Night Passage (Universal-International, 1957)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 22) my husband Charles watched the fifth film in the James Stewart Six-Film Western Collection from Universal: Night Passage. The movie was a major disappointment whose best feature is its title, which suggests a Western/noir fusion like the second film in the box, Winchester ‘73. The title of Night Passage makes it sound like Dark Passage, the novel by David Goodis that became the basis of the third (of four) films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together (in 1947, written and directed by Delmer Daves), but it’s nowhere near as good a movie. Part of the problem with it is the plot makes virtually no sense; though the story was written by Borden Chase, who wrote such classic Westerns as Red River and Winchester ‘73, the director isn’t Anthony Mann but someone named James Neilson, most of whose credits were for series TV. Stewart plays Grant McLaine, who used to work as a trouble-shooter for the local railroad owned by Ben Kimball (Jay C. Flippen) until Kimball fired him for reasons that remain maddeningly obscure. Supposedly it has to do with McLaine taking a bribe from a gang of criminals to let them rob one of Kimball’s trains, but we begin to suspect after a while that it was really because McLaine was having an affair with Kimball’s wife Verna (Elaine Stewart, presumably no relation). The railroad has reached a dead end in its construction because its trains keep getting held up by a gang of outlaws co-led by Whitey Harbin (Dan Duryea, who turns in by far the best performance in the film even though he’s basically replaying the psycho villain he’d been doing in modern-dress contexts like Fritz Lang’s mid-1940’s film noir classics like Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street) and a bandit nicknamed “The Utica Kid” (Audie Murphy).

So far the robbers have made off with three payrolls for the railroad’s construction workers, and the workers are understandably getting restive and are threatening to walk off the job en masse and head for the nearby gold fields unless Kimball can figure out a way to pay them. The robbers are stopping the trains by toppling water tanks over the tracks, rendering them impassable – when I saw what was going on I joked, “Where’s Buster Keaton when they need him?” (I was thinking of the marvelous gag in Keaton’s 1924 film Sherlock, Jr. in which he wrestles with the spout on a water tower and the water gushes down on top of him, which broke Keaton’s neck for real even though he didn’t realize it until a doctor X-rayed him 11 years later and asked, “When did you break your neck?”) For most of the film Kimball isn’t sure whether Grant is an outlaw working with the train robbers or a good guy trying to stop them, and neither are we except for our movie-conditioned expectations that James Stewart isn’t going to be playing a bad guy. Though the film is called Night Passage, it’s only in the last 15 minutes of its 90-minute running time that we finally get some scenes taking place at night. Until then it’s all set against gorgeous Western scenery (William Daniels, in the third phase of his career after his first phase as Greta Garbo’s favorite cameraman at MGM and his second phase after he quit MGM, signed with Universal and started making films noir like Brute Force, Lured and The Naked City, is the cinematographer) and virtually all in broad daylight. It also doesn’t help that after Kimball fired him, Grant made his living as an itinerant street musician, singing and playing accordion – or that his singing voice, though at least more tolerable than it was in the 1936 MGM musical Born to Dance (where he introduced Cole Porter’s song “Easy to Love” and joked years later in the 1974 compilation film That’s Entertainment that “Easy to Love” was such a great song it even survived him introducing it), drones through a not very funny novelty song called “You Can’t Get Far Without a Railroad.”

The song was written by Ned Washington (lyrics) and Dimitri Tiomkin (music); Tiomkin also did the background score, and that didn’t help either. Ultimately Grant recovers the stolen payroll money (which triggered one of Charles’s pet peeves in movies: the bundle of cash is way too small to be $10,000) and hides it in a shoebox carried by the typically obnoxious movie kid, Joey Adams (Brandon De Wilde). Then the saloon where Verna Kimball and Charlotte “Charlie” Drew (Dianne Foster) work burns up and takes Grant’s accordion with it – though Grant ultimately recovers the money again after it mysteriously disappears from Joey’s shoebox and turns it over to Kimball, who’s able to pay off his workers and keep the railroad going. There’s also a quite charming hard-boiled character named “Miss Vittles” (Olive Carey) who’s marvelous even though she throws herself at Grant, who couldn’t be less interested in her that way. Ultimately the Utica Kid turns out to be Grant’s younger brother, Lee McLaine, though he gets shot and killed in the last minutes and Grant and Charlie end up together. Night Passage is a pretty annoying movie, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” item Anthony Mann was offered the job of directing it and turned it down on the ground that nobody would understand it and Stewart and Murphy wouldn’t be believable as brothers. Mann was right on both counts, but Stewart was so ticked off at him the two never spoke again. Murphy’s casting is one of the film’s major problems: he’s just not a strong enough actor to be credible as the bad guy with some good aspects we’re told his character is. The role should have gone to Paul Newman, Michael Landon, Steve McQueen or one of the many James Dean wanna-bes who were cluttering up Hollywood in those days to take advantage of the death of the original.