Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Destry Rides Yet
Again
You
know, I don't hold too much for first impressions. The way I figure it, the
last impression is important.
-Tom Destry
One of the satellite channels programmed a weekend of
Audie Murphy cowboy movies. In my youth these were a Saturday afternoon staple down
at the Palace Theatre, of happy memory, and I was pleased to revisit Destry (1954).
Dismissing Destry and other post-war shoot-‘em-ups
as cheap, mass-produced, predictable entertainment would be easy, and in fact Destry
features few surprises: a young, unassuming cowboy whom everyone underrates arrives
in a corrupt western down to clean it up. The chief villain is an oily
fancy-pants with a concealed Derringer and who surrounds himself with a crew of
stupid, disposable gunslingers. There is a bad girl and a good girl (think of
Grushenka and Katerina in The Brothers Karamazov), an incompetent mayor,
an incompetent sheriff, a kindly old Doc, a brass-voiced old aunt, and assorted
fearful townsfolk.
Destry, however, stands out because of the director,
George Marshall, and an outstanding cast of some of Hollywood’s finest.
Marshall was the director of 1939’s Destry Rides again
and wanted to re-make it in color and with a larger budget. His 1954 Tom Destry
is the son of James Stewart’s Destry, and so the second film could be considered
a sequel rather than a remake. That the second film is not as well-known as the
first is unfortunate, because it is excellent in its own way.
Audie Murphy was a great actor. He is better known for his
many cowboy films, but was brilliant as a conflicted young idealist in The
Quiet American. Filmed in Saigon in 1958 with some studio sequences in Rome,
this controversial film was not a financial success (and author Graham Greene
hated it) but Murphy is finally given a chance to portray a complex, conflicted
character and carries it off wonderfully. In Destry he anticipates this
complexity as a young deputy sheriff dealing with apparently impossible
situations while upholding the law.
Mari Blanchard, whose career was all too short, is the brunette
bad girl who chooses the right path in the end, but because she was the bad
girl she must die.
Lori Nelson is the blonde good girl, generally forgettable
except at the end, when she discharges two revolvers into the ceiling to get
Destry’s attention.
Wonderful Mary Wickes is the brass-voice old aunt (Doc’s
wife, actually, but P. G. Wodehouse would see her as an aunt).
Lyle Bettger is the Snidely Whiplash villain, cunning, cruel,
and treacherous. He seems to be enjoying his role immensely.
Thomas Mitchell is the bumbling, drunken sheriff, often
comical but who in the end dies tragically when shot in the back by the
villains. This is the point when Destry stops being Mr. I-don’t-like-guns Nice
Guy and the plot goes all Katie-bar-the-door.
Best known as Scarlett O’Hara’s pa, Mitchell enjoyed a
long career in Hollywood and was a closet intellectual and playwright as well
as a much-honored actor.
Wallace Ford is loveable ol’ Doc. This great actor’s early
life was, as many have noted, Dickensian. He was born in England as Samuel
Grundy and grew up in a series of orphanages and brutal family placements in England
and in Canada. Sam and another boy, named Wallace Ford, escaped to America (Danged
illegal immigrants, right? Ford later served in the cavalry.) on a freight
train. Wallace Ford was killed while the boys were trying to board another train,
and in his honor Sam took Wallace’s name. Now there is a story worth filming.
Edgar Buchanan always played bumbling, comical old
grumps, uncles, and mayors, but in a surprise turn he is in this film a determined
villain and is killed trying to murder Destry.
John Doucette steals his one brief scene as a
growly-voiced bully, and long before he was the Skipper Alan Hale, Jr. sails a
horse as a tough trail boss impatient with the young deputy sheriff’s determination
to follow the law in all things.
By the end of the film the set is littered with more
bodies than the final scene in Hamlet, and yet there is no blood. Why
were movie deaths so tidy in those days? Everyone in the cast and crew were
survivors of the Depression and the Second World War. Some of them had been in
combat in the Second World War and others in the First World War. All of them
would have lost friends or relatives in the wars, and all of them knew how fearful,
painful, and prolonged most deaths are. We can only speculate that, knowing hunger
and death and loss for so long, the filmmakers were not going to show those
horrors in their art. It sometimes seems that the brutal deaths in modern
cinema are staged by filmmakers whose own lives have featured no more trauma
than not making the swim team at Yale or maybe having to wait in line at a
Starbuck’s.
But this is only speculation.
Another reality is that there is little diversity in
1950s cowboy films, although we know that the American West was peopled by all
sorts of peoples from all sorts of backgrounds and cultures. But a film reflects
the aesthetics of the dominant culture in the time in which it was made, not
the time in which it is set, thus all those blonde Romans in Spartacus.
John Ford was one of the few filmmakers trying to get things right (cf. Sergeant
Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn, for instance), but he is now faulted
for his efforts while the other producers and directors of the time who ignored
social injustice get a pass.
Well, as the man says in Slaughterhouse Five, so
it goes.
And I see I have drifted away from my topic, the fine
craftsmanship in Audie Murphy’s Destry. It is a good film indeed, almost
Shakespearean in its individual tragedies but with the young lovers reunited at
the end. We hope that they lived happily ever after.
-30-
