Jeff Arnold’s West

The blog of a Western fan, for other Western fans

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A fine Western noir
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Rawhide is a much underrated but absolutely excellent Western.

 

Given that Tyrone Power had been such a megastar for Fox and was Jesse James in their big color picture of the same name in 1939, it was perhaps surprising that they should have put him in this apparently small, black & white Western in 1951. But it was a high-quality picture in fact and Power was superb in it. He was not really a Western hero. Oh, sure, every big studio star had to climb into the saddle occasionally in those days, even if he were allergic to horses, and Power mounted up six times.
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Power and Hayward: excellent combination
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But apart from Jesse James and Rawhide, two were Canadian Mountie pictures, one was a Brigham Young biopic and in the other he was Zorro; they hardly count as Westerns at all. Jesse James notwithstanding, Rawhide was easily the best he was in. In it he is gritty, tough and ready to fight with fist or six-gun, a real Western lead. And he wears a great shirt.

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Amusing
 
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The picture was directed – very well directed too – by Henry Hathaway. He’d cut his Western teeth on a long series of Zane Grey adaptations for Paramount in the 1930s, many with Randolph Scott, and in 1940 did that Brigham Young film with Power. He later directed Gary Cooper and John Wayne in some of their famous Westerns. So Hathaway knew what he was doing in the West and he does a damn good job with Rawhide, which is pacey, gripping and has excellent performances from the cast.

 

And the cast is top notch. Apart from Power, aptly named, we have a tough, belligerent Susan Hayward, magnificent in this. She first appears as an unmarried mother, quite shocking for 1951 audiences. The scene where, holding the baby, she demands to be addressed as Miss and not Mrs Holt is very well handled. In fact it turns out the little girl is her late sister’s child and she is going back East to take the infant from the placer camps in California to ‘civilization’. Full marks to Ms Hayward for an outstanding performance. She was one of the Hathaway Garden of Evil alumni (where she also played a tough cookie) and was also memorable in Canyon Passage, The Lusty Men and, in older age, The Revengers, all good Westerns and all the better for having her in them.
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She was terrific in Westerns
 
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Then we have Edgar Buchanan as the manager of the stage way-station, as grumpy and crusty as we would expect from the excellent Edgar and one of his best roles. For the scene is set somewhere in the Southwest, between Tucson, AZ and Huntsville, TX, so maybe southern New Mexico, though it is not specified (in any case, beautiful scenery, very well shot in Alabama Hills, Lone Pine locations by Milton R Krasner). Four bandits have broken out of Huntsville and take over the staging post in order to rob the stage of its bullion.

 

And the bandits are seriously good. They are led by a gripping Hugh Marlowe as Zimmermann. Marlowe was better known for his drama, crime and mystery thrillers but he was in seven Western features (and some TV shows), including with Hayward under Hathaway in Garden of Evil in ’54. Rawhide was his first and what a pity he didn’t do more.
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Marlowe: electrifying
 
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His three henchmen are played by Jack Elam, Dean Jagger and George Tobias, all terrific. It was one of Elam’s earliest parts and one of his best – even possibly the very best. Right from the get-go he appears as a manic, bloodthirsty villain, just out of two years in the pen, and that squint-eyed, splay-toed, stooping figure is all that we want Jack to be. The sheer evil glee with which he shoots at the baby girl (in a scene that would never be allowed nowadays) is one of the most memorable
moments in Westerns. Jagger is the intellectually challenged Yancy, another classy performance from this great actor, and Tobias is the loyal ox Gratz. It really is one of the best gangs of western badmen ever assembled.
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Elam: manic
 
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And then other favorite Western character actors make their appearance, such as Jeff Corey as the stage driver, James Millican as the shotgun messenger and Kenneth Tobey as a Ward Bondish cavalry lieutenant. You really couldn’t ask for a better cast.

 

Another excellent feature of this movie is the music. It starts with a catchy, memorable tune worthy of a big A-picture, dum-de-dum-de-dum, morphs into O Susanna as the stage bowls along and gets terrifically dark when the sinister, threatening badmen are holding the good folk hostage. It’s by Sol Kaplan and it’s one of my fave Western scores. Kaplan’s music for Westerns included The Fiend Who Walked the West (because Fox re-used the score from The Day the Earth Stood Still). Good stuff.

 

The movie is written by Dudley Nichols, so that explains the quality of the script. It was in fact Nichols’s first Western since Stagecoach. The following year he adapted the AB Guthrie Jr. novel for The Big Sky and in 1957 he did The Tin Star. That’s pedigree.
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Wonderful locations, fine photography
 
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There’s one bit that doesn’t ring true, when bad Guy Marlowe tells Power that he is a green boy now but when he grows it will be different. Marlowe was in fact only three years older than Power.

 

I love the intro and what they call an outro, as the voiceover (Gary Merrill) tells us about “the jackass mail”, St Louis to San Francisco in 25 days and all for $200 American. In fact I love the whole movie and do not really understand why it is so little thought of. It’s a gripping Western noir that won few plaudits at the time – or since – and yet is one of the best little Westerns the early 50s had to offer. It was apparently a remake of Fox’s 1935 crime melodrama Show Them No Mercy with Rochelle Hudson and Cesar Romero, which I haven’t seen. I doubt it could be as good as this.

 

 

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14 Responses

  1. I love this movie, too. It's very tight and the sense of menace is palpable. And you are 100% right about Marlowe. He's terrific in this picture; he was largely wasted in minor pictures or weak characters, but he is riveting here. I wish he had made more pictures like it.

  2. Yup. Funny, though, that you and I are the only people on the planet who know how good this Western is.
    Jeff

    1. one more vote for the awesomeness of this movie – Hathaway's a terrific director and this is one of his finest films.

    2. # Me too! Rawhide is a great film. Elam is a genuinely terrifying psycho. I like the way the corny opening music gives way to western noir.

  3. Here goes, Jeff. I've watched as many westerns as you have. I'm a pathological western addict, hopelessly hooked by everything to do with the genre. I've met and interviewed Rod Steiger, Robert Altman, Charles Bronson, JD Cannon, Vincent Gardenia, Anthony Franciosa and a couple of others I'd rather not mention. I didn't exactly interview Bronson. Not many people did. Generally speaking, he didn't give interviews. The only one I recall was on the release of Breakheart Pass, and Jill Ireland answered some of the questions for him.

    All this is to show my credentials before I make a controversial statement. I say Hathaway's From Hell to Texas is a superb movie, possibly a GREAT one. So Don Murray was and still is largely unknown. Does that matter? The hell it does. It's actually refreshing to watch a lesser known player take the lead in a relatively prestigious studio oater – and succeed wonderfully.

    A fine cast backs him up magnificently, especially Chill Wills, Diane Varsi and Dennis Hopper, legendary these days but unknown in the late '50s. Then there's the magnificent RG Armstrong, such a powerful actor he could be terrifying in the right part – see his turn as the jailer in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. For me, the movie comes above The Searchers. It uses the landscape as well as Ford, and has none of the comedy crap that rings false, like the squirm-inducing interludes with Ken Curtis. It gets on with the story and sticks with it without a trace of sentimentality. I'll be gunned down at dawn for saying this, but fair's fair. Hathaway and his team deserve the highest praise for their achievement. This films is shockingly little-known and I'll yell in support of it until I go to Boot Hill.

    1. Hi Bill
      I admire your enthusiasm and it's nice to have a perhaps underrated Western that one really likes. Rawhide and From Hell to Texas are similar in this.
      Personally, I would put From Hell to Texas in the very good rather than the great category, but that's just an opinion. I was quite complimentary about it, I recall, in my Dec 2010 review, http://jeffarnoldblog.blogspot.fr/search?q=from+hell+to+texas.
      Thanks for your comment. Nice to hear from a fellow obsessive!
      Jeff

  4. Not having heard much about this, I didn’t have high hopes the first time I saw it, but boy, was I pleasantly surprised. Great cast like you pointed out and very suspenseful. Except for All About Eve I don’t think I’ve seen better work from Marlowe and Elam is delightfully psycho. Probably seen it 5 times and it still holds up.

  5. I think Rawhide is a great movie. I watched it a little while ago and have no recollection of ever seeing it before. But I knew all the music – as if i had heard it many times. Work that one out. I have noticed that most films which became lifelong favourites have effective scores – so my guess is I saw it as an impressionable youngster. Another one I must have seen is The Charge at Feather River. Haven’t seen it since but I remembered the title and the tune.

  6. Wow. Over the years I’ve managed to see pretty much all the Westerns (sound era, anyway) by all the top Hollywood ‘Old Master’ filmmakers. But one or two have eluded me, including this one – until last night. And what a lovely surprise it was – you’re right, it’s actually close to flawless (it has one plot-point that didn’t work for me (not the one you mention)). Power and Hayward are very good and Marlowe and Elam outstanding. Script, direction and photography all top-notch. Such assured economy; nary a wasted shot or line of dialogue.

    A little bonus for me was seeing James Millican in the same film and in fact the same scenes as another character actor Louis Jean Heydt. They have such similar sounding voices, and quite similar looks, that for years, not knowing their names but seeing them pop up in different films, I thought they were actually the same person, it was only in the IMDB and Wiki era that I discovered my error. Heydt sports a moustache in this one, perhaps to prevent audience confusion (I wonder if it was an industry in-joke to have cast them in the same movie in the first place). A shame to read on Wikipedia that they both died before their time.

    1. Yes, this Western slipped under many people’s radar for a long time. It’s a pity because it’s really top-notch.
      I had no problem telling Millican from Heydt but I too had confusion issues for some time, even Marvin and Coburn!

      1. Seen together these two gentlemen are obviously not the same person (though similar). Seen apart in different movies with months or years between them- in an era before the internet provided easy referencing – it was easy for them to blend into one! At least in the eyes of this myopic viewer.

        The only weakness in Rawhide for me was a bit where after the dull knife Power and Hayward have been using to chisel an escape-hole in the wall accidentally ricochets outside. Hayward uses a ruse to go out to that area with the baby in hopes of retrieving it, Elam and another henchman follow… and the scene ends with them spotting the knife in the kid’s hands. Instead of confiscating it and reporting it to Marlowe, following a bit of to-and-fro with Hayward they just leave it and she brings it back to Power! I know these guys are supposed to be dumb oxes but not that dumb surely! This was too implausible for me.

        Apart from that the movie is perfect, and reminds me a little of The Tall T – another hostage situation, and another where the main bad guy is a lot smarter than his gang and perhaps respects and even a little envies the good guy. Though I think perhaps this philosophical theme is less scripted-in here than it comes out of Marlowe’s admirable performance.

        Thank you for the warm review of this film which vindicated my pleasant surprise upon finally encountering it. Til next time…

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