Director: Delmer Daves
Along with High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma became one of the defining films in a decade that sought to elevate the western above its supposedly simple roots and into something more grounded in complex character psychologies and social realism. Heroes and villains were no longer as clearly distinguished, and rather than the Old West serving as the setting where honor was upheld and alliances were unbreakable, in the 1950s the west becomes an entirely isolating environment defined by self-interest. Whereas Delmer Daves made a terrific argument for the “new” western in the previous year’s Jubal (which transplanted a Sirkian psychosexual melodrama into a western setting), 3:10 to Yuma never feels anything less than strained. Despite the drive towards realism, an overbearing score evokes a pompous grandiosity that Daves is unable to resist steering clear of. Moreover, as beautifully composed as many of the images are, the visual strategies within a scene is often a mess—due to jarring cuts and poorly conceived angle choices, it is frequently disorienting trying to spatially relate characters to one another and their surroundings. As with the worst tendencies of Stanley Kramer, Daves matches his social messages with a need for audio-visual “importance”, playing up a desired level of prestige that lacks the resonance of the supposedly dated westerns of years past.
Director: Delmer Daves
Although it plays as a typical revue spectacle, Hollywood Canteen is among the most compelling propaganda films of the 1940s. The gist is that the film captures the famed venue that saw Hollywood actors “giving back” to soldiers, and therefore the picture involves a number of the top stars of Warner Brothers appearing as themselves and humbly showing their gratitude to everyone around them. It is at once both a hugely charitable endeavor and entirely self-serving—because the film is about Hollywood’s support of the soldiers and ignores the rest of the general public, it has a slightly tacky self-congratulatory feel. And yet, the film shows a great intelligence about what movie stardom is and it knows how to capitalize on the fantasies that the viewing audience revels in. As the audience’s cipher, Robert Hutton plays a soldier who becomes a celebrity amongst the ruling class, earning respect from legends like Bette Davis and even having Joan Leslie fall in love with him. There’s a great sense of magic in the combination of the everyday and the glamorous—director Delmer Daves knows the power of Barbara Stawyck’s image, and he presents her rather matter-of-factly, engaging in a menial task and occupying only a short amount of screen time. With this strategy, Daves gives audiences the understanding that surprises are around every corner, and they’re not going to be telegraphed. That an “ordinary man” experiences a world in which Hollywood stars treat him as a peer and pine for him gets at a primacy in film escapism—rather than asking a viewer to get lost in a narrative, Hollywood Canteen nakedly invites one to imagine themselves participating in it.
Director: Delmer Daves
Rod Steiger plays Iago to Ernest Borgnine’s Othello in Jubal, a slow-burner of a western from director Delmer Daves. When a drifter played by Glenn Ford finds himself employed by a cheerful rancher (Borgnine), the senior ranch hand (Steiger) starts feeling his position severely threatened. Worse yet, he’s just as unsuccessful in seducing his boss’ wife (Valerie French) as the newcomer is in getting her attention. Although Jubal takes its narrative roots from Othello, what it does most of all is adopt a very 1950s style of classical melodrama. The jealousy and resentments simmer for the first two thirds of the picture until a very dramatic boiling over occurs in the final third, spear-headed by Steiger’s embittered manipulations. It plays a bit like Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece from the same year, with the growing feelings of impotence and resentment bearing down on an unstable wild card (not to mention the similarities in the seductive femme fatales played by Dorothy Malone in the Sirk film and French). Steiger’s method performance feels like it’s too much, which is especially problematic considering Borgnine’s success in a similarly big role. Whereas Steiger plays a single crass note, however, Borgnine’s performance evolves depending on who he is sharing the screen with, and the relationship he develops with Ford is at times genuinely touching. There’s a nice moment in which he shows a believable naïveté regarding his failures as a husband–only Borgnine could sell the surprise that smacking his wife on the behind isn’t the most effective means of displaying affection.
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