Bend of the River (Universal-International, copyright 1951, released 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, April 17) my husband Charles and I watched the third of the six movies in the James Stewart Westerns collection on Universal DVD’s: Bend of the River. The omens were pretty good on this one: the director was Anthony Mann, who had previously made Winchester ‘73 with some of the same cast members (James Stewart, Rock Hudson, Jay C. Flippen), and the writer was Borden Chase (adapting a novel called Bend of the Snake by one William Gulick), who’d written Winchester ‘73 as well as Red River, two of the all-time greatest Western films. Alas, the magic didn’t gel this time around, and it’s hard to tell what went wrong. Bend of the River is about a wagon train of prospective homesteaders en route to Oregon to set up farms. Their guide is Glyn McLyntock (James Stewart) – one wonders why his name is spelled so pretentiously when throughout the movie I’d assumed it was “Glenn McLintock” – and on the way there he rescues an outlaw named Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) from a lynch mob who are trying to hang him for stealing a horse. (One wonders if the horse he rides off on in Glyn’s company is the horse he was accused of stealing.) The two team up despite the misgivings of the paterfamilias, Jeremy Baile (Jay C. Flippen), and his two daughters, Laura (Julie Adams) and Marjie (Lori Nelson, in her first film). Ironically, Julie Adams was the female lead in the first Creature from the Black Lagoon and Lori Nelson was the female lead in its sequel, Revenge of the Creature.

The would-be homesteaders make a deal with steamboat owner Tom Hendricks (Howard Petrie) to hold their belongings in Portland until September 1, when Hendricks will ship them to their camp. Among the items they are expecting are food supplies they will need to get them through the winter until they can start growing their own in the spring. The homesteaders cut down enough trees to establish a clearing and build their houses, and they wait for the supplies to arrive … and they wait … and they wait. Now it’s the middle of October, they’re running out of flour and bacon, and they will starve unless the supplies arrive. Glyn volunteers to ride to Portland to find out what happened, and when he gets to Portland he finds it’s a wide-open town full of gunfighting, drinking, gambling and the other Western vices. Hendricks explains that there’s been a gold rush – I’ve been unable to find out when this film takes place, and Google was no help because there were at least three Oregon gold rushes, one in 1850 before the big one in California, one from 1861 to 1870 and one in the 1890’s just before the big one in Alaska. He’s decided to renege on his deal with the settlers because he can get a lot more for his flour and whatnot by selling it to the miners at the inflated prices typical of resource rushes. Glyn makes vague promises to some of the locals, led by Shorty (the young Harry Morgan), to help him steal the stuff from Hendricks – only they decide midway through the journey that they’d rather divert the stuff to the gold miners who will pay inflated prices for it. About all Glyn has going for him in keeping the shipment on its way to the homesteaders is gambler Trey Wilson (Rock Hudson) and Emerson Cole – who switches sides in mid-journey and aligns with the renegades until Glyn and he have a big fight in the middle of the river that ends with Glyn drowning Emerson. (At this point we’re thinking that it would have been better if Glyn had let the lynchers hang Emerson in the first reel. But then again we wouldn’t have the fun of watching Arthur Kennedy’s great performance in the role; he practically steals the movie.)

Ultimately Bend of the River is entertaining but nothing special, and I’m not sure where it went wrong. Part of the problem may have been that it’s in color: after the mega-success of Winchester ‘73 in black-and-white Universal-International made another percentage deal with James Stewart (reportedly he’d made $600,000 off his share of Winchester ‘73 and $750,000 off his share in this one) and decided to ramp up the budget by shooting it at the tail end of the three-strip Technicolor era. But, quite frankly, the color works against the values of this story; it needed the cool, dark beauty of red-filtered black-and-white. Part of it also might be that, as Charles said afterwards, aside from a brief run-in between the settlers and a few Shoshone Indians early on whose only plot significance is that Julie Adams’ character gets an arrowhead stuck in her shoulder (and the main woman on the wagon train, Mrs. Prentiss, played by Frances Bavier, insists that they drive as gently as possible for the next month until she heals), Bend of the River doesn’t really seem that much like a Western. Charles said it was basically an exploration film about colonization and imperialism, and it could have been set in Africa or the South Seas or anywhere else in the world where whites were lording it over people of color. Bend of the River is a good movie rather than a great one, and while it’s indicative of the way James Stewart was trying to keep his career going by hardening his image – there’s a clip from the film included in the trailer in which, reacting to Emerson’s change of sides, Glyn gives him a low-keyed threat that he’ll be looking over Emerson’s shoulder wherever he goes until he finally catches up with him, and he sounds amazingly like his long-time friend and occasional co-star John Wayne – he’d already proven he could act a Western tough guy in Winchester ‘73 and he didn’t need to do it again. The trailer also references Julie Adams’s character as a woman who “made the mistake of falling in love with two men” – though that’s only sequentially, not simultaneously (she takes up with Emerson in wide-open Portland and then ends up with Glyn after Emerson’s death) – and when it then mentioned Rock Hudson I couldn’t help but joke, “He also made the mistake of falling in love with men.”