by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ran Raiders
of Old California, an intriguing 1957 “B” Western
from Republic during the dregs of their existence as a company. Just one year
later founder Herbert B. Yates would close the studio (and sell it to CBS,
which would call it “Television City” and film the Carol Burnett Show there) and would continue his film developing
business, Consolidated Film Laboratories, and keep Republic alive solely as a
label under which to sell his old films to TV. The imdb.com page on Raiders
of Old California gives two other production
companies as the makers of the film — Albert C. Gannaway Productions and Gavel
— and Gannaway (the person) also gets credit for producing and directing the
film from a script by Sam Roeca and Thomas G. Hubbard. From the appearance of
Faron Young and Marty Robbins, two major stars of country music in 1957, I had
expected something considerably lighter, a musical Western in the vein of the
ones Republic had made with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers throughout the late
1930’s and the 1940’s. Instead neither Young nor Robbins sang in the film at
all, and the movie turned out to be a surprisingly dark tale beginning at the
end of the Mexican War of 1846-48. A company of U.S. soldiers led by Captain
Angus Clyde McKane (Jim Davis, top-billed, and the same Jim Davis as the one
who co-starred with his near-namesake Bette Davis in Winter Meeting, her second-to-last Warner Bros. contract film in
1948 — Bette Davis and Marty Robbins, one degree of separation!) besieges the hacienda of Mexican landowner Miguel Sebastian (Larry
Dobkin). They kill all of Sebastian’s men and are about to kill Sebastian as
well when a Mexican courier turns up with the news that the war is over.
Instead — though we only learn this for sure towards the end of the movie,
albeit it’s no particular surprise — McKane forces Sebastian to turn over his
huge land grant (one so old it was issued by Philip II in the 16th
century when he was king of Spain) in
exchange for his life. The film then flashes forward to 1850 and McKane is a
land baron, and with his henchmen Damon Pardee (a young but still evil-looking
Lee Van Cleef) and Timothy Boyle (Marty Robbins), he regularly terrorizes the
locals and installs suitably compliant sheriffs like the current one, an old
whiskey-soaked guy played by a virtually unrecognizable Douglas Fowley (if you
know him from his leads in above-average “B” movies like Lady in the Death
House or his character roles in
big movies like Singin’ in the Rain, in which he played the director, you’ll never guess he’s in this role;
he’s made up to look like Walter Huston’s character in Treasure of the
Sierra Madre) to make sure he can
dispossess both white settlers and any leftover Mexicans relying on oral
promises Sebastian made to let them stay on their land.
Only U.S. government
justice is about to arrive in the persons of marshal Faron Young (Faron Young,
surprisingly using his real name as that of his character) and judge Ward Young
(Louis Jean Heydt, who judging from his appearance here had aged worse than
Fowley had). Judge Young is ready to put McKane and company on trial for
stealing Sebastian’s land, but he needs a witness — and it’s Marshal Young’s
task to find one. He finds Scott Johnson (Harry Lauter) working a farm on the
old Sebastian land grant; Johnson originally was one of the three witnesses who
signed the deed granting McKane ownership of Sebastian’s land, and so far he’s
gone along with McKane’s cover story that Sebastian gave it away to cover his
gambling debts, but right now he’s having an attack of conscience. Of course,
like innumerable stupid movie characters both before and since, he tells the villain to his face that he isn’t going to go
along anymore instead of shutting his trap until he can reach someone in law
enforcement and just telling them the truth. The villains respond by ambushing
him, Marshal Young, the judge and Mrs. Johnson (Arleen Whelan) as they’re
setting forth to town to record his testimony — and he’s wounded but survives.
Meanwhile, however, McKane and his men have murdered the Mexican settler Diego
(Edward Colmans) who apparently was the one lead to Sebastian’s current
whereabouts, since he was supposed to be dead but the good guys have found out
he’s alive but don’t know where. They trace him to a small town where, in need
of a doctor for the wounded Johnson, they are told there isn’t a doctor locally
but the town priest can help — and, as is revealed in a cunning point-of-view
shot showing that Gannaway was considerably better than run-of-the-mill
Republic directors like R. G. Springsteen, Lesley Selander or Joseph Kane, the
town priest is Sebastian (though the film
leaves it unclear whether he’s just posing as a priest or actually took vows in the intervening years since he was
done out of his ranch). Eventually the good guys hold their trial, Sebastian
and McKane give their conflicting accounts, the jury finds McKane guilty — and
just then a cattle stampede McKane has arranged as a diversion from the trial
comes to town (though these are some of the sickliest, scrawniest cattle ever
seen on screen — Charles even wondered if some of them were pigs crudely made
up to look like cattle) arrives and
runs McKane over in the street, killing him and ending the threat from his gang
(most of whom have been killed in previous shoot-outs anyway).
What’s
interesting about Raiders of Old California is that, while it remains unaffected by the
overtones and (sometimes) pretensions of the “psychological Western” that began
with films like Blood on the Moon (1948), Winchester .73 (1950) and High Noon (1952) — though John Ford had beaten all those filmmakers to the punch
with Three Bad Men back in 1926 — it’s
considerably more violent and nasty than most of the Republic Saturday-matinee
oaters from the company’s glory years. McKane isn’t just an unscrupulous land
baron but a psychopath, and even more than previously in Republic’s history the
film is little more than violence porn. Instead of the relatively innocent fist
fights by which the goodies usually subdued the baddies in Republic’s earlier
Westerns, there are a lot of shoot-outs and there’s a high body count among the characters.
Indeed, it’s the sort of film where you can pretty much guess the ending just
by surmising, based on the usual character conventions, just who’s going to be
left alive at the fade-out! It’s fascinating to watch the usual Republic “B”
crew trying to keep their Westerns popular by making them bloodier and gorier —
though one convention they did keep from their glory years was the almost supernatural power of the
hero. Faron Young manages in scene after scene to dispatch bad guys who vastly
outnumber him, all the while keeping his white shirt immaculately clean and the
Brylcreemed hair perfectly in place, as if he’s going to go from these
old-Western gun battles directly onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. It’s a
quirky movie, predictable but a lot of fun along the way, though perhaps if
they had made it a musical and
given Young and Robbins a chance to sing it would have been even more
entertaining!
