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Hanging day in Wolf City, Wyoming
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Comedy Westerns can be unfunny parodies (and to the serious Westernista, faintly sacrilegious) or affectionate, smiling tributes. You can probably think of examples of both. In the latter category I would place the Buster Keaton Go West, the 1939 Destry, the Bob Hope Paleface pictures, The Sheepman and, of course, Blazing Saddles. Among others. I love these films and will watch them any time they come on. Cat Ballou just about makes it into the list of affectionate tributes. It’s not a mocking effort and it laughs with rather than at the genre. It’s not the most hilarious film, though, and for me anyway doesn’t come in the must-watch department when it appears in the TV schedules. Still, it has quite a lot going for it.
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Derringers for one thing. You know how I like the villainous little guns. Usually they appear in the hands of saloon gals, gamblers or besuited crooks. But in Cat Ballou semi-goody Jed (Dwayne Hickman), dressed as a priest to rescue his pardner from the clutches of Sheriff Bruce Cabot, conceals a derringer in a bible. In a bible! Boy, is that sneaky. Dean Martin copied that idea in 5 Card Stud three years later. So that was a great bit in Cat Ballou. Better still, Cat Ballou is a two-derringer movie (a rare bird indeed) because later on Cat shoots Sir Harry (Reginald Denny) with one (no more than he deserved), and that’s what leads her to the gallows in Wolf City, WY in 1894.
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A two-derringer Western
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That’s where the story is set, and it’s the time of the Hole in the Wall Gang, though their glory hath departed and Butch Cassidy is played by Arthur Hunnicutt, 55 but doing his old-timer routine. Actually, Butch (Robert Leroy Parker) didn’t even start his depredations or recruit the Sundance Kid until 1896, when he was 30, but we won’t worry about that too much.
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Paul Newman seems to have aged a bit
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In fact the cast of Cat Ballou is pretty good. It is true that the good-badmen heroes, Michael Callan as Clay and Dwayne Hickman as Jed, were not top-line Western stars, though Mr Callan was in They Came to Cordura and The Magnificent Seven Ride! and Mr Hickman was in several TV Westerns. But other members of the cast were a delight to watch. Jane Fonda is a rather charming Cat. Arthur as Butch Cassidy has to be worth seeing and there’s Jay C Flippen as the corrupt sheriff complementing the great Bruce Cabot as lawman. Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye provide an entertaining Greek chorus with banjos (which they strum very unconvincingly to the soundtrack, sometimes not even bothering).
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Above all we have Lee Marvin as both the drunken gunslinger Kid Shelleen and the evil noseless assassin Tim Strawn. Several actors had been considered before Lee, notably Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. Jack Palance lobbied hard for the part. They got the right guy. Lee did it for only $30,000, but it earned him an Oscar, beating out also-nominated Laurence Olivier and Rod Steiger, so respect. Of course, Lee knew a thing or two about drunks cleaning up. Fellow actor Dwayne Hickman said that Lee was taking nips from a vodka bottle throughout filming, and according to Michael Callan, on the last day of filming Lee “had to be poured into the car, and then the plane. Somehow, he had gotten hold of a .45, and started shooting things on the road.” Lee Marvin was not the most sober or restrained of people.
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Lawman Cabot
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Lawman Flippen
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Marvin was in 20 Western movies (if you regard The Missouri Traveler, Pocket Money, Raintree County and Bad Day at Black Rock as Westerns) and one or two of his appearances were perhaps less than epic but his Liberty Valance, his Monte Walsh, his Masters in Seven Men from Now and his part as the leader Fardan in The Professionals make him a leading Western star. He had the right level of grit and toughness and he always lifted even an indifferent movie. Four years after Cat Ballou he starred in another famous box-office hit comedy Western, Paint Your Wagon. Luckily, in Cat Ballou he does not break into song. He certainly hams it up as the drunk Shelleen but he is splendidly menacing as Strawn. And the part where he cleans up, and his squire, the Sioux Jackson Two Bears (Tom Nardini), dresses him in his gunslinger armor like some medieval knight, is memorable. The idea of the broken-down gunfighter getting back into shape is of course a familiar trope, and the getting the old guns and clothes out of a drawer or trunk is instantly recognizable to us.
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Marvin fine
Yakima Canutt was the 2nd Unit director too, so the stunts are good.
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The movie was directed by Elliott Silverstein, not perhaps in the front rank of Western directors but he had done some TV shows and in 1970 he was to direct A Man Called Horse. Silverstein later said, “The film was a lucky strike. It just happened that everything came together. Out of all the chaos came something I don’t think anbybody expected, including me.”
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Burt Kennedy said, “We had lunch in Bel Air at Harold [producer Harold Hecht]’s house. We made a deal for me to write Cat Ballou. When I came back, the phone was ringing and it was Harold, and he fired me!” So that didn’t last too long. The story had been floating around Hollywood since The Ballad of Cat Ballou by Roy Chanslor (the Johnny Guitar guy) had been been published in 1956. By the time it became a film the serious novel had become a comic parody. In the end it was written up into a screenplay by Walter Newman, who worked with Nunnally Johnson on The True Story of Jesse James and also contributed (uncredited) to The Magnificent Seven, and the hugely experienced Frank Pierson, who did loads of Have Gun – Will Travel episodes and would later do Cool Hand Luke and Dog Day Afternoon. Some of the lines are amusing and the story nips right along so no complaints there.
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Jane charming as Cat
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Jane Fonda got the lead. Marvin wasn’t too keen on her and said he found her “kind of pretentious”, and he didn’t care for her being a proponent of ‘The Method’. She was nominated for a BAFTA but the Oscars ignored her. Still, she was certainly vivacious and the picture was a huge success for her.
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The DP was Jack Marta (Dark Command) and there are some nice locations with Buckskin Joe, Colorado standing in for Wyoming.
The Frank De Vol music sticks in your memory too.
And who will ever forget the cross-legged horse? Apparently that was pretty hard to stage. Horses don’t naturally lean on things or cross their legs. It was a parody of the James Earle Fraser statue, ‘The End of the Trail’.
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Great shot
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There was talk of a sequel. Silverstein remembered meeting Marvin at a party and mentioning the idea. “I was willing to try it,” Silverstein said, “and Lee mumbled … ‘Aah, mumble, mumble, CAREER’. I think he was trying to say that he wanted to broaden his career and not simply repeat. I think that’s what it was.” Well, it was a party, so coherent Marvin utterances weren’t too probable. There were two TV pilots in 1971, one with Jack Elam and one with Forrest Tucker, but those series never happened.
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4 Responses
One of my favorite picture — yup, I admit it. When I first saw this on the late show, I nearly laughed myself into a hernia. I always wondered why Callan was not a bigger star. He is extremely appealing and has an easygoing presence. One of the many mysteries of the movies. The Cole-Kaye narration is a delight. I think this is a great winner — not the hilarity of Son of Paleface — but a very funny picture.
Glad you like it. The picture sure has its fans. In fact it appears in various lists of the best Western movies ever, e;g. No. 58 in IMDB's 'The 100 Greatest Western Movies of All Time'.
Jeff
My favorite line is when Lee Marvin asks Cat's father for a drink and he asks Jackson Two Bears "Do you have that bottle you carry around to make that sheriff mad?"
Richard
Yes, nice one. Actually the writing is pretty good and there are a good number of witty one-liners.
Jeff