With the Western Film Fair starting tomorrow in Winston-Salem, and with one of my favorites, Julie Adams, among the guests, I got to thinking about Bend Of The River (1952), the second Western Jimmy Stewart made with Anthony Mann. Miss Adams appeared in plenty of Universal Westerns, from The Lawless Breed (1952) to Wings Of The Hawk (1953).
This one has a good early part for Rock Hudson and a typically fine performance from Arthur Kennedy (the same year he did Rancho Notorious). Stewart is his usual loner trying to overcome a dark past — showing yet again why he was maybe the finest screen actor of the 50s.
The scene in Bend Of The River where Miss Adams is hit by an arrow always gets to me — thanks to the great special effect, Mann’s tense direction and a very convincing job from Julie. (Doesn’t that look like it’d hurt?) That’s Aunt Bea, Francis Bavier, tending to her.
Came across this on eBay this morning — a ticket from the picture’s Portland premiere (it was shot in Oregon), signed by Stewart.
When I am under the weather I like to curl up on the couch and watch “Bend of the River”. It comforts me. My daughter wants to know how many bad guys have to get shot before I am comforted. There is no answer to that.
If you speak to Julie say “hi” from Canada. I once commented on her lovely voice and my husband gave me a double take and said “Her voice!?” She’s a heartbreaker.
If I’m not mistaken Bend of the River was adapted by Borden Chase from Bill Gulick’s novel “Bend of the Snake” — Chase also scripted two other Stewart/Mann westerns: “Winchester ’73” (1950) & “The Far Country” (1954).
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I chose “Bend of the River” for my birthday movie this year, so saw it again just a few weeks ago. It always holds up. Julie Adams is a favorite of mine, and an icon for me, especially for her Westerns (even more than the beautiful “Creature from the Black Lagoon”), and of all of them, “Bend of the River” is for me her best movie and has her best role. One of my favorite moments in any Western is when James Stewart returns to Portland and comes into that saloon and first sees his friend Arthur Kennedy, then Kennedy casually reveals, simply by putting his arm around her, that Julie Adams, whom we know Stewart loves, is now his girlfriend–Stewart’s repressed emotion is intense and it’s such a concise revelation of the triangle we know would come when Adams stayed behind to recover from her wound. In addition to Stewart (Toby said it all here about this actor), Kennedy is indeed likewise fantastic. He does not actually become the villain until the movie is over two-thirds over, and before that is charming and likeable, even if we know which way he’ll go in the end, and makes it powerful when he does. In a close call, my favorite villain in Westerns–Kennedy would also make that list for his role in Mann’s “The Man from Laramie”–again opposite Stewart and again in a triangle, there with Cathy O’Donnell; Kennedy is versatile and if the character is “Bend of the River” is amoral and cynical, the one is “Laramie” is, to some real extent, tragic.