Sherry Chandler » 3:10 to Yuma (1957)
3:10 to Yuma (1957)
Spoiler warning.
The first part of this Netflix adventure lay in actually getting the right movie. When we pulled the sleeve out of our pretty red Netflix envelope last week, the DVD sleeve said 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and mentioned Glenn Ford and Van Heflin but when we popped it into the player what we got was Russell Crow and Christian Bale. It seemed almost as though the small gods of Netflix couldn’t believe anybody would really want to see a 30-year-old western shot in black & white when they could have a no-doubt faster paced, grittier, more colorful modern remake.
But that was precisely the version we did want to see. So we bunged the DVD back in the envelope unwatched and sent a message to Netflix that we wanted the movie we wanted. To their credit, they got the right one back out to us almost the next day (it was the weekend).
It was worth the wait. The worst part of the movie was the song, “3:10 to Yuma,” sung by Frankie Laine (of course). It was derivative in both words and music and a perfect example why Laine didn’t realize he was parodying himself when he sang the Blazing Saddles theme.
Once the bombast of the theme is done, however, 3:10 to Yuma is a fairly slow and quiet film that gives the tension time to build and Glenn Ford, with his slow crooked smile, time to charm the pants off stolid Van Heflin. Well, let me rephrase that. Time to charm the sawed-off shotgun out of Heflin’s hands.
He does charm the pants off Felicia Farr’s saloon girl, though all we have of that scene are the two of them coming out of the back room through a beaded curtain, putting their clothes in order just ever so subtly. That’s enough. I know how all the parts go together.
Heflin reprises his long-suffering sodbuster role from Shane (1953), with even echoes of the gunfighter’s seduction of the rancher’s wife and son(s). In this case, he’s Dan Evans, a small-time rancher and American everyman who made the mistake of setting up business on land without a water supply sufficient to stand up to drought. He takes the job of guarding Ford’s Ben Wade for the $200 he needs to buy water rights from a neighboring rancher. You can see how this part of the plot echoes.
In this film, however, Heflin isn’t castrated by a gun butt to the head, which allows for overtones of High Noon (1952) as we watch that big hand moving along, nearing 3:10. (Tex Ritter much more believable in the music department here.) And just like they did Gary Cooper, the townspeople desert Heflin, leaving him to make a lone stand for truth, justice, and the American way.
But the center of the film focusses on the drama between the two men as they sit in a hotel room waiting for the train that will take Ben Wade to prison in Yuma. And/or the arrival of Wade’s gang to rescue him. Ford charms, Heflin resists and the two men develop a tense camaraderie, sharing cigarettes, parrying with words. (Though most of Heflin’s parrying consists of telling the irrepressible Ford to shut up.) Also a familiar American movie trope, but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone topping Ford’s performance here. To quote Dave Kehr in the NYTimes, Glenn Ford could be a bland hero but never an uninteresting villain. Much of the joy in this film is in watching Glenn Ford with his perfect equanimity and his tip-tilted stetson.
The film is unrealistically free of brutality, blood and guts. I’m sure the modern remake corrects those errors, which is precisely why I don’t really care to see it. I know how all those parts fit together, too.
And to be honest, I don’t really believe Van Heflin made it out of town alive. Ben Wade was boss to an amazingly inept gang of brigands. Or that a Ben Wade ruthless enough to shoot one of his own men rather than be caught would not have taken advantage of Dan Evans any number of times.
But it wasn’t part of the world created here for either of these men to be brutally shot down. Evans is not a murderer and Wade is not without some twisted sense of fair play. It was, I suppose, a more innocent time.
3:10 to Yuma is based on an Elmore Leonard short story of the same name.
P.S. I didn’t say anything about the black & white cinematography because I’m really not very smart about that stuff. But it’s beautifully filmed, as most black and white film is, to use light and shadow to enhance the tension.
Some beautiful horses and horsemanship, too.
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1 Comment
1. MW replies at 21st February 2008, 11:55 am :
Westerns are already so much in the realm of fantasy that I think modern attempts to make them grittier, as the modern version no doubt has done, only turns them into a joke. No, it isn’t realistic to see someone get shot in the back at close range, and not to see blood. But I think that would have taken away from the overall tone of the movie, and focused it much more on the gunfights than the much more interesting psychological standoff going on in the hotel room.
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