NR | 1h 53min | Drama, Western | 1940
You’re a John Wayne fan and haven’t seen this Western? You’d better. It isn’t high art, but as a melodramatic and meaningful entertainer, it’s up there with the best.
Kansas in the 1860s is all the rage; it’s where nearly everyone within riding distance dreams of settling, as one property broker-developer says, in its “rich and fertile plains.”
Two Texas drifters, cowhand Bob Seton (John Wayne) and his ol’ pardner “Doc” Grunch (George Hayes), plan to keep moving and see the country, including mountainous California. They figure that they can earn some easy bucks while passing through Kansas. So Bob, who lets his fists do the talking, punches teeth out of loud-mouthed no-gooders, while Doc sweet talks them into his dentist’s chair.
Plans change. Bob falls for Mary McCloud (Claire Trevor) and befriends her brother Fletcher (Roy Rogers). Trouble is, Mary fancies erudite schoolteacher Will Cantrell (Walter Pidgeon), who lives a quiet life with his widowed ma, Mrs. Cantrell (Marjorie Main).
Backed by Mary and her banker father Angus (Porter Hall), smooth-talking Will runs for town marshal. But straight-talking Bob wins. Smarting from defeat by a cowhand who can’t even spell, Will vows to make a name for himself. But to Ma Cantrell’s horror, he rustles up a gang and takes to slave-trading, gunrunning, and profiteering off the now full-blown Civil War, first slyly, then openly.
That charade fools Mary into marrying Will. His slick lawyering seems more useful to her than Marshal Bob’s by-the-book style in sparing Fletcher the gallows. Fletcher’s just killed a man in preemptive self-defense. As Will’s colors become clearer, she wonders if Bob’s integrity, courage, and earthiness are a better bet than Will’s ill-gotten wealth and influence.
Why director Raoul Walsh and Wayne didn’t make more than just two films together (“The Big Trail” (1930) is the other), we’ll never know. Walsh had as much of an eye for Wayne’s magic on screen as John Ford did; Wayne went on to become a fixture in Ford’s filmography.
Walsh, a breeder-owner of thoroughbreds, loved horses. Watch for his grippingly filmed chases on horseback, one of which has a coach run off a cliff and into a lake. That’s no surprise, with Yakima Canutt as stunt director.
Walsh first directed Wayne as a 23-year-old. He’s a 33-year-old here, and in top form as a man’s man. This was Trevor’s third film with Wayne, as their chemistry here demonstrates.
Means Matter
Walsh’s screenwriters get the balance right between melodrama and message, drawing only loosely from American writer W.R. Burnett’s novel of the same name, and heavily fictionalizing supposed links to Quantrill’s Raiders. The onscreen Will Cantrell isn’t, by any stretch, the offscreen Quantrill.
The two women, Ma Cantrell and Mary, signify choices that ordinary folk have to make when starting out or sustaining a new way of life; here, the virgin territory of Kansas symbolizes possibilities for both nobility and notoriety. Do noble goals justify not-so-noble methods? Or do nefarious methods corrupt those goals by their nature, rendering them noble no longer?
Mary, the younger, more impressionable of the two women, is slower to choose wisely, she shortsightedly warms to Will, the suitor who appears more likely to grant what she wants, to somehow save Fletcher.
Ma Cantrell, however, lovingly yet farsightedly calls out her errant son the moment he betrays his truer, better nature. Forget about her wants. She’d rather he grants her what she needs: an honest, brave son, who’ll pay any price to stay that way.
If he’s lost himself, how can he possibly save anyone, let alone her? She pleads with Will, “There’s good in you and it’s stronger than the bad that’s in your blood.” The legacy of lawlessness that Will figures he’s inherited from his long dead outlaw father and brothers from Ohio, needn’t be his in Kansas. Here, in a land brimming with promise, he can choose and shape his future as an honest, brave young man.
Doc does something similar for Bob. Diffident about being unlettered, the young man’s tempted to skip running for marshal and start gun-running instead. But Doc is adamant: “You ain’t a wrecker, boy, you’re a builder.” Unlike Will, Bob wises up.
