Three Bad Men (Fox Film Corporation, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 26, 2025) my husband Charles and I watched Late Night with Stephen Colbert, which among other things featured Chris Hemsworth taking the “Colbert Questionert,” a list of 15 questions Colbert asks selected guests to make sure they can be well and truly “known” to him and his audiences. One of the questions was, “Favorite Action Movie” – and if I were asked that question my choice would be an unusual out-of-left-field one: John Ford's tragically neglected and unsung 1926 silent masterpiece, Three Bad Men. My husband Charles and I watched it on January 13, 2008 – four months before I launched this blog – and here’s what I had to say about it when I wrote my journal the next morning.

My partner Charles and I watched the third film in sequence from the Ford at Fox box — which turned out to be an unexpected masterpiece; Three Bad Men, a surprisingly dark Western set against the backdrop of the Dakota land rush in 1876 (a precursor to the one in Oklahoma 14 years later and triggered by the discovery of gold in the Dakota Hills, for which the Sioux Indians were forced off their lands and onto smaller and nastier reservations — a reality considerably whitewashed in this film’s expository titles — to make room for the whites). Three Bad Men was based on a novel called Over the Border by one Herman Whitaker, though it certainly has a family resemblance to Peter B. Kyne’s story “Three Godfathers” (which Ford had already filmed at Universal in 1919 as Marked Men and would remake for MGM in 1948 in color, with John Wayne in the lead). It was scripted by John Stone with titles by Ralph Spence and Malcolm Stuart Boylan — though the cornball humor and the references to actual old songs of the period are pure Ford (it’s intriguing that Ford was using old songs in his films even before sound came in and actually allowed him to make sure the audience could hear them) — and photographed by George Schneiderman, though this time the surviving print was scratchy and grainy and, though quite watchable, didn’t do justice to Schneiderman’s work the way the DVD’s of Just Pals and The Iron Horse had. Also, according to Ford biographer Tag Gallagher, the film was drastically cut during its initial release (from 118 to 92 minutes) and the shorter version is all that survives — one suspects the longer version would have made more of some of the contrasts, like the Southern background of leading lady Lee Carlton (Olive Borden), revealed when the canteen on her wagon is grey and has the crossed-swords Confederate logo and the initials “C.S.A.” on it, versus the Northern background of leading man Dan O’Malley (George O’Brien), who appears in most of his scenes in full Union uniform — but, like such other famously shorn films as Greed and The Magnificent Ambersons, what’s left of Three Bad Men is enough to establish its greatness.

Gallagher says it was a major box-office flop in 1926 — so much so that Ford, who in the preceding 12 years of his directorial career had made Westerns almost exclusively, didn’t make another Western at all for the next 13 years (until Stagecoach marked his return to the genre). What I suspect turned audiences off of this movie in 1926 is the very quality that today makes it seem far ahead of its time: its moral ambiguity. The titular three bad men are outlaws “Bull” Stanley (Tom Santschi, a second-tier Western star who lasted until the end of the silent era but mostly in independent “B”’s), Mike Costigan (J. Farrell MacDonald) and “Spade” Allen (Frank Campeau), and we know they’re bad because we see a montage of wanted posters for them in various jurisdictions (including Mexico!) and crimes (mostly bank robbery and horse stealing), but in the plot of the film they actually become heroes and (like the “bad” men in Three Godfathers) are redeemed at the end by sacrificing their lives for a good cause — here, to save the ingénue leads. The real villain is Layne Hunter (Lou Tellegen, a surprisingly cosmopolitan actor to turn up in a John Ford Western), the sheriff of the town of Custer, from which the land rush is supposed to start; though supposedly on the side of law and order, he actually has his own gang of criminals, whom he sends after the high-priced thoroughbred race horses in the Carlton wagon train. Hunter’s gang kills Lee Carlton’s father, but then the three “bad” men happen by because they were planning to steal the race horses themselves, only instead of doing so they drive off Hunter’s men and save Lee, with “Bull” insisting to his sidekicks that they leave Lee’s horses alone while he takes the girl under his personal protection. Lee and O’Malley had already met earlier in a rather annoying meet-cute in which she had got grease on her face from her wagon losing its wheel (his face looks like that of a normal human being, but hers is so heavily swathed in white makeup she looks like a mime), and intriguingly it is Lee who is the sexual aggressor between them, but through most of the film Lee is living with “Bull” and seems genuinely attracted to him, and it’s he who decides he isn’t worthy of her and so he sends his men into Custer to find her a suitable husband.

There’s one incredible scene in the town saloon in which Mike and “Spade” (whose body language when they sleep together does seem decidedly homoerotic) fasten onto a “dandy” type and practically cruise him — when they’re not opening his mouth and kicking his leg as they would do if they were buying a horse. Hunter is shown as such a no-goodnick he off-handedly tells his mistress Millie (Priscilla Bonner) to get lost (and there’s a mistaken-identity scene in which she sneaks up behind O’Malley, who’s joined “Bull”’s entourage, and attempts to seduce him while he has his eyes closed and responds because he thinks she’s Lee; it’s old hat but still funny) and devises a scheme to sneak across the border into land-rush territory the night before, grab a choice spot and drive off anyone who tries to claim that land legitimately. Three Bad Men contains a spectacular sequence of the land rush itself, comparing favorably to the depictions of the later Oklahoma land rush in William S. Hart’s Tumbleweeds (also released in 1926), Cimarron (1931) and The Oklahoma Kid (1939) and obviously meant as Fox’s attempt to attract audiences who’d loved The Iron Horse with more exciting mass action. It includes a great bit in which the editor of the Custer paper takes along a pressman and a press on a flatbed wagon so he can write dispatches from the land rush as it’s going on — which Ford insisted was based on a true story: “The newspaperman who rode along with his press — printing the news all through the event — that actually happened.” It also has a superbly staged fight scene in the Custer saloon and a heart-stoppingly beautiful shot introducing the title characters against either a rising or setting sun (we’re not sure which but, even in a less than pristine print, Schneiderman’s camerawork is absolutely gorgeous), but this is more than a simple story illustrated with pretty pictures.

The moral ambiguity and especially the strong attraction between Lee and “Bull” (anticipating one of Ford’s last films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance from 1962, in its love triangle between an innocent young woman, a bookish young man and a man of strength and power) make this an extraordinary movie for 1926, a precursor of the “psychological Westerns” that were all the rage in the early 1950’s and considered so innovative then. Three Bad Men also derives a lot of its richness from a favorite theme of Ford’s: the “civilization” of the West, the imposition of rules and mutual responsibilities on previously free-wheeling frontier communities, and the role of women in bringing that about (which makes me wonder, however good the 1931 Cimarron is as it stands, if it would have been even better if Ford had directed it; maybe he would have made Yancey Cravat’s wanderlust believable, a task that evaded Wesley Ruggles and his writers). There’s also a great scene in the middle of the land rush in which a pioneer family is stopped short of the gold country when their wagon breaks down, the husband paints a sign on their wagon reading, “Busted by God!,” the wife (it would be the woman!) picks up the soil and grinds it in her hands, and then solemnly tells her husband and us that the real gold in the Dakota country is in the fertility of its soil. In the end, the three bad men give their lives to save O’Malley and Lee from Hunter’s men and give them time to plant their homestead — and an epilogue reveals their farm, growing a bumper crop of wheat freely waving in the wind, and their home and child, whom they’ve named after the “bad” men who enabled them to survive long enough to settle, marry and give birth to him. Three Bad Men is a surprising masterpiece, its sentimentality held in sufficient check (as with Chaplin, Ford’s biggest weakness as an artist was his tendency towards the sentimental) that it can reach far deeper levels of emotion than the average film of its (or any, for that matter) time — and the fact that the “bad” men are its heroes and the representative of law and order its principal villain gives it a richness and moral complexity that may have put off 1926 audiences but makes the film seem modern now.