by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a movie I’d
recently recorded from TCM, Seven Angry Men, a not especially great but entertaining and quite fascinating film
from Allied Artists (née
Monogram) in 1955, directed by Charles Marquis Warren — best known as the
creator of the long-running (20 years, which set the record for the
longest-running drama series of all time, later tied but not beaten by the
original Law and Order) Western
TV series Gunsmoke. The script by Daniel B.
Ullman is basically your pioneer homesteaders being hounded, harassed and
attacked by vicious outlaws story — only the setting is “Bleeding Kansas”
during the pitched battles over whether Kansas would come into the U.S. as a
free or slave states, which took place from 1856 to 1858 and were basically the
opening act of the Civil War, and the pioneer homesteaders are John Brown
(Raymond Massey), his wife Mary (Ann Tyrrell) and their six sons: Owen (Jeffrey
Hunter), Oliver (Larry Pennell), Frederick (John Smith), Jason (James Best),
John, Jr. (Dennis Weaver, also a regular on Gunsmoke), and Watson (Tom Irish). Massey had previously
played John Brown in the 1940 Warners’ big-budget Western The Santa Fe Trail, a pro-Southern gloss on the same events (well, Gone
With the Wind had just been released, it
was the most popular film of all time and therefore other studios had reason to
believe that pro-Southern tales of the Civil War and the run-up to it were guaranteed
box office) that portrayed Brown as an out-and-out villain.
His portrayal in Seven
Angry Men is considerably more
ambiguous and nuanced: Brown comes off as an Old Testament prophet — Charles
joked that being involved with him was like being in a guerrilla war commanded
by Isaiah — endlessly quoting or paraphrasing the Bible and insisting that he
was literally ordered by God to be his
avenging angel on earth to purge the U.S. of the evil of slavery. What’s
fascinating about this movie is how it really seems like an anomaly given the
historical Zeitgeist; it came
out at an odd crossroads in human history, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court
decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled that slavery’s successor, segregation,
was unconstitutional, but also at the height of the so-called McCarthy era
(“so-called” because it actually started before Senator Joe McCarthy emerged as
a national figure and continued well past his demise), in which individuals in
all sorts of professions, including filmmaking, were carefully vetted
politically and required to affirm their “loyalty” not only to the United
States government and to the capitalist economic system in order to work. The
fact that the anti-Communist hysteria was still going strong in 1955 may account
for the extent to which Ullman’s script stressed Brown’s religiosity; given
that the U.S. officially defined the enemy not only as “Communism” but as “Godless Communism” (which led to the addition of “under
God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, the addition of “In God We Trust” to all U.S.
money, and the general effort on the part of government at all levels to
declare atheists and agnostics at best second-class citizens and at worst
anti-American pond scum), stressing Brown’s Christian beliefs and making them
his primary motivation for his crusade (the word is appropriate for once!) against slavery obviously
made him a bit more sympathetic to a 1955 audience.
Seven Angry Men has its flaws; it’s the sort of movie that walks
right up to a lot of heavy-duty issues that still resonate today — like whether
violence in the cause of political or social change is ever justified, and whether taking up arms against an
evil and inevitably shedding innocent blood in the process advances the cause
of social justice or just cheapens and demeans its practitioners — without
really tackling them. And it has other, more superficial flaws too: Massey as
Brown seems to have walked off the canvas of a 19th century
painting, and his dialogue is sufficiently alien from the normal speech
patterns of 1955 it’s easy to believe he’s a man from the past (albeit a highly
theatrical one whose stylized language is probably nothing like the way normal
people talked then), but the young actors playing his sons bring their usual
1950’s Brylcreemed hairdos to the set and look like just what they are — modern
people in period costumes. The plotline follows Brown from the bloodshed in
“Bleeding Kansas,” and dramatizes both the raid on the free-soil community of
Lawrence and Brown’s response (he captures two of the young men who were in on
the raid and, though they have both guns and ropes, they eschew those more
common means of 19th century killing in favor of stabbing them à
la Julius Caesar), and the
main conflicts are between Brown and at least some of his sons, Owen and
Frederick in particular, who get disgusted by the bloodshed on both sides and
just want to get out of Kansas and live normal lives. Frederick is actually
trying to do just that when pro-slavery “border ruffians” led by the film’s principal
villain, Martin White (a marvelous performance by real-life ex-con Leo Gordon),
ambush him and kill him just because he’s one of the sons of the hated John
Brown. Brown leaves Kansas after the 1858 vote by which its citizens decide to
come into the Union as a free state (under the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854,
sponsored by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, which established so-called
“popular sovereignty” by which the settlers in those territories could decide
whether they would be slave or free — opponents contemptuously called it
“squatter sovereignty” and Douglas’s 1858 re-election opponent, Abraham
Lincoln, acidly said that all “popular sovereignty” meant was “if any one man
choose to enslave another, no third man will be allowed to object”) and organizes
his next campaign against slavery, the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in
1859.
For this he takes a fundraising trip to Massachusetts and gets donations
from such illustrious names as Ralph Waldo Emerson (Selmer Jackson) and Henry
David Thoreau (Lester Dorr) to finance an expedition to a Southern town with a
military armory. His band will take control of the armory, hold local white
dignitaries hostage, and use the guns therein to arm the local slaves, who will
then stage an uprising that will start a civil war and bring down the slave
power. It goes awry for the same reason the U.S.-initiated Bay of Pigs invasion
in Cuba did 102 years later: rather than join these crazy white guys in their
would-be attack on slavery, the local Black slaves decide to sit out the
conflict on the principle that, as Shakespeare put it, they would “rather bear
those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.” Brown gets this
unwelcome news from one of the few recruits to his cause who actually is
African-American, Ned Green (James Edwards, the fine actor from Stanley
Kramer’s and Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave who should have become a major star, but for some reason he never caught on and
the next hot young Black male lead,
Sidney Poitier, was the one who cracked the color bar on major Hollywood
stardom) — earlier there’s a marvelously ironic scene in which Brown’s men, out
to capture the telegraph office at the railway station so the authorities can’t
communicate to the outside world, finds that the telegraph operator is Black,
and when they tell him they’ve come to free him, he says, “You don’t have to
free me! I’ve been free eight
years already!” — and they do a desultory hold-out in the Harper’s Ferry armory
until a U.S. Army battalion led by Col. Robert E. Lee (Robert Osterloh) storms
the place and takes Brown and his remaining sons into custody. Meanwhile, Owen
Brown and his girlfriend Elizabeth Clark (Debra Paget, who despite her starlet
reputation is actually pretty good) — an Illinois woman who met Owen and his
brother Oliver as they were coming into Kansas and made it clear from the
get-go that she approved of the Browns’ opposition to slavery but utterly
loathed their tactics — sneak away from Harper’s Ferry and end up heaven knows
where. It would have been nice to have a tag scene set after the Civil War
starts, with Owen Brown enlisting in the Union Army and thus fighting the slave
power via government-sanctioned rather than freelance violence.
With my
penchant for recasting classic (or not-so-classic) movies based on who else was
around at the time who could have played the parts, I found myself through much of this movie
wishing that James Dean had played Owen Brown, not only because Massey and Dean
did such marvelous work as an antagonistic father and son in East of Eden the same year but because Dean’s intensity would
have brought a lot more power to Owen Brown’s dilemma — not only choosing
between his father and his girlfriend but between violence and nonviolence,
between war and peace, between fighting (and likely dying) for a cause and just
living an ordinary life (and given the “family” ideology of the 1950’s it’s
obvious the initial audiences for this film were intended to “read” the
cause-free life as the “correct” choice!) — though it is ironic that in this film Jeffrey Hunter got to
play the son of a prophet four years before he played the Son of God Himself in
the sound remake of King of Kings. Seven Angry Men is a
movie that’s better than it had a right to be: deliberately slow-moving, blessed
with dramatically shaded cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks (even though he
was working with trees, hills and other features of the southern California
locations that aren’t believable as representations of the Kansas plains) and
an appropriately somber original score by Carl Brandt, intensely dramatic and
more of an “issues film” than one expects from such a politically repressed
time as the mid-1950’s, it draws John Brown as neither hero nor villain but a
basically decent man, fighting for a righteous cause but getting so obsessed about
it he sacrifices everything else, including the lives of some of his sons, to
it, and thereby destroys himself.
