Destry Rides Again (Universal, 1939)

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

Two nights ago (Sunday, March 10) my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of the 1939 Destry Rides Again, produced by Joe Pasternak, directed by George Marshall and starring Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart (billed in that order!). It’s become known as Dietrich’s comeback film after she was one of the stars named by independent exhibitor Harry Brandt as “box-office poison” in a notorious Hollywood Reporter trade-paper ad in 1938. Among the other people named in Brandt’s ad were Mae West, Edward Arnold, Greta Garbo (Brandt conceded that her films still made money in Europe, but said that “does not help theater owners in the United States”), Joan Crawford and Kay Francis. “Paramount showed cleverness and consideration for exhibitors by buying off Dietrich's contract, which called for one more picture,” Brandt wrote. “Dietrich, too, is poison at the box office” – the one part of the ad that actually contained the phrase “box-office poison.” Dietrich accepted an offer from Universal at half her previous Paramount salary and took the part of “Frenchy,” a saloon entertainer in the rough-and-ready town of Bottleneck in the Old West. (It’s typical of Hollywood then that one foreign accent was considered the same as another, so no one thought it odd that the German-born Dietrich should play a Frenchwoman – which she already had in her first American film, Morocco, in 1930.) Destry Rides Again began as a 1930 novel by Max Brand (whose real name was the German-sounding “Frederick Schiller Faust”!) which Universal had first filmed in 1932 as a comeback vehicle for Tom Mix. Mix had seen the writing on the wall in 1927 when sound came in and quit the movies to perform in circuses; in 1932 he decided to return to filmmaking and make his first talkie. Directed by Benjamin Stoloff from a script by Robert Keith and Richard Schayer, the 1932 Destry Rides Again more or less followed the plot of Brand’s novel: Harrison Destry (called “Tom” in the movie) was previously framed for a crime he didn’t commit by the story’s villain, Chester Bent, who gets his friends onto the jury so Destry is convicted. He serves two years in prison and then seeks revenge when he’s released.

In 1939 Joe Pasternak was a producer at Universal who’d became famous for the movies that made Deanna Durbin a star, but when a friend of his suggested that he couldn’t do anything else, Pasternak recalled, “I told him that I could produce any kind of picture – even a Western. I came across this Max Brand property that had been made with Tom Mix. At first glance, it looked all right, so to show my friend that I meant business, I announced that I was going to film Destry Rides Again. Then, after I began studying the book closer, I realized that I’d made a mistake. The story wasn’t as good as I’d originally thought. Yet I’d stuck my neck out, so I decided to go ahead with the picture anyway. But we did some extensive rewriting.” In fact, the rewriting was so extensive the film became an almost totally different story; the credited writers are Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell and Henry Myers, and the credits state merely that the film was “suggested by,” not “based on,” Brand’s novel. Tom Destry, Jr. (James Stewart) has foresworn the use of guns after his father, a former sheriff, was shot to death in the backstory. The town of Bottleneck is run by no-goodnik Kent (Brian Donlevy), who owns the local saloon where Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich) performs. The town mayor, Slade (Samuel S. Hinds), is part of Kent’s organization. When the town sheriff, Samuel Keogh (Joe King), is shot and killed by one of Kent’s men, Gyp Watson (Allen Jenkins – and yes, it’s odd to see this usually comic-relief actor as a black-hearted gunman!), Slade appoints the town drunk, Washington Dimsdale (Charles Winninger), as the new sheriff. Realizing he’s incompetent, Dimsdale sends for Destry as his deputy because he remembers how good a sheriff Destry, Sr. was. Only Destry, Jr. shows up in Bottleneck with Jack Tyndall (Jack Carson) and his wife Janice (Irene Hervey), and it doesn’t help his rough-and-tumble image that the first thing he does when he gets out of the stagecoach is hold Janice’s parasol. It doesn’t take long for Destry to deduce that Gyp Watson is Keogh’s killer, though he can’t prove it until he finds Keogh’s body, and Destry arrests Gyp but Slade announces he’s going to preside over the trial himself, which will ensure Gyp’s acquittal. Destry sends out of town for an honest judge, Murtaugh (whom we never see), but Janice lets slip that Destry has sent for an out-of-town judge and Kent’s men set out to ambush the new judge and keep their control over Bottleneck.

I’d had fond memories of Destry Rides Again but I hadn’t realized what a mess it really is; it’s as if Jackson, Purcell and Myers simply put all the Western clichés into a blender and spat them out again in whatever order they ended up in. There’s a genuinely moving final scene in which Destry puts on a pair of shootin’ irons to go after Kent and the baddies (in a film like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs this would have been glorified as the character realizing it’s a violent world out there and you need guns to fight back) and Kent tries to kill him, but Frenchy comes between them, takes the bullet meant for Destry, and dies. But we don’t see Judge Murtaugh arrive in Bottleneck and preside over the trials that clean up the town at long last, and we should have. It’s hard to believe that James Stewart gave such a routine aw-shucks performance the same year he was incandescent as Senator Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The best parts of Destry Rides Again are Dietrich’s songs, written by her favorite songwriter, Frederick Hollander (who under his original name, Friedrich Holländer, had been her principal composer in Germany as well; he wrote all four songs she sang in her star-making film, The Blue Angel, including what became her theme song, “Falling in Love Again”), with lyrics by Frank Loesser three years before he became a songwriter himself. Her rendition of “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” made it one of Dietrich’s standards, an inevitable part of her stage act in later years, though she also gets a quite nice and un-rambunctious ballad called “You’ve Got That Look.” Destry Rides Again is a movie that’s probably better remembered than it is, but it was good for Marlene Dietrich (she made a comeback essentially by making fun of her former image and playing a woman in a community of rough-and-tumble men) and I’ve long been amused by the Rolling Stone review of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles that claimed that “he hates the Germans so much they’re anachronistically dragged into this film.” Their reviewer obviously didn’t realize that Madeline Kahn’s “Lili Von Shtüpp” was a parody not only of Marlene Dietrich in general but Destry Rides Again in particular!