The Arizonian (RKO, 1935)

“That’s what it takes to make peace in the west”

The Arizonian was not a film known to this writer prior to recently spotting it lurking unloved in the darker, smaller hours of the TV schedule. Turns out it’s a bit of a find.

The title feels like it might well be a blatant play for some of the market share magic of The Virginian whose 1929 version, starring a young Gary Cooper, had been such a smash. But when it comes to the movie itself it quickly turns out to be one of those, like 1932’s Law and Order, that instead riffs on the Wyatt-Earp-in-Tombstone story while purporting to portray different characters entirely.

The ‘Wyatt’ character in this case is one Clay Tallent, played by Richard Dix. Clay rides into the film’s stand-in for Tombstone, here named Silver City, Arizona (n.b. in real life there are several Silver Cities but none in Arizona, apparently…). En route he foils a stagecoach robbery, rescuing Kitty Rogers, Silver City’s resident saloon singer. Clay’s reason for coming to Silver City is to catch up with his younger brother Orin, acted by James Bush, who’s resident there and is courting Kitty. However, there’s an almost instantaneous mutual attraction between Clay and Kitty. Poor old Orin is much slower on the uptake than we viewers and takes his time to figure out what’s going on – helped along by walking in on Clay and Kitty in romantic embrace (ironically just as Clay is trying to nobly break he and Kitty up so as not to hurt his little brother). How this love triangle eventually resolves itself you might be able to guess ahead of time, e-pards, but we don’t do spoilers on this site so my lips are sealed. What can be fairly observed is that this plotline is on the tiresome side, slowing down an otherwise peppy and pacey production.

Francis making a marshal of Richard

On Clay’s arrival in Silver City, its marshal accuses local menace Frank McCloskey of the stagecoach attack, and is quickly killed for his trouble. In an iconically Earp-ian moment, the town mayor pins a badge and gun on Clay, making him Silver City’s new marshal on the spot. By the way, said mayor is played by none other than Francis Ford, former director and star of silent Westerns but probably most familiar to JAW readers for his small but treasurable performances in the sound-era work of his younger brother John Ford. In John’s movies, Francis’s characters tend to have few or no lines of dialogue and to be presented as lovably simple-minded, sometimes drink-sodden old eccentrics. His performance here couldn’t be more different – it’s a proper speaking part and he’s a lucid and competent middle-aged professional – which makes it fascinating to see. (Another Ford regular, J Farrell MacDonald, plays the unfortunate original marshal – truly a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performance.)

You think maybe McCloskey is going to become the Ike Clanton of this tale, but he isn’t really – he’s killed off part way through the film, while the big baddy is his boss, the thoroughly corrupt local sheriff Jake Mannen who controls all of Silver City’s lawlessness – and this is a town with a lot of lawlessness to go round. And so we are set up for a slightly unusual dynamic for a ‘town’ western: good town marshal versus bad county sheriff.

The sheriff is portrayed by Louis Calhern, a skilled and busy character actor who could do a good line in slimy opportunists. It makes him a decent villain and antagonist for the Dix character. As for Dix himself, he had had a stellar career in silent Westerns, then started the sound era strong with his Oscar-nominated performance in 1931’s epic Cimarron. By this point, though, he was down on his uppers, doing smaller roles and smaller films, his career having apparently been damaged by chronic alcoholism. (He died 14 years after this movie, aged just 56.) Dix’s performance in this picture can reasonably be described as being rather stolid but that actually quite suits the role, projecting a straightforward, decent, reticent, and comfortable-in-its-own-skin masculinity. Bush as his brother gives a flimsier, bland, unmemorable, and rather amateurish performance.

The English Nightingale, quite coquettish

Their mutual love interest, Kitty Rogers, is advertised by Silver City’s saloon as ‘The English Nightingale’, a necessary touch because she’s played by a well-spoken Brit, Margot Grahame, an actress who managed to keep a steady career going from the 1930s through the 1950s, albeit one without many Westerns in it. Contracted to RKO, producers of The Arizonian, her most prestigious performance was given the same year, in John Ford’s critically praised RKO feature The Informer (1935).

Though her part in The Arizonian is not very interestingly written, she does fine with it. Jeff Arnold might not have enjoyed Grahame’s singing (our Jeff seemed to have a bit of an aversion to musical interludes in Westerns) but it’s pleasant enough.

But what this oater also desperately needs is a character with both more vim and vigour and more shades-of-grey morality than this array of decently done cut-outs. And it gets that in the form of Preston Foster in, more or less, the ‘Doc Holliday’ role. Foster’s character, Tex Randolph, is initially hired to gunsling by bad guy Mannen but eventually throws his lot in with our hero Clay Tallent. Again, you might manage to take a reasonable guess ahead of time as to how things are going to play out for Tex in the film’s final reel – and again I’m saying nothing.

Anyhow, Foster, who could be a bit plodding at times, is pretty good here, portraying a dandy with a mean streak – but with a working conscience lurking deep inside. Foster’s flamboyance in dress and manner contrasts with Dix’s sobersides persona and gives the movie some much-needed charisma.

The screenplay comes from the pen of Dudley Nichols, at the time an in-house RKO writer – a reliable and intelligent one, and a frequent collaborator with John Ford (including on the aforementioned Informer). Nichols was particularly good at pace and structure. Witness his masterpiece, the script for Ford’s Stagecoach. The more modest Arizonian feels a good place for Nichols to flex his Western muscles, four years before attempting that towering and genre-defining production. The lovey-dovey bits aside, the writer generally does a fine job of keeping the story moving while injecting just enough subtlety into the dialogue and characterisations to stop it from becoming too formulaic.

In the director’s chair is Charles Vidor, a prolific Hungarian-born filmmaker with a certain flair. Perhaps best known for his perverse noir film Gilda (1944), starring Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth, Vidor helmed a few contributions to our noble genre. Jeff Arnold writes positively of his later oaters The Desperadoes (1943), co-starring Randolph Scott and Ford, and The Man from Colorado (1948), co-starring Ford and William Holden. In the case of The Arizonian, Vidor oversees a few dull patches – have I mentioned already that the Dix-Bush-Grahame romantic subplot drags the film down? I think I may have done… But overall he rises well to Nichols’ screenplay, bringing a whole bunch of nifty directorial touches to the action scenes. For example, an early confrontation on main street between Dix and bad guys makes excellent use both of character cutaways and of close-ups on rifles and pistols.

It behoves this reviewer to warn potential viewers of what some will find a distasteful flaw in the casting of the movie. It includes two minor characters, a black couple played by Willie Best and Etta McDaniel (sister of Hattie, she of Gone with the Wind fame). McDaniel injects some dignity into her performance, and her character performs a decisive action late in the film that is critical to the plot. Nichols, who held politically liberal views, probably thought he was being progressive by including this moment and even including black characters at all but sadly the way he writes McDaniel’s and particularly Best’s roles – or maybe it was how Vidor required them to play them – frankly demeans the two actors with egregious racial stereotyping.

Vidor does a splendid job with the final shootout, which has an unusual and atmospheric visual twist to it. Together with two moving and well staged post-climactic scenes, it brings this entertaining pic to a satisfying close. It apparently picked up good reviews in its day and performed solidly at the box office. It’s certainly no masterpiece – the acting’s too much of a mixed bag, the romantic subplot is a crashing bore and on the whole you feel like everyone’s aiming just at a decent day in the office rather than anything momentous or memorable. But for all that,  it’s well worth any Westernista’s time – and it’ll only take up 75 minutes of it! We’re accustomed to thinking of the ‘30s as a fallow period for our noble genre, largely consigning it to cheapo kiddie fodder. And yet here, bang in the middle of the decade, we have a decently budgeted adult Western, put together by people who know what they’re doing, evoking many of the genre’s core themes and throwing bits and pieces of cinematic sparkle into the mix. As Jeff would often say – you could watch this.