Jeff Arnold’s West

The blog of a Western fan, for other Western fans

The Vanquished (Paramount, 1953)

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Crooked town boss Lyle
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I don’t mind John Payne Westerns. He was not maybe in the very top rank of Western actors, nor was he an especially charismatic actor; many will remember him most as The Restless Gun on TV. But he was solid and some of his big-screen efforts were perfectly creditable. Such a one is his 1953 outing, for Paramount, no less, The Vanquished.
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Payne saves the town – and has a choice
 
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I also like this picture because Lyle Bettger is the villain, and I am a bit of a Lyle fan on the quiet. This was in fact only his second feature-film Western (he had been Sterling Hayden’s smiling sidekick in the exellent Denver and Rio Grande the year before). Blond men make good villains, for some odd reason, and none better that Mr Bettger, who villained his way from Western to Western all through the 1950s and 60s. The only trouble with The Vanquished, though, is that he doesn’t smile enough. He’s just a dead-straight out-and-out bad guy. Lyle was at his best when being charming. Like a snake.
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Great villain
 
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The Vanquished is no great classic. The studio brought out Shane that year and The Vanquished is certainly not in that class, nor can it really compete with Warner Bros’ Hondo or MGM’s The Naked Spur. But it can hold its head up among the likes of, say, Thunder over the Plains (a movie with which it has certain things in common), The Nebraskan or The Moonlighter, and it was a lot better than the clunky Pony Express or noxious Arrowhead (both the last two also Paramount).

 

 

It’s a Reconstruction story. Usually in Westerns (such as, indeed, Thunder over the Plains) this is an unmitigated Bad Thing. Reconstruction stories are always about evil and dishonest carpet-baggers, backed up by Union troops, oppressing the decent Southern folk with taxes and appropriations. No mention of the benefits of Reconstruction is ever made and if African-Americans appear at all they are referred to as darkies and are the object of derision. There is usually a courageous ex-soldier (Union or Confederate) who takes up the cause of the (white) locals and bests the crooked Northerners.

 

 

But The Vanquished is slightly more nuanced than that. Yes, it does have an ex-soldier hero (Payne) thwarting the oppressor (Bettger) and true, there are no African-Americans to be seen except as silent servants. But the military authorities, in the shape first of General Hildebrandt (Charles Evans) and, when Bettger murders him, General Morris (John Dierkes, splendidly bearded) are full of integrity, and they are decently determined to stamp out corruption, which they do. And Bettger, and his mistress Rose (Jan Sterling), a former seamstress for the rich folk, are local people getting their own back, not Northerners.

 

 

Three people worked on the screenplay, including Winston Miller, who had collaborated with Selznick on the script of Gone with the Wind, but he said, “Westerns happened to be what I could do best. There are a lot of pictures I couldn’t do, like a highly dramatic Bette Davis picture. I can only speak for myself, but you find your niche, you find that other people like it. I never took an assignment I didn’t think I could make a good picture out of.” He did My Darling Clementine for John Ford, and wrote smaller but classy Westerns such as Fury at Furnace Creek and Station West. So that’s probably why the screenplay of The Vanquished is as interesting as it is.
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A bit grainy but the only photo I could find of Winston Miller
 
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The director was Edward Ludwig, who had been an actor in silent movies, then screenwriter, and had started directing in the 1930s. He made the successful war film The Fighting Seabees with John Wayne at Republic, and later directed a lot of Western TV shows, notably those Restless Gun ones with Payne. He didn’t do all that many big-screen Westerns, though. This was his fourth of only five.
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Ludwig
 
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It may have been Paramount but it was still a modest Western. You can tell it’s low-budget. There are few exteriors and most is done in the studio. Still, it is in Technicolor.

 

 

It’s 1866. In the first reel Payne rages to the military at the injustice of the corrupt administration of Roger Hale (Bettger) in his (unnamed) Southern home town, but as soon as he gets there he declares to the town notables in the saloon that he has no interest in opposing Hale, and indeed he goes to work for him, foreclosing and such. Of course we know that he is undercover, working to get the dirt on Hale, but the townsfolk don’t know that and they ostracize him. Well, Hale has personally hanged a citizen in the main street in the first reel so no wonder he and his henchpersons aren’t very popular. Willard Parker is one of those. He is the corrupt Army captain in on Hale’s nefarious schemes.
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Lyle lords it over the town with his lady – I mean, woman, Jan Sterling
 
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Apart from Rose, who, Hale says, will be a rich woman, but never a lady, there is the doctor’s glam daughter Jane (Coleen Gray) who used to love Payne before the war and now re-falls for him. She is demure and proper but plucky and determined. Ms Gray was a former Fox starlet who had had the honor of being fifth-billed in Red River and then appeared in three lesser Westerns. Jan Sterling, Rose, was an actress who specialized in the sulky pout and the year after The Vanquished would be Oscar nominated for her part in The High and the Mighty with Wayne. Earlier in ’53 she had been ‘the other woman’ to Rhonda Fleming in the rather dire Pony Express.
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Oh dear, these studio publicity stills…
 
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There’s a good bit with some scissors which has a Hitchcockian tinge and also reminds you of The Furies.
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Scissors
 
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Worth a look.

 

 

8 Responses

  1. Any film that has Coleen Gray chasing Jan Sterling around the bedroom
    brandishing an enormous pair of scissors has to be worthy of anyone's
    attention…very Freudian and Coleen's the good gal in this one.
    The New York Post's Lou Lumenick considered Ludwig underrated..I agree.
    A new…ish French imprint called Movinside are releasing Payne's
    THE EAGLE & THE HAWK on Blu Ray later this year. Historical nonesense
    it may be but beautiful Sedona locations and James Wong Howe photography
    save the day. I'm a total sucker for these splashy Pine-Thomas things and
    wish more of them were available in high-definition.

  2. I think this Winston Miller may have been a child actor in silent days – if so, he played George O'Brien's character as a child, very effectively witnessing his father' grisly murder, in the beginning of "The Iron Horse."

  3. Not my favourite Payne western ( "THE ROAD TO DENVER" perhaps?) but an enjoyable one nonetheless.
    I had the distinct pleasure in the 80s of finding myself sat next to Jan Sterling at a film gathering in London. She was chatty and most charming.

    1. That's interesting. To compare the real person with the screen persona. The nearest I came to that was meeting Kenneth Branagh, who, regrettably, has not distinguished himself in the Western genre.
      Jeff

  4. Jeff Chandler like John Payne seemed to like to play flawed characters
    in some of his 50's films. Worth checking out is the Chandler starrer
    DRANGO which is a reverse take on THE VANQUISHED.
    Whereas Ludwig goes for a florid Southern Gothic style DRANGO director
    Hall Bartlett
    goes for a dark Noirish tone. DRANGO I believe was shot by the
    aforementioned James Wong Howe.

    1. Yes, I'm quite pro-Chandler.
      Will check out Drango.
      Howe one of my favorite cinematographers.
      Jeff

  5. Jeff, would you know anything about John Paynes motorcycles ? I have a photo of him with a 1942 Indian Chief another with a Crocker. Im looking for more photos or info. cheers

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