calls from South Africa and says he has found Jack a job at a London casino, Jack accepts the offer because of the very large salary and because he immediately sees the job in terms of research for a novel about gamblers and gambling.

The film has lots of philosophical voice-over narration by Jack about being a participant in events and at the same time a detached observer gathering material for his book. In these internal monologues Jack also ruminates on how gambling and odds permeate so much of life. Although adamant that he is not himself a gambler, he obsessively calculates the odds on his every action, seeing all of life as one gamble after another. Later an attractive woman (Alex Kingston) who comes to the casino fascinates Jack. When she says she is deeply in debt to dangerous people and proposes that Jack be the inside-man in a robbery of the casino, he reluctantly agrees.

The movie is above all a character study and thus relies heavily on Owen's brilliant performance for its success. Looking leaner and hungrier than in Gosford Park or Children of Men, he makes Jack aloof but fascinating. Beneath a still, calm, nonreactive exterior, this is a complex man in constant thought, a silent internal observer and interpreter of external events. It is because Owen projects this aspect of Jack's character so thoroughly that the large amount of voice-over narration with its almost Dostoyevskian slant works so well. The movie builds to a tense outcome that results in several unexpected turns, an ending consistent with the film's theme that the outcome of a bet cannot be accurately predicted in advance and is by its nature the result of randomness.

ADAPTATION (2002) **½
In the late 1990's, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean wrote a series of articles about the Florida wild orchid collector John Laroche, published in 1998 as the book The Orchid Thief. For some reason the book, which is more a profile than a narrative, was bought for adaptation as a movie and assigned to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), whose sensibility would seem wholly unsuited to such a project. The resulting movie is a real curiosity.

The first two-thirds are divided unevenly between two interwoven plots—Kaufmann's (Nicholas Cage) personal insecurities and his professional struggles writing the screenplay (the predominant thread), and a straight account of Orlean's (Meryl Streep) experiences with Laroche (Chris Cooper) while writing the book (the secondary thread). The latter plot line is fascinating. The other part, about Kaufmann, is not. As Kaufmann himself says of this narrative strategy, "It's self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic." Not content to transform the film into his own personal vanity project by making himself the main character, Kaufmann even gives himself an alter ego, a fictitious twin brother (also Cage). The most embarrassing scene in the movie: the one in which Kaufmann masturbates to a photo of Orlean on the dust jacket of the book. One can only wonder how anyone connected with this movie, having read the script, agreed to participate. The last third or so of Adaptation veers in an altogether different direction as a response to the suggestion of a screenwriting guru (Brian Cox) who advises Kaufmann to write a knockout "last act" to disguise the flaws of the rest of the film. This preposterous last act has Laroche deriving a psychoactive substance that looks like green cocaine from his orchids and mailing some to Streep, who snorts it, has a psychedelic experience, then rushes off to Florida for a tryst with Laroche. The Kaufmann brothers follow, and the movie becomes an outlandish crime thriller with Orlean and Laroche trying to murder the Kaufmanns.

Adaptation received rave reviews from many critics as well as numerous nominations and awards from critics' groups, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars. More than 50,000 users of IMDb give it a very high 7.8/10 rating. I can sum up my reaction to the movie in two words: pretentious rubbish. Nearly everything in it seems a contrived, attention-seeking stunt. If the acting weren't so good, I would give it an even lower rating.