4K News #335: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Directed by John Ford
Starring John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Edmond O’Brien, Andy Devine

Just saw that John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is coming to 4K in April — the first Ford or Wayne picture to do so.

It’s hard to imagine this looking any better than the Blu-Ray, but who’s to complain? It’s one of the finest Westerns ever made.

Image swiped from John Wayne.

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Talking Johnny Guitar With Robert Bellissimo.

It was an honor to be the guest on Robert’s podcast yesterday. He turned it around quick, and it’s ready now. Check it out.

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Screening: Stagecoach (1939).

Directed by John Ford
Starring Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Andy Devine, John Carradine, George Bancroft, Louise Platt, Donald Meek, Berton Churchill, Tom Tyler, Tim Holt

The Graham Cinema in Graham, North Carolina, is running John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) next week. I don’t have to tell you what a terrific, landmark movie it is.

John Wayne and Andy Devine on location. John Ford’s back there with the pipe.

Monday & Tuesday, February 10 & 11
7:00 & 9:00 pm.

The Graham Cinema
119 N Main Street
Graham, NC

And if that wasn’t cool enough, on February 24th and 25th, they’ll be running She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949). The Graham Cinema is a great old movie house. If you’re anywhere nearby, be sure to check it out.

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Screening: The Shootist (1976).

Directed by Don Siegel
Starring John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, Hugh O’Brian, Harry Morgan, John Carradine, Sheree North, Scatman Crothers

Two of my biggest movie heroes, John Wayne and Don Siegel, only worked together once, on The Shootist (1976). It turned out to be Duke’s last film, and it gave him the perfect way to go out — which he was obviously aware of.

Clint Eastwood visits Wayne and Siegel on the set of The Shootist.

The Shootist is screening at The Autry Museum Of The American West as part of their What Is A Western? film series.

The Autry: Wells Fargo Theater
Saturday, December 14, 2019, 1:30 p.m.
234 Museum Drive, Los Angeles, CA

I encourage you to go if you can get there. It’s a wonderful movie, and seeing it on the big screen would be quite a treat in this day and age.

And in this era of stupid-looking facial hair, doesn’t Wayne look cool?

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50s Westerns Blu-Ray News #265: The True Story Of Jesse James (1957).

Directed by Nicholas Ray
Starring Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Hope Lange, Agnes Moorehead, Alan Hale Jr., Alan Baxter, John Carradine, Rachel Stephens

Nicholas Ray’s mangled masterpiece The True Story Of Jesse James (1957) is coming to Blu-Ray from Twilight Time. It’s one of my personal favorite 50s Westerns — for Ray’s incredible use of CinemaScope if nothing else, and it’s the subject of what I think is my best post ever for this blog.

It’s coming November 20. Not sure what the extras will be, but I can’t wait.

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Music From The Westerns Of John Wayne And John Ford.

The music label Cherry Red out of the UK has released (or is about to release) a 3-CD set Music From The Westerns Of John Wayne And John Ford. Featuring music from Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948), Three Godfathers (1948), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande (1950), The Searchers (1956), Horse Soldiers (1959) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Of course, music is always a huge part of a John Ford picture, so there’s plenty of good stuff here.

Sometimes it’s the original soundtrack (Rio Grande, Horse Soldiers), sometimes it’s from other sources. You can see a track listing here. This promises to be a very cool set. Can’t wait.

Thanks to Mr. Richard Vincent for the tip.

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Screening: John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

Directed by John Ford
Starring Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden, Sal Mineo, Ricardo Montalban, Delores Del Rio, Gilbert Roland, Arthur Kennedy, James Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey, Jr., Denver Pyle

Cheyenne Autumn (1964) is a picture I’ve always wanted to see on the big screen, on film. And here’s my chance — they’re running a 35mm IB Technicolor print at the New Beverly Cinema on May 21 and 22. Shame it’s 2,554 miles from my front door.

Cheyenne Autumn isn’t Ford’s finest work, but it has plenty to recommend it — and it just might be William Clothier’s best work (he shot it in Super Panavision 70, which is why I want to see it in a theater).

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The Joel McCrea Blogathon: Stranger On Horseback (1955) By Guest Blogger Allen Smithee.

Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Screenplay by Herb Meadow and Don Martin
From a novel by Louis L’Amour
Cinematographer: Ray Rennahan
Film Editor: William B. Murphy
Music by Paul Dunlap

Cast: Joel McCrea (Judge Rick Thorne), Miroslava (Amy Lee Bannerman), Kevin McCarthy (Tom Bannerman), John Carradine (Col. Buck Streeter), John McIntire (Josiah Bannerman), Nancy Gates (Caroline Webb)

I missed Stranger On Horseback (1955) on its first run in the UK. as the support feature to the very popular Marty.

My interest was aroused by a February 1963 edition of Motion which had a comment on the film by the esteemed Raymond Durgnat. Mr Durgnat was the doyen of a new breed of young English cineaste film writers. Durgnat’s impression of the film was as follows: “In Stranger On Horseback (a disturbing little Jacques Tourneur Western), Joel McCrea comes across Miroslava (ex Archimboldo) who is clad throughout in black leather, boots, gloves, and of course whip. SHE comes across HIM bathing naked in a pool and though the scene is censored, it looks as if it builds up to the scene in Duel In The Sun where Gregory Peck waits for Jennifer Jones to emerge from among the reeds where she is cowering and shivering. The film also has a moment of Hawksian moral sadism; the weak willed sheriff (Emile Meyer) finally accepts the necessity for violence and blasts away at the crooks with a shotgun. “How d’you like it?” asks McCrea. “Loathesome,” replies Meyer grinning broadly.”

The plot of Stranger On Horseback is pretty straightforward: a circuit judge (McCrea) wants to get the goods on an unsolved murder committed by the son (Kevin McCarthy) of a local king-pin (John McIntire). Tourneur graces the film with plenty of quirky offbeat touches that range from the humorous to the subversive.

The only available version of the film is on DVD from VCI, obtained from a print sourced from the vault of the British Film Institute. Sadly, this print is in bad shape — the lovely Sedona locations appear washed out. Hopefully, a master neg may surface or perhaps the film will be restored, like the previously considered lost Seven Men From Now (1956). It’s amazing what can be done these days, just consider the wonderful restoration done by Ignite Films on Canadian Pacific (1949) and The Cariboo Trail (1950). We live in hope. Not only is Stranger On Horseback Tourneur… it’s very good Tourneur.

The film runs a mere 66 minutes, which suggests the film may have been censored — most of McCrea’s Fifties programmers clocked in at around 80 minutes. The film was an initial independent effort from producer Leonard Goldstein who previously had a splendid track record at Universal and Fox. Sadly, Mr. Goldstein passed away at the tender age of 51,  before Stranger On Horseback was released. Goldstein also produced Saddle Tramp (1950), the best of McCrea’s six Universal Fifties Westerns.

McCrea had choice of director on Stranger On Horseback. He chose Tourneur, who previously made the wonderful Stars In My Crown (1950), a film which sadly failed to find an audience. Tourneur also directed McCrea’s next picture Wichita (19XX), the first of four films that he made for Allied Artists. Wichita was far and away the best of the four and scored at the box office.

The bad guy in Stranger On Horseback is Kevin McCarthy, who impressed McCrea. He told the young actor, “I’m going to tell the studios all  about you.” I have often wondered if this lead to McCarthy’s most iconic role in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956). After all, producer Walter Wanger had produced one of McCrea’s biggest hits, Foreign Correspondent (1940). Wanger and McCrea were working out of Allied Artists at the same time. Furthermore; Sam Peckinpah played a bank teller in Wichita and a meter reader in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Sam has often cited Don Siegel as his mentor.

Don Siegel had previously tried to develop Bad Day At Black Rock at Allied Artists. He wanted McCrea to play the lead. With all due respects to Spencer Tracy and John Sturges, John at the very fine Greenbriar Picture Shows feels the McCrea/Siegel film would have been superior. I totally agree. And I might hasten to add that I will be first in line when Warners releases the Blu-Ray version of Sturges’ film.

Had McCrea appeared in Bad Day At Black Rock and not turned down the Van Heflin role in Shane (1953) this surely would have had a huge boost to his star power which faded considerably in the late Fifties.As much as we all love his Westerns I would have loved to have seen him tackle some of the non Westerns roles played by Cooper and Stewart in the Fifties. McCrea’s reason for turning down Shane was two-fold: he did not feel he was at a time in his career to take secondary roles; plus, he did not want to detract from his friend Alan Ladd. McCrea, in typical modesty, stated that he could never had been as good as Heflin was. I totally disagree especially under George Stevens’ direction.

An amusing snippet: one day, Ladd asked his pal McCrea, “What do you do when the phone doesn’t ring… when nobody wants you?” McCrea jokingly replied, “I slap my wife on the butt, jump on my horse and ride around the ranch.” This flippant attitude was totally alien to the increasingly insecure Ladd.

From the mid to late Fifties, McCrea often worked for directors who were a far cry from the likes of Hawks, Hitchcock, Wyler, Wellman, Sturges and Walsh — whom he worked for in his glory days. It’s a shame that Tourneur or Siegel didn’t direct films like The Oklahoman or Trooper Hook (both 1957), especially with their subtext of alienation and racism. Both directors made wonderful films that shared those themes. Things did improve when Joseph Newman came on board, a vast step up from the likes of Francis D. Lyon and Charles Marquis Warren.

Despite the late Fifties drop off in quality (apart from the Newman efforts, especially 1958’s Fort Massacre), McCrea has left a hugely impressive body of work. It is also encouraging that many major stars, from Katherine Hepburn to Clint Eastwood, feel McCrea was grossly underrated.

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The Nicholas Ray Blogathon: The True Story Of The True Story Of Jesse James (1957).

Directed by Nicholas Ray
Produced by Howard B. Swope, Jr.
Screenplay by Walter Newman
Based on a Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson
Music: Leigh Harline
Director Of Photography: Joe MacDonald, ASC
Film Editor: Robert Simpson, ACE

CAST: Robert Wagner (Jesse James), Jeffrey Hunter (Frank James), Hope Lange (Zee James), Agnes Moorehead (Mrs. Samuel), Alan Hale (Cole Younger), Alan Baxter (Barney Remington), John Carradine (Rev. Jethro Bailey), Rachel Stephens (Anne James), Barney Phillips (Dr. Samuel), Biff Elliot (Jim Younger), Frank Overton (Major Rufus Cobb), Barry Atwater, Marian Seldes, Chubby Johnson, Frank Gorshin, Carl Thayler, John Doucette.

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This is my contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blogathon, celebrating what would be Ray’s 100th birthday. Hosted by Cinema Viewfinder, you’ll find more posts here.

There’s an infamous group of films that have achieved an almost mythic quality for a very odd reason — they were taken out of the director’s hands and re-thought, re-cut, re-shot or just generally monkeyed with by their studios, leaving us to wonder what could have been. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973). Once Upon A Time In America (1984). The history of cinema is littered with such films.

Home video has given many of these films a second chance, allowing them to be restored, reconstructed or re-re-cut to give us an idea of what should have been. Touch Of Evil (1958), for example. With others, such as Ambersons, the materials are lost, leaving us with not much more than anecdotes to attest to the fact that a true masterpiece was mauled.

But other pictures have no Director’s Cut, no alternate ending, no defenders, no myth. We’re left with just another movie that doesn’t quite add up. Sadly, that’s where Nicholas Ray’s The True Story Of Jesse James (1957) winds up.

Nicholas Ray was on a bit of a roll heading into this picture. He’d directed two Westerns in recent years, the incredible Johnny Guitar (1954) and Run For Cover (1955). Rebel Without A Cause (1955) brought him together with James Dean — and would go on to become Ray’s biggest success and a truly iconic film. And Bigger Than Life (1956), though it wasn’t a hit upon release, is now seen as perhaps his masterpiece.

As part of the deal that had included Bigger Than Life, Ray owed 20th Century-Fox another picture. And the studio decided they wanted to remake Jesse James (1939), their big Technicolor hit from Henry King starring Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda as the James brothers. That version of the James gang story made enough to warrant a sequel, Fritz Lang’s The Return Of Frank James (1940), so why not return to the well?

Every indication is that Ray, going in, was excited about the project and had big ideas. The studio’s ideas, however, turned out to be a bit smaller.

Nicholas Ray: “I’d do it entirely as a ballad, stylized in every aspect, all of it shot on a stage, including the horses, the chases, everything, and do it in areas of light.”

This radical approach was turned down, if it was even pitched. Ray then became excited about actually shooting on location — Northfield, Minnesota, for example. The studio, however, wanted to shoot on rehabbed sets from other Fox pictures. What’s more, they had another recycling effort in mind — repurposing footage from the 1939 Jesse James.

Ray: “The real reason they made it was because some genius at Fox had figured out a way of reprocessing old footage into Scope… Now, if you’ve seen it, the one scene that you’ll recall is this incredible stunt where Jesse and Frank elude the posse by riding through a plate glass window, down the streets out of town, and over a huge cliff into a river. Well, since the picture had been made, the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) cracked down on abuse to horses in movies. I mean those animals really took a fall. So basically, that whole picture was made to use that scene again. We matched the clothing and everything. A lot of the same buildings and props were still around.”

So far, Ray’s lost his location shooting and he’s saddled with stock footage from a film that his picture will certainly be compared to. And we haven’t gotten around to the script.

Nicholas Ray was fascinated by the subject of youths finding their way in the world, a theme that runs through many of his films, Rebel Without A Cause being an obvious example. In the early 60s, working on King Of Kings (1961), he explained himself: “I have always been concerned with youth and their struggle for belief and understanding.”

This theme, this struggle, seemed appropriate for the story of the James gang. Herbert B. Swope, Jr., the picture’s producer, played up this angle in a promo article he probably didn’t write: “The James story is essentially the story of juvenile delinquency. The gang was made up of youths who were, for the most part, teenagers. The clothes, customs and the use of the horse may have been replaced by rock ‘n’ roll and hot rods, but the basic problem of youth at war with the world and with itself was the same as it is now.”

In the beginning, 20th Century-Fox handed Nick Ray a script by Russell S. Hughes. He didn’t like it. So with Nunnally Johnson’s script for the 1939 picture as a springboard, Ray hired Walter Newman to work on a new screenplay. Newman had once worked with Ray on a picture about gypsies that never happened, and he’d recently written The Man With The Golden Arm (1955).

Walter Newman: “Both Nick and I were psychoanalytically oriented, and in doing research were struck by the fact that Jesse was unmistakably self-destructive… We thought that was a novel angle of attack for the story.”

They had more in mind than just working in a little psychology.

Walter Newman: “In telling the story, we moved back and forth through time — the way people did several years later in other films. This was Nick’s concept. In my pedestrian way, I used flashbacks — some character talking about an experience with Jesse, then we’d flash back, the conventional approach. Nick said, “Why the prologue? Let’s just flash back and forth with no explanation at all. Write it conventionally and I’ll shoot it that way, but then I’ll try to convince the studio to do it my way. If I succeed, all right, and if I don’t, we’ll use the prologues.”

Newman’s script, dated July 1956, was rejected by Fox — hard to read (those flashbacks), and Jesse wasn’t sympathetic enough. The next draft, by Ray and Gavin Lambert, and dated September 4, went over a bit better. Shooting began September 6, with the “final” script dated September 14. That script contains plenty of blue pages, indicating that changes continued during filming.

Maybe somewhere in all those changes, it came to pass that The True Story Of Jesse James became not all that true — his granddaughter is credited with “historical data” — just truer than the Jesse James pictures that came before it.

Then there was casting. Ray was convinced that Elvis Presley would make a good Jesse James. Elvis has just appeared in his first film, Love Me Tender (1956), for Fox, and was a dialogue-quoting fan of Rebel Without A Cause. But Hal Wallis had the King locked down tight at Paramount, and Fox was keen on using a young actor they had under contract, Robert Wagner.

Joining Wagner was Jeffrey Hunter, who’s excellent as Frank James; Alan Hale as Cole Younger; Hope Lange as Zee, Jesse’s wife; Agnes Moorehead as Mrs. Samuel, the James boys’ mother; and Alan Baxter as the railroad man determined to bring the outlaws to justice. John Carradine, who played Bob Ford, Jesse’s murderer, in the 1939 film, is on hand here as the preacher who baptizes Jesse and Zee. And Nick Ray’s son, Tony, has a small part as Bob Younger.

James Dean, dead. Elvis Presley, not available. Location shooting in Missouri and Minnesota, out. The flashback structure, compromised. As time went on, and as his vision of the picture began to fade, Ray began to think of the picture as a studio assignment, not a Nicholas Ray film. There wasn’t a lot to get excited about, and he turned to liquor and pills. Before photography began, Ray took a drunken fall at the Chateau Marmont, spraining the same ankle he’d injured during the shoot for The Lusty Men (1952). This gave him another reason to self-medicate.

Robert Wagner: “I was looking forward to working with Nick Ray on a Western, but he was a very strange man. He was bisexual, with a drinking problem and a drug problem — a very confused and convoluted personality, even for a director, few of whom were as obviously tormented as Nick… he hardly ever gave you a physical direction. It was all about emotions, and that’s what he tried to put in the movie.”

The picture begins with the botched Northfield robbery. The James gang fleas with a posse lead by Sheriff Hillstrom (John Doucette) on their trail. They escape by leaping off a cliff on horseback, thanks to the aforementioned footage from Jesse James. A newspaper man asks, “What makes him Jesse James?” — and the picture spends the rest of its running time trying to answer that question. Much of the flashback structure is built around an ailing Agnes Moorehead telling us of her sons’ troubles. Naturally, she sees her boys as loving sons, while other characters recall things from a different point of view. Starting in the days immediately after the Civil War, Frank (Jeffrey Hunter) and other Confederate veterans are being persecuted by Union sympathizers — making it hard for them to return to a simple life of farming. To feed their families and get back on their feet, Jesse suggests they return to the type of raids they excelled at during the war.

Eventually, the picture takes us back to the Northfield job, and after learning of Jesse’s past, we see the robbery in a different light. We also see the change in Jesse. He’s no longer in it to fund a fresh start, but driven by his self-destructive nature, paranoia and a growing belief in his own myth. Of course, we all know where this leads, to his assassination by the Fords, guests in his own home.

From fade-in to fade-out, The True Story Of Jesse James reeks of studio tampering. While the flashback structure works, the cloud-the-edges-of-the-frame device (which Ray didn’t want) is embarrassing. Swope, the producer, was sympathetic to Ray’s narrative style and persuaded the studio to test two versions — Ray’s and a more chronological approach. In the end, after a blowup in which Nick cussed out the Fox executives, the picture was re-cut, eliminating some of the flashbacks and narration. While Ray handled some of the re-shooting, in the end it was handed over to contract directors and a team of editors.

Wagner: “Every morning we’d all wonder how Nick was going to be today, which is no way to make a movie. I liked working for him — he was as close to the avant-garde as Hollywood got at that time — and he was very interesting in his various pathologies.”

Walking away from The True Story Of Jesse James, Nicholas Ray left for Europe where he’d soon make the brilliant Bitter Victory (1957). He claimed to have never seen the James film as released.

Ray: “I think some of the best scenes I ever directed were in that film but cut out. One was the fight between Frank and Jesse in the cave with very straight dialogue in a good heavy sense. The action was a little too violent. For taste, I re-shot it.”

So why do we bother watching a film when its director couldn’t be bothered to finish it?

Maybe Jean-Luc Godard answers that question best: “That something has gone wrong from the point of view of the production is hardly in doubt; but not the direction, in which each shot carries the indelible mark of the most peculiarly modern of film-makers.”

In other words, the whole can’t touch the sum of its parts. Ray’s unparalleled use of color and ‘Scope, along with some terrific sound design, make many sequences very effective — even if the picture as a whole falls short.

Director of Photography Joe MacDonald had just shot Ray’s Bigger Than Life, another psychoanalytic study of self-destructive behavior — and one of the most incredible-looking CinemaScope films ever made. His credits also included John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), a film of almost unreal beauty. There was no way The True Story Of Jesse James could be anything but stunning to look at.

No one composes or blocks scenes even remotely like Nicholas Ray. The way characters come in and out of the wide frame is amazing to watch, with action in the foreground and background at the same time. (The Northfield posse scenes are especially good.) Much is made of Ray’s training under Frank Lloyd Wright and how it might have impacted his films.

Ray: “I like the horizontal line, and the horizontal was essential for Wright. I like the CinemaScope format very much; and when I am free to use it as I please, as in Rebel, I get great satisfaction from doing so.”

Along with the widescreen photography and stereo sound design, the picture makes great use of music, though this aspect was also compromised. Leigh Harline, who wrote “When You Wish Upon A Star” for Pinocchio (1940), uses the traditional “The Ballad Of Jesse James” throughout, most effectively in the final scene, with a man singing it outside Jesse’s home after his murder — while inside, the gathering crowd steals souvenirs — the legend already in place.

“But that dirty little coward shot Mr. Howard,

An’ laid Jesse James in his grave.”

Jean-Luc Godard: “…one should not forget the ambition which attended its inception. So reader is warned. One must judge The True Story Of Jesse James on its intentions.”

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SOURCES: Nicholas Ray: An American Journey by Bernard Eisenschitz; Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure Of An American Director by Patrick Macgilligan; Pieces Of My Heart: A Life by Robert Wagner with Scott Eyman.

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