by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Before the second episode of Watergate last night I watched a moderately interesting movie
on TCM: Cowboy, a 1958 Columbia
production which they showed on a night of films about long cattle drives. They
showed it right after Howard Hawks’ 1948 masterpiece Red River, starring John Wayne (in what was probably the best
performance he ever gave) and Montgomery Clift as, respectively, a tough cattle
baron and his foster son fighting over control of a large cattle herd being
driven across the prairie to Abilene, Kansas. (Though Clift is supposed to be
playing Wayne’s foster son, there’s enough homoerotic tension between them I’ve
referred to Red River as the
Gayest Western ever made until Brokeback Mountain.) Cowboy
was based on a late 19th century memoir by a real-life cowboy, Frank
Harris, but as my husband Charles once said about the film Shine, it’s clear the filmmakers (director Delmer Daves,
one of Hollywood’s quirkier talents, and writers Edmund H. North and an
uncredited — because of the blacklist — Dalton Trumbo) picked this true story
to film because it was one that fit neatly into the Hollywood clichés. In the
film Frank Harris is portrayed by, of all people, Jack Lemmon, who was already
typecast as the urbane but klutzy city dweller in various romantic comedies,
and he’s depicted as a hotel clerk who wants to become a cowboy and,
ultimately, a cattle baron. Partly he wants the romance of the Western life (or
at least what he thinks it is based on the highly romanticized literature of
the time) and partly he wants to get into the pants of Maria Vidal (Anna
Kashfi, Marlon Brando’s India-born first wife, with whom his relationship was
so tempestuous his makeup people had to work hard to cover up the scars she’d
inflicted on his face with her fingernails), daughter of Mexican cattle baron
Vidal (Donald Randolph), who naturally doesn’t want her to marry a mere hotel
clerk.
So Harris offers hard-ass cattle driver Tom Reese (Glenn Ford,
top-billed) $3,800 he made from the sale of his dad’s farm and puts it up as
seed capital so Reese can buy a cattle herd and drive it to market, since Reese
has lost all his own money gambling — only Reese has won it back in the
meantime and tries to pay off Harris so he doesn’t have to deal with it. The
ill-assorted pair and their fellow cowboys set off on the big cattle drive and
there seems to be a veritable checklist of situations the writers were ticking
off one by one — an incident in which the cowboys are playing games with a
rattlesnake and one of them is fatally bitten; a scene at a Mexican cantina where the cowboys try to connect with women of “easy
virtue” while a super-trumpet player (real-life Mexican trumpet star Rafael
Méndez, a showy virtuoso who recorded for Decca and Coast, a short-lived label
owned by Westinghouse, mostly trumpet transcriptions of light classics like
“Hora Staccato” and the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé); a sequence in which Comanche Indians try to break
up the herd and get the cattle to stampede (though the film never explains why the Indians wanted the cattle to stampede — U.S.
movie audiences were so conditioned in 1958 to regard Indians as villains they
probably just figured, “They’re Indians, that’s what they do”); a bizarre sequence in which Harris and Reese
have to wrestle four cows who have fallen to the floor of a railroad car so
they don’t start a sort of mass trample-in which will kill all the cows in the car; and a finale in which Harris
gives a stiff-upper-lip salute to a dead member of the band and Reese, who’s
earlier given the rattlesnake victim a similarly emotionless send-off, chews
Harris for his unemotionalism and tells him he’s not being tough, just mean.
(Oh, if someone who could have got him to listen would only have said that to
Donald Trump when he was growing
up!) In the end, of course, Harris becomes a real man in the cowboys’ eyes —
and he proves that in a weird way, by killing a cockroach on the wall of his
Chicago hotel room by blowing it away with a gun (which, of course, also knocks
off a good deal of the outside of the wall).
Cowboy is an unsurprising but endearing movie whose
principal virtue is it was one of the last gasps of three-strip Technicolor
before the cheaper, simpler but also less effective processes like Eastmancolor
and monopack Technicolor replaced it; in a story that today would be filmed all
in dirty greens and browns, the scenes in Cowboy are genuinely colorful (even when we don’t necessarily want them to be;
there are times when the visual look of cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr. and
Technicolor consultants Henri Jaffa and the notorious Natalie Kalmus, gets in a
way of the message of the writers that the West wasn’t anywhere near as
glamorous as previous movies had told you it was, but it still makes the film
an utter joy to look at!) and quite a relief from the look of most modern films
even though there were times when I wondered if Cowboy might have been more effective dramatically in
black-and-white. The performances are O.K., with Glenn Ford delivering his
usual this-is-what-you-get-when-you-can’t-afford-John-Wayne tough-guy schtick and Jack Lemmon showing that he could be effective
in a non-comic role, though he’d have to wait until he matured both as a
performer and a person before he did films like Save the Tiger, The
China Syndrome, Missing and Glengarry Glen Ross that really established his range. Anna Kashfi is
just sort of there to establish
exotic cred and get a woman into this movie somewhere — later there’s some byplay between her, Lemmon and
the Mexican guy her dad forced her to marry and a preposterous combination of
bullfighting and ring-tossing in which the husband and Glenn Ford compete to
see who can throw a red ring over the horn of a killer bull in a stadium filled
with other cattle as well. Cowboy
is a pretty forgettable movie, and in some ways the production of it was more
interesting than the actual result: when Jack Lemmon signed to do the film (on
an are-you-chicken dare from Glenn Ford!) he was such a real-life tenderfoot
he’d never even seen a horse in
person, much less ridden one, so director Daves decreed he would shoot the film
in sequence so the audience could see Lemmon’s skills as a horseman growing for
real the way they were supposed to in the plot.
