by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a really quirky movie, a
1950 Warner Bros. Western called Barricade,
which was actually a transformation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf into a land-based Western story. Interviewed by
Michael Druxman for the 1978 book Make It Again, Sam, writer William Sackheim recalled being called into
the office of Warners’ “B” producer Saul Elkins and being told that his next
project would be to adapt The Sea Wolf — Jack London’s grim tale of a crew at sea trapped under the absolute
rule of mad captain “Wolf” Larsen — as a Western. They ran Warners’
previous (more or less) come scritto
version of The Sea Wolf — the
1940 version with Michael Curtiz directing and Edward G. Robinson and John
Garfield starring — “then announced that the project would be called Barricade,” Sackheim recalled. “To this day, I have no idea
what that title meant.” The chief problem facing Sackheim (who, oddly, is the
only credited writer; the credits don’t mention either The Sea Wolf or London’s name) was the obvious one — to explain
why the men under the control of his villain, mine owner and operator “Boss”
Kruger (Raymond Massey, oddly using his “Lincoln” voice for a role at the other
end of the moral scale), didn’t just leave — which he solved partly by establishing
that the mine was located in the middle of what was otherwise desert country
and it would therefore be fatal to anyone who tried to escape, and partly by
some very convincing writing of the men as suffering from what would now be
called the Stockholm syndrome, locked in a love-hate relationship with their
tyrannical boss and all too eager to wreak their wrath not on him, but against anyone who tried to free them.
The gimmick is that Kruger has recruited his workforce exclusively among
outlaws, who can’t complain to the authorities (even if they could get to the authorities) because they’d be arrested
themselves. There’s one obvious plot hole; though it’s not clear exactly what Kruger’s mine is producing (the word “ore” gets
dropped in the dialogue, so it’s clear it’s metal rather than coal), the mine
is so damned isolated there’s no indication of how Kruger ships out whatever it
is they’re mining so he can sell it and make money off it.
The (relatively)
innocent protagonists are fugitives Bob Peters (Dane Clark, in a surprisingly
effective performance even though he hated making the movie — “I’d just come
off suspension at the time and the studio assigned me this as punishment,” he
told Druxman) and Judith Burns (Ruth Roman), who get caught up in Kruger’s evil
empire and, when they steal a covered wagon and try to flee, don’t get far
because Kruger has spiked their drinking water with salt. Peters is assigned to
be the mine’s explosives expert — he tries to lie his way out of the job by
claiming he’s never worked in a mine before, but Kruger sees through that — and
at one point he blows up part of the mine in an attempt to kill Kruger, then
makes his abortive escape — only to find, when he returns, that Kruger is very
much alive and, of course, out for revenge. There are also some fascinating
subsidiary characters (thinly disguised equivalents to people in London’s
original tale), including a former judge (Morgan Farley) who became an
alcoholic and lost everything (and is essentially lynched by the miners when he
sobers up and tries to organize them against Kruger) and a philosophical little
man, “Tippy” (George Stern), who first tries to talk Peters out of going with
Kruger and then helps Kruger forestall any threats to his power. Even London’s
gimmick of having Wolf Larsen have a brother, Death Larsen, who’s the only man
of whom he’s afraid gets transmuted into this film; in Sackheim’s script,
Kruger got the mine in the first place by cheating his brother out of it, then
killing him, but his nephew Clay Kruger is out there somewhere threatening to
organize a mob of his own and take back the mine by force if he can’t win it
back legally — which he’s trying to do by infiltrating his attorney, Aubrey
Milburn (Robert Douglas), into Kruger’s workforce to see if he can spot
something actionable in Kruger’s operation.
In the end Clay does try to take back the mine, and there’s an exciting
shootout in which Clay and all his men are killed, as are virtually all of
Kruger’s, though Kruger himself lives long enough for Bob Peters, our nominal
hero (though played by Clark with an undertone of hostility that makes it
difficult for us to root for him unreservedly but also makes him a more complex
character), to shoot him down as the mine burns up (the equivalent of Larsen’s
ship sinking at the end of the original Sea Wolf). Like Larsen, Kruger is also an intellectual; his
private office is filled with books and adorned with a painting of Richard III,
his rather odd role model, standing on top of a mound of corpses (an image whoever
made the painting obviously ripped off from the sequence in the 1929 Warners’
all-star film The Show of Shows
in which John Barrymore delivers one of Richard III’s speeches while standing
on top of a mound of corpses), and as cruel as he is to Milburn it’s obvious
that he, like his Londonesque counterpart, likes having a man with brains
around so he can sound off philosophically (he comes off sounding rather like
an Ayn Rand hero — not surprising since two years earlier Massey had had a key
supporting role in the film of The Fountainhead). Barricade is directed by Peter Godfrey — quite the best film of this usually
mediocre hack I’ve seen; obviously an action film turned him on a lot more than
the melodramas and romcoms Warners was usually giving him — and it features
spectacular Technicolor cinematography of the West’s wide-open vistas and an
effective contrast between the gorgeous countryside and the claustrophobic
environment of Kruger’s mining camp; it’s a surprisingly good film for a “B”
Western (even one from a major studio and with the added expense of
Technicolor), and the Sea Wolf
origins of the story and Sackheim’s clever adaptation of a nautical story into
a Western gives this film far more depth and richness than most of the cheap
Westerns of the time.
