One, Two, Three

ONE, TWO, THREE               B+                  

USA  (115 mi)  1961  ‘Scope  d:  Billy Wilder

On Sunday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation’s capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs #44 and 45 against the Senators. On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. I only mention this to show the kind of people we’re dealing with—REAL SHIFTY!     — C.R. MacNamara (James Cagney)

Working relentlessly at breakneck speed, Wilder delivers a comic romp not seen since the Marx Brothers, a free for all of unparalleled mayhem, something reminiscent of Howard Hawks’ madcap screwball comedy BRINGING UP BABY (1938) or the Coen Brother’s irreverent antics in O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000), where the film reels off one-liners as if the screenwriters were getting paid by the joke.  The frantic pace is hilarious, as is the use of James Cagney as the corporate emblem of America, synonymous with the product Coca Cola.  What’s weaker here is the overall level of acting, much of it downright pathetic, which may actually add some level of sick cultish appeal to the film.  While many of Wilder’s films have a timeless feel about them and feel as fresh today as when they were written, this is not one of them.  Filmed almost entirely in Berlin, the city Wilder left three decades ago with the anti-Semitic rise of Nazism, this movie relentlessly exploits the politics of the Cold War, making it unfashionably out of date, more of a period piece that may suffer from a time warp.  For those who can set aside today for a glimpse into yesteryear, the experience is not much different than Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE OR:  HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), which is the penultimate Cold War exposé.  While Wilder’s breakneck pace is more frantic and his jokes neverending, like a cheap burlesque routine, Kubrick’s vision is more icily chilling, smart and superbly rendered, well acted and brilliantly conceived, with an unforgettable finale, an ending to end all endings.  This film is simply not in that league, pitting capitalism against communism, targeting American imperialism as capitalist pigs with “Yankee Go Home” slogans referenced throughout, made at the height of the Cold War when the Berlin Wall was actually constructed during the middle of the shooting, sealing off the East Germans from the West, requiring extensive on-the-spot screenplay and set adjustments, rebuilding the Brandenburg Gate in Munich.    

Opening with the Saber Dance Sabre Dance - Aram Khachaturian - YouTube (2:25), conducted to full effect by musical director André Previn, a kickass, frenetic theme that plays throughout the movie, few films ever made match this kind of delirious non-stop energy, and most, including this one, have momentary let downs where the pace simply can’t keep up.  Cagney, C.R. MacNamara, affectionately known as Mein Führer by his wife, Arlene Francis, is the tyrannical head of Coca Cola in Berlin who dreams of being the first entrepreneur to break into the untapped markets behind the Iron Curtain.  His every move is satirized, as is the German staff efficiency, where Schlemmer (Hans Lothar), his right hand man, clicks his heels with each new command, while Fräulein Ingeborg (Liselotte Pulver), the curvaceous blond secretary sets the tone for a sex farce, exactly as Lee Meredith did as Ulla with Zero Mostel in THE PRODUCERS (1968).  Hilariously, Cagney’s office features a “Yankee Doodle Dandy” cuckoo clock where Uncle Sam pops out.  The entire premise of the film is Cagney barking out orders at a furious pace where underlings jump into action trying to obey his every command.  It plays like a three ring circus, as people are literally stepping over one another in choreographed pandemonium, where the dialogue driven film is a nonstop torrent of one-liners, zingers that leave one breathless after awhile.  Wilder devises an exaggerated soap opera for the theme, as the Atlanta executive in charge of Coca Cola (Howard St. John) phones MacNamara to inform him of the arrival of his 17-year old daughter in Berlin, Pamela Tiffin as Scarlett, asking him to look after her for a few days.  Without anyone’s knowledge, she stays for months, secretly meeting a communist boyfriend across the border, Horst Buchholz as Otto Piffl, lured by his outlandish views, calling her a “typical bourgeois parasite, and the rotten fruit of a corrupt civilization.  So naturally, I fell in love with him.”  At one point, down in the dumps, thinking his career is over, Cagney quips “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” an Edward G. Robinson line from LITTLE CAESAR (1931).  Later in the film Red Buttons has a cameo where he does a Cagney “You dirty rat” imitation in front of Cagney, as someone similarly did a George Raft imitation in front of Raft in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959).   

What follows is Cagney trying to put the lid on this budding international scandal, at first getting Otto out of the way, setting up the poor guy’s arrest by the East German police, where he is tortured by being forced to listen endlessly to the bubble gum sounds of Brian Hyland - Itsy bitsy teenie weenie Yellow polka dot bikini ... YouTube (2:27).  But when Cagney quickly learns that Scarlett’s pregnant and married, he has to embark on a secret mission into the bowels of communist East Berlin to get him back, making excellent use of real locations, especially the burnt out ruins on the East German side of the Potsdamer Platz, all set to the music of Wagner’s Die Walküre shown here (under noiseinthemirror) one, two, three | Tumblr on YouTube (6:43), embellished even further when they meet Russian trade ambassadors at the Grand Hotel Potemkin, where in the smoky ruin of a burned out café, a weary dance band plays a German version of “Yes, We have No Bananas” with a few deadbeats dancing in slow motion while aged comrades sit completely undisturbed playing chess.  Smuggling Otto out of an East Berlin jail is just the beginning, as the pace slackens a bit in a battle of wits with the infuriorated Otto, who defiantly proclaims “Capitalism is like a dead herring in the moonlight, it shines, but it stinks.”  In a furious attempt to take the Bolshevik out of the boy and make him more presentable to his family, as his future in-laws are arriving the next day, Cagney has his work cut out for him.  Engaging the full force of the Western front to accomplish the task, Cagney sneers “That’s just what the world needs, another bouncing, baby Bolshevik.”  This is a completely cynical piece on East-West relations, so when Cagney puts his stamp of family approval and places Otto in charge of a Coca Cola plant, who then immediately vows to lead the workers in revolt, yet stands there ridiculously bare-legged, Cagney snaps at him “Put your pants on, Spartacus.” While the film is zany and clever throughout, it never rises to more than a theatrical set piece, as most of the action takes place with people standing around in a room, or running breathlessly in or out, creating an exaggerated sense of melodramatic hysteria, but interesting in the way Wilder takes a real international crisis and works it into his movie, spouting silly philosophic gems like “Look at it this way, any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad.”

The Glass Key (1935)

THE GLASS KEY             C+            

USA  (80 mi)  1935  d:  Frank Tuttle

Not to be confused with the later version of this film, which was remade in 1942 with Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd (as the wrong film was shipped to the theater), this is basically the same story, adapted from a Dashiell Hammett novel, considered one of his best, but this rarer, earlier version omits the love interest, which was expanded to make room for a more noirish version, complete with Lake as a femme fatale.  George Raft grew up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York and hung out with professional gangsters, such as Owney Madden and Arnold Rothstein, learning to imitate their mannerisms before breaking into films, initially as a dancer during the Vaudeville era before landing a part in the gangster classic SCARFACE (1932), playing a coin-flipping gunman.  No one wore hats better, or wore better hats, than George Raft.  He was given the lead in this picture, though he plays Ed Beaumont, a man of dubious character who likes to spend his evenings drinking rye whiskey and winning money at rigged roulette wheels, whose relationship to political boss Paul Madvig (Edward Arnold) is never made clear, though he appears to be his protection, the muscle, the right hand man who is always at the boss’s side, showing little distinction between politics and the portrayal of mob bosses.  Raft was actually the first consideration as Sam Spade in THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), but he turned it down, opening the doors to a man named Bogart.  Set during or just after the Prohibition Era, when saloons appear to be nothing more than all-male speakeasy’s, Madvig tries to clean up the city and shuts down some illicit gambling joints, where the owner, Shad O’Rory (Robert Gleckler), along with his muscle, Jeff (Guinn “Big Boy” Williams), don’t take kindly to the action and swear to get even.  This sets the wheels in motion for a blood feud.

Adding to the mystery is Madvig’s support of Senator John T. Henry (Charles Richman), whose daughter Janet (Claire Dodd) he’d like to marry (the role expanded for Veronica Lake), and whose son, Taylor Henry (Ray Milland), is something of a family embarrassment, as he owes plenty of money to loan sharks like O’Rory, putting his father in a precarious predicament.  When Madvig’s daughter Opal (Rosalind Keith) expresses a romantic interest in Taylor, who happens to be standing in the way of Madvig’s desires for Janet, Madvig in a rage decides to set matters straight.  When Taylor Henry ends up dead, Madvig is immediately implicated, as he was the last one seen with Taylor in an angry public dispute on the street.  With the election coming up, the newspapers have a field day at Madvig’s expense, where much of the story is advanced through developing headlines, with O’Rory continuing to feed the paper anonymous tips.  Only when it appears the tide has turned against Madvig, who has been publicly convicted by the press, does Beaumont spring into action masterminding a crafty, behind-the-scenes operation to uncover what evidence O’Rory actually has, which isn’t much except a witness to the arguing.  But that’s plenty with just a few days before the election.  O’Rory, however, is not satisfied, and when he can’t pay off Beaumont to rat on his friend, he sicks his dog and his muscle on him, repeatedly beating him to a pulp, trying to manufacture a witness to the murder.  When he somehow manages to slip away and is treated in the hospital, Ann Sheridan shows some sass with some terrific lines as his nurse.  After rounding up all the available suspects and witnesses having any knowledge in the murder, it all comes together in an Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot style interrogation with Beaumont inventively taking the lead. 

This particular version has little inventiveness or star power, but Raft is convincing as a guy who would feel right at home in Scorsese’s GOODFELLAS (1990), while major elements of this film can be detected in the Coen Brothers highly stylized gangster flick MILLERS CROSSING (1990), also set in the Prohibition era, where one guy lays it all on the line, switching loyalties to the other side, attempting to bring peace to a long standing blood feud between warring gangs, also sounding like the blueprint to Kurosawa's YOJIMBO (1961).

The Blue Dahlia

THE BLUE DAHLIA               B                     

USA  (96 mi)  1946  d:  George Marshall

Bourbon straight with a bourbon chaser.       —Buzz Wanchek (William Bendix)

You've got the wrong lipstick on, Mister.       —Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd)

It’s funny, but practically all the people I know were strangers when I met them.     

—Joyce Harwood (Veronica Lake)

Like all the modern day era directors named Marshall, George Marshall was primarily a comic director before making this film, where he serves in a functional role, little more than moving the right pieces around, but hardly visionary or exemplary, where screenwriter Raymond Chandler may have actually directed several of the scenes.  This film is noted as being the only original Raymond Chandler script in Hollywood, though several of his books have been adapted, where the script was unfinished when filming began and production was about to be shut down as he developed writer’s block.  Already a hurried production, as actor Alan Ladd was being recalled for military service, so the terms Chandler demanded to finish the script on time was to start drinking again, as he felt he wrote better under the influence, also an in-home round the clock nurse to help moderate his alcohol intake, so as an alcoholic he wouldn’t drink himself into a stupor, and a car which drove his finished pages to the studio every day.  John Houseman, from the Orson Welles Mercury Theater group, was the producer on the Paramount film and he felt inclined to agree to these outlandish terms, offering in addition a $5000 incentive to finish on time, which he did, as otherwise everyone would simply be fired.  This is also the third of four films where Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake would work together.  While the two of them were never close, the diminutive Ladd at 5' 5” enjoyed working with her as she was just under 5 feet tall, and this is one of their better efforts.  The snappy and crisp Chandler dialogue, which was the film’s only Academy Award nomination, works to their benefit, as they have some terrific lines together, always keeping one another at arm’s length, but just barely.  After Lake died, it was revealed by her husband, director André de Toth, that she was a heroin addict and an alcoholic during her starring roles at Paramount, earning $4500 a week, which is why they never renewed her contract, eventually working as a barmaid near the end of her life, drifting from one cheap hotel to the next, where she had frequent arrests for public drunkenness. 

Like many of the war pictures in its day, the film opens with out of uniform soldiers returning home to Los Angeles on a bus, where they experienced a close camaraderie of serving together, but become anonymous figures upon returning home.  Alan Ladd as Johnny Morrison definitely fits that bill, even though he has a wife to come home to, while the other two, William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont, are envious.  But when Ladd arrives, his house has been taken over by a drunken crowd of perpetual party revelers, led by his wife, Doris Dowling, who is on the arm of a crooked nightclub owner Eddie Harwood, Howard Da Silva, whose career was blacklisted for the decade of the 1950's.  Da Silva, Dowling, and Frank Faylen (a small-time hood) all just finished working together on Billy Wilder’s THE LOST WEEKEND (1945).  Dowling is from the theatrical school of bold dramatic expressions, wearing lavish and spectacular gowns that might feel more appropriate in a highly decorative Josef von Sternberg film.  Her stand-offish behavior towards Johnny, not to mention being caught in a kiss with Harwood, sends Johnny back out the door, where in typical noirish fashion it has become an evening downpour of rain.  With all the hotels booked, he’s aimlessly roaming the streets, suitcase in hand, until a car pulls up and offers him a shelter from the storm, driven by Veronica Lake.  While exploring the entire Los Angeles vicinity together, from Hollywood, Santa Monica, to Malibu, they immediately hit it off, but with vague sarcasm and clever comebacks.  They are easily the glue that holds this picture together, but keep getting separated after a news report announces the murder of his wife, where Johnny is the lead suspect, spending the rest of the film on the run while the police are searching for him, leaving him little choice except to find the killer himself. 

While some of this does in fact resemble Howard Hawks’ THE BIG SLEEP (1946), another Chandler novel with Bogart and Bacall which may have borrowed liberally from this film, especially the scenes where the hero gets double crossed, beaten up and captured in an out of the way location, the claims that Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO (1961) and the Coen Brother’s MILLER’S CROSSING (1990) also drew wholesale from this film are less obvious, as Ladd is hardly in a position trying to keep two warring sides at bay and instead is a returning war hero who has to reestablish his heroicism back here on American soil.  While not officially a detective, Ladd is placed in the position of being a detective in having to solve the crime before the police make an arrest.  In this respect, the film has more in common with THE THIN MAN (1934), where the non-explicit, bordering on dysfunctional relationship between Ladd and Lake is a stark contrast to the cozy marital bliss of William Powell and Myrna Loy, who represent the security, peace and prosperity of the pre-War years.  After the war, a man’s got to settle his own affairs with little or no help, where Bendix returns with a serious war injury, with a metal plate placed in his head, where he is constantly growing mentally agitated at the least provocation, especially the sound of American jazz music, which causes headaches and mysterious blackouts, continually demanding that people “Turn off that monkey music!”  Bendix was Chandler’s inadvertent killer in the initial script, where in noir films a character suffering from temporary amnesia is as familiar as the common cold, and everything leads up to his odd yet plausible police confession, which was unacceptable by the U.S. Navy, refusing to allow the depiction of a wounded war veteran as the damaged killer in a high profile Hollywood production coming so close to the end of the war.  The Navy threatened to refuse to cooperate in any future Paramount production, causing a hastily altered Raymond Chandler rewrite, which is really just a stab in the dark and the film’s weakest link.  Like the much publicized OJ Simpson murder case which captivated all of Los Angeles for months, there were really no other suspects.

BUtterfield 8

BUTTERFIELD 8                                C                                         

USA  (109 mi)  1960  ‘Scope  d:  Daniel Mann

Apparently Elizabeth Taylor initially rejected this screen role, but eventually changed her mind in order to fulfill the final movie of her MGM contract which Taylor claimed made her “MGM chattel” for 18 years, freeing her up afterwards to earn one million dollars in salary for CLEOPATRA (1963).  Despite winning the Academy Award for this performance, Taylor never warmed up to the material, allegedly throwing a drink in disgust the first time she watched it in a screening room.  There are also rumors that Taylor garnered the Academy sympathy vote, as she was extremely ill with pneumonia and nearly died, where many felt she might never work again.  It is true, Taylor had never lowered herself to this kind of trashy and tawdry material before, and despite providing an excellent performance, the film never rises to ever be about much of anything.  What’s kind of interesting is seeing how this role was preliminary material for hurling barbs and playful insults in the bawdy drinking games in her next Academy Award winning performance, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966).  In both films, she works with her real life husbands at the time, providing explosive fireworks with Richard Burton in the latter, while Eddie Fisher is simply her foil here.    

A note of interest, novelist John O’Hara’s name appears in the title credit, something rarely seen, adapted by John Michael Hayers, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954), and Charles Schnee, who wrote the screenplay for Howard Hawks’ RED RIVER (1948).  There are some clever exchanges between characters, verbal barbs that pass for veiled insults or sexual banter, but the film eventually deteriorates into near laughable material.  The opening ten minutes or so are wordless, with the camera following Taylor’s every move from the point she wakes up alone in bed, checking out the lay of the land, never uttering a word except a name and a phone number, until she leaves the luxurious New York apartment and hops in a cab.  This sequence features tense and over-anxious music that is completely out of synch with the otherwise quiet and calm demeanor of Ms. Taylor, who plays Gloria Wandrous, a sexually adventurous woman with a history of continually changing partners.  She is in her element getting picked up in bars where the clever one-liners are bitchy, sexually provocative, and highly aggressive, where it appears she can stand up to anyone and match them blow for blow, just verbal sparring where they usually end up in bed together.  The title is her answering service where she carefully screens and selects the men who interest her. 

Something changes, however, when she meets Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey), a filthy rich playboy who keeps a wife and women on the side.  Despite his smug fratboy manner that suggests women are mere collections, something to be talked about in the executive boardrooms, when they meet in a bar they do produce verbal sparks, where she interestingly digs her spiked heel into the toe of his shoe when he grabs her arm, which is sexual stimulation for these two practitioners.  But all the promise in the world can’t hide where this film’s going, despite Gloria’s desperate attempts to gain respectability.  Noted for his role in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), where he plays a brainwashed victim subject to a hypnotic trigger code, Harvey always provides wooden performances, where his character barely registers a pulse.  Here he’s a bit more frenzied and on edge than usual, but simply no match for the emotional volatility from Taylor’s performance, always showing an appealing vulnerability, even playing this kind of trashy role which feels much like a lurid dimestore novel you can pick up at any airport book stall.  If there’s anything all of Ms. Taylor’s roles have in common in her 4 consecutive years of Academy Award Best Actress nominations, culminating with winning the award, it’s her ability to bring down the curtain with such distinguished high drama.  This film is no different, though it’s the least suspenseful, where the director actually adds a feeble addendum at the end that ridiculously shows how far this film has deteriorated, which without Taylor’s performance wouldn’t matter at all.     

Two in the Wave

TWO IN THE WAVE                     B-             

France  (91 mi)  2010  d:  Emmanuel Laurent

This is a delightful romp through the archives of the late 50’s and early 60’s French New Wave films, specifically referencing François Truffaut, whose landmark film 400 BLOWS starring a young 14-year old Jean-Pierre Léaud was a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959.  Simultaneously, a fellow writer from the Parisian film magazine Cahiers du cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, was busy readying his first film BREATHLESS, which opened nearly a year later also to resounding success, elevating both young novices to becoming spokespersons for the nouvelle vague.  Since both were erudite and educated, used to expressing their thoughts on paper, they did not shy away from the cameras which followed them everywhere, plastering them on magazine covers, making them an international sensation.  Breaking all the rules about rigid narrative filmmaking, much of it just copying traditional formulas guided more by economics than genuine inspiration, this brash group of young guns broke away from film studios and invented a new art, preferring to shoot on location where their editing and visual style expressed a new sense of urgency and personal expression, inventing new rules as they went along.  The trip down memory lane guided by clips of their early films is a real treat, as they play out like personal photo albums or favorite songs, as so many audience members will recollect seeing these films and recalling what a vital part they played in transforming their own attitudes about art and cinema. 

Both Truffaut and Godard are seen in clips as documentary interviewers as well, where Truffaut wrote a legendary book from his Hitchcock interviews, while Godard wrote a film CONTEMPT (1963) that was largely inspired by his interviews with Fritz Lang.  The young novices idealized directors who exhibited a flair for cinematic art and imagination, like Renoir, Hawks or Hitchcock, or who could express emotions through an unabashed realism, like Nicholas Ray.  Unfortunately, many of their compatriots were left out of this venture, as there is no mention of Chabrol’s LE BEAU SERGE (1958), oftentimes cited as the first New Wave film, or Eric Rohmer who built a career around character observations and dialogue, or the brilliant contributions of Jacques Rivette, who they all admired as perhaps the most radical artist among them, while including clips from Agnès Varda’s shorts, where we see a playful side of Godard in front of the camera, and Jacques Demy’s LOLA (1961).  This oversight streamlines the density of the subject matter, which is not so much a historical account of the New Wave, something the public appears clamoring for, but focuses instead on just two contributors, and barely makes a dent on their films, really only exploring their early years where each suffered box office casualties along with their successes.  Interestingly, despite noting their radical artistic achievements, the film doesn’t weigh in with any historical analysis or perspective on either man’s career.  In fact, there is no one onscreen who disputes the film’s findings or who offers a dissenting view.  In an interesting foreshadowing of events to come, both men are seen rallying the troops in 1968 and consolidating their combined voices against the French ministry’s firing of legendary film archivist Henri Langois from the Cinémathèque Française, even halting the Cannes Film Festival that year, which led to the turbulent street demonstrations that reinstated not only his position but the needed funding.      

Activism and artistic differences eventually leads to a permanent artistic rift between the two men in 1973, where Godard embraces radical politics as an essential ingredient to any socially relevant art, while Truffaut believes art transcends politics.  Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT (1973), absent any politics, provokes an excoriating public denunciation from Godard, calling it irrelevant and nothing more than a bourgeois trifle, while Truffaut countered with the publishing of a twenty-three page personal critique of Godard, calling him a sham, an illegitimate spokesperson for the working class as he lives a typically bourgeois lifestyle surrounded by wealth and riches.  The two men never spoke again for the rest of their lives, like something out of CITIZEN KANE (1941) when Orson Welles stopped speaking to Joseph Cotton.  Earlier in the film, Godard relished a Welles quote:  “Art as a moral stance against tyranny.”  Under the circumstances, however, considering the contributions both have made to cinema, their public spat seems petty and childish, even if their respective views both happen to be true and offer the best analytic film criticism this movie has to offer.  What is especially sad is seeing both men competitively vie for the personal allegiance of Jean-Pierre Léaud, the poster child of the New Wave, who feels compelled to continue to work for both directors while being pushed and pulled from both ends, like a child in a divorce custody case.  While this documentary only skims the surface, using ridiculous images of actress Isild Le Besco paging through old copies of Cahiers, the real interest lies in reviewing clips from the early films which come alive onscreen, beautifully capturing the vibrant energy of youth, a timeless moment in cinema history when the world stopped to watch and listen as the medium playfully spit out the past while rejuvenating itself. 

Rio Bravo

RIO BRAVO                 A                     

USA  (141 mi)  1959  d:  Howard Hawks

While this is generally considered the model for John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), that’s putting it loosely, as much more of the action in this movie takes place outside the jailhouse where a sheriff, a cripple, and a drunk are keeping a prisoner locked up, despite the best efforts of his brother and his “extended” family of hired guns who have blocked off the town from the rest of the world and are lining the streets just waiting for their opportunity to set him free.  Hawks was angry with Gary Cooper’s performance in HIGH NOON (1952), thinking he did not represent the bravery of the actual sheriffs in the West, especially considering he spent much of the time asking people from the town for help rather than make do with whatever he had.  In the language of the West, brave men never asked for help, but only accepted it when it was offered.  John Wayne is just such a sheriff in this film, one of his more likeable roles as a hardened, crusty, rifle toting man who demands respect from anybody who tries to go up against him, so few people try.  Yet in the opening sequence, which is played out slow and tense, gauging a humiliating and disturbingly sadistic moment in a saloon, somebody whacks him over the head, which kept him from preventing what happened next, as a man at the bar (Claude Akins) shoots another man in cold blood.  Wayne catches up with him in the next bar, introducing himself by whacking him with the barrel of his rifle, knocking him out cold, hauling him off to the jail where the sheriff and his two deputies remain considerably outnumbered. 

The film is surprisingly easy on the eyes, as it has a terrific cast shot during the prime of their careers, all delivering among their career best performances. Wayne is solid as the no nonsense Sheriff John T. Chance, as his decisions are sensible, carefully reasoned, where he continually looks after the interests of others over his own personal welfare, perfectly expressed to the Wagon Train master Ward Bond early in the film.  Bond offers to help, and gets himself killed in the process.  Dean Martin is barely recognizable as the Dude (yes, before Jeff Bridges!), a nervous, sweaty, rather shifty kind of deputy who can startle you with his shooting accuracy, where almost Columbo-like, he takes people by surprise, as for the past 2 years (after losing a girl) he’s been on a drunk, but since this murder he remains sober, though going through the shakes through most of this film.  The Dude’s best moment is entering a bar filled with a dozen or so of the prisoner’s friends and having to pick out the man who shot Ward Bond, no easy feat, especially when they continue to ridicule him for being a drunk, but he impressively sizes up the situation perfectly.  The other deputy is Walter Brennan, a grizzled old man who walks with a limp and has one of the most recognizable voices in show business, often imitated by impersonators, but he gives a stellar performance here.  Add to this cast two stragglers who came in on the stage, Ricky Nelson as Colorado, a hired gun working for the Wagon master, and Angie Dickenson as Feathers, a notorious card shark listed as a known associate of a man on a Wanted poster who was caught cheating at cards, identifiable by her preference for wearing feathers.  Both are outstanding, especially Dickenson, where in every scene with Wayne she literally knocks his socks off, a smart headed woman, a whirlwind of sexual energy who steals every scene she’s in.  She’s a dynamo.

What makes these characters so useful is the way each one is used, as they carry the action when the camera is turned on them, as there’s an underlying story of a jailhouse that is surrounded and outnumbered, a sheriff who hasn’t a clue how to hold his prisoner as they wait for a federal marshal to arrive in six days.  How do they hold them off?  Rather than focus on the tension, which is established early, the director clearly delights in the infectiously appealing nature of pairing off different personalities, letting them each have brilliantly extended scenes together, where the bravado performances only color the already heightened tension.  Hawks is really in no hurry to deliver the inevitable showdown scene, which he delivers in spades, but the film is actually everything leading up to that moment, where the people become the story, where they have to stand their ground and take stock of one another, where they may occasionally wobble a bit in their belief in themselves, but they’re surprisingly supportive in the way they relate to one another.  It’s impressive how Hawks works a few songs into the works while sitting around the jailhouse, where Dean Martin sings “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” accompanied by a guitar-playing Nelson, with Brennan on the harmonica, and all three chime in to Nelson’s “Cindy.”  The entire film is superbly written and directed, brilliantly acted, perfectly paced, with some terrific naturalistic sounding dialogue.  The bad guys and the owners of the hotel may be stock characters prone to stereotypes, but they don’t infect the psychological intrigue that is established early, as the film is surprisingly intricate, establishing a protective and harmonious community before our eyes through the complex interplay of such appealing characters.