The Virginian (Paramount, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I screened a movie that was intriguing if not all that great as filmmaking: the 1929 Paramount version of Owen Wister’s 1902 Western novel The Virginian (full title: The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains), which had been a best-selling novel and then a successful play written by Wister and Kirke La Shelle (both of whom get credit for the story source in this film) in 1904. It had already been filmed by Paramount twice in the silent era – the first directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Dustin Farnum in 1914, the second, from 1923 with Kenneth Harlan and Florence Vidor – when the studio green-lighted this first sound version. The writing credits list “adapted by” Grover Jones and Keene Thompson, with Howard Estabrook credited with “screen play” and Edward E. Paramore, Jr. with “dialogue.” (In Aaron Latham’s Crazy Sundays, his book about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s years in Hollywood, he wrote that when Fitzgerald and Paramore worked together on the script for MGM’s film of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, Fitzgerald accused Paramore of writing “Owen Wister dialogue.” Now that I know Paramore actually wrote dialogue for a film based on a Wister novel, that criticism makes more sense.)

The Virginian was the first sound film directed by Victor Fleming and the first all-talkie made by Gary Cooper – though he’d done at least two previous films that had talking sequences, The Shopworn Angel (better known for a 1940 remake with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) and The Wolf Song. (Sound films took over so rapidly that a lot of big-budgeted silent films made in 1928 were quickly withdrawn so new scenes could be added and they could be advertised as talkies.) The Virginian emerges today as a good but not great movie, which avoids at least one of the pitfalls of early sound films – the actors deliver their lines naturalistically without any of the horrible pausing that makes a lot of early talkies almost unwatchable – and director Fleming and his recording engineer, M. M. Paggi, manage the difficult (in those days) feat of recording dialogue outdoors and making it comprehensible. But for a famous Western based on a legendary story it has hardly little action, and Charles was more bothered than I was by the lack of a background musical score (two years later another Western saga, Cimarron, directed by Wesley Ruggles and also scripted by Howard Estabrook, became the first sound film to use a non-source musical score throughout; the composer was Max Steiner, and he and other film composers soon perfected the technique of underscoring a film until it practically became an art form of its own).

The Virginian deals with a mysterious stranger, never referred to by name but only as “The Virginian” (Gary Cooper, visibly recognizable but sounding not quite like himself vocally because he’s trying to do a light Southern accent), who comes to the town of Sunk Creek, Wyoming as the foreman of a cattle ranch owned by Judge Henry (E. H. Calvert). Much of the movie takes place in the town’s saloon, where the three male central characters – The Virginian, his old friend Steve (Richard Arlen) and the bad guy, Trampas (Walter Huston), who leads a local gang of rustlers that are targeting Judge Henry’s cattle. Early on in the action a young woman named Molly Stark Wood (Mary Brian) comes to town to open a school for the children of Sunk Creek, and though Steve cruises her almost as soon as she arrives, naturally she falls for the Virginian even though they’re at cross purposes. She wants to stay, educate the town’s children (and, it’s hinted, any adults who want to learn as well) and in general make it a better, more respectable place, while the Virginian is feeling the wanderlust typical of male leads in Westerns and wants to skedaddle to Utah or Nevada or some place further West as soon as he catches the thieves that are rustling Judge Henry’s cattle. He discovers that his old friend Steve is one of the thieves, and leads a lynching party that hangs Steve and two other members of the gang. Later on the Virginian is ambushed and wounded by Trampas, who shoots him from behind, and the Virginian is urged (and has several opportunities) to kill Trampas similarly – but he’s too honorable a man to do that: he’s out to kill Trampas, all right, but he wants to do it facing him so he can’t be accused of the cowardice of shooting a man in the back.

One gets the impression that Wister’s story, with its conflicting loyalties and culture clashes, had a better potential movie in it than the one that actually got made. One of the best scenes is when Mary Brian’s character is confronted by pioneer woman Mrs. Taylor (Helen Ware), who tells her of how when they were coming out to Wyoming their wagon train was raided by Indians, who shot her husband and left him to die at her feet; and Our Schoolmarm says that she’s no stranger to Indian attacks – back in the old days her New England forebears were attacked by an Indian raiding party and nearly annihilated. Aside from the outrageous political incorrectness of the scene by modern-day standards – Native Americans depicted as mindless savages and the two white women comparing notes on how they successfully resisted their depredations – it’s actually one of the most powerful scenes in the film – but little is made of the issues that would seem to have been naturals for film. Gary Cooper, at least then, was too limited an actor really to dramatize the moral conflict between his old friendship and his responsibility to protect his boss’s herd – this film’s virtual endorsement of lynching is one of the many aspects that make it politically problematic today (if Turner Classic Movies decided they needed to bring in experts to do a disclaimer before showing this film, the disclaimer would be almost as long as the 91-minute running time of the movie itself) – and the final confrontation in the streets, properly facing each other, between the Virginian and Trampas is shot so slowly and perfunctorily that if you blinked, you’d miss it.

The Virginian lurches to such a weirdly perfunctory and inconclusive ending that if you blinked, you’d miss it – it’s not clear whether the Virginian flees Sunk Creek after killing Trampas or stays on (in the novel, at least according to its Wikipedia page, he stayed and ultimately became an influential figure in the town and a key campaigner in the eventual drive to make Wyoming a U.S. state). The Virginian has retained its popularity over the years; there was another version in 1946 with Joel McCrea, TV-movies in 2000 and 2014 (the latter with country singer Trace Adkins as The Virginian) and a TV series in the 1960’s that lasted eight years and starred James Drury (or, as Mad magazine called him in their parody, “James Droopy”). It was the origin of the line, “The next time you call me that, smile!” – said by the Virginian to Trampas in an early confrontation at that saloon – which became as much a bit of lingua franca slang as “Make him an offer he can’t refuse” did decades later. The Virginian is surprisingly well acted for an early talkie, not only by the three legendary male leads but by Mary Brian as well; she was an underrated actress who really brings multidimensionality to the character. Confronted with life as a single woman in a town full of horny straight guys (though the script is actually pretty decorous – besides the Virginian, Steve seems to be the only man who makes an outright advance on her), she manages to show the character’s strength between the respectable dignity and poise.

One thing I hadn’t expected was that Gary Cooper essentially remade the movie 23 years later when he made High Noon – where he also played an authority figure in a small Western town torn between wanting to flee and wanting to confront the outlaws threatening it, and also engaged to a schoolmarm who wants no part of the violence Cooper’s character doesn’t like but realizes will be necessary. There’s even a Mexican woman who hangs on at the cantina and briefly tempts Our Hero in both films (and, oddly, the imdb.com page for The Virginian doesn’t list either this character or the actress playing her), but the more incisive direction of Fred Zinnemann and the more sophisticated script by Carl Foreman make High Noon a classic while the 1929 The Virginian is reasonably entertaining but of interest mostly as an historical curio.