THE WAR WAGON

(1967)
Universal



Directed by Burt Kennedy
Produced by Marvin Schwartz
Screenplay by Clair Huffaker
Based on the novel “Badmen” by Clair Huffaker



THE WAR WAGON combines two of my favorite genres into one rip-snorting package: The Western and The Caper Film. I absolutely love a good horse opera and many of my favorite movies are westerns that I can watch over and over again. And I love a good caper. I just enjoy the hell outta seeing a bunch of expert thieves steal something that everybody says can’t be stolen. Maybe it’s because most thieves are so inept in real life and never seem to be able to pull off their heists with the aplomb and style movie thieves do.

THE WAR WAGON can be classified as the western version of an armored car heist. The title vehicle is an armored fortress on wheels that is protected by a Gatling gun and 32 heavily armed riders on horseback and the entire convoy gallops along at full speed from start to finish. Nobody has ever successfully been able to rob The War Wagon and it’s owner is about to transport the largest shipment of gold The War Wagon has ever carried: a half million dollars.

Taw Jackson (John Wayne) has a carefully put together plan to rob The War Wagon and the way he sees it, he’s got a right to the gold. After all, it came off his land that was stolen from him by Frank Pierce (Bruce Cabot). Pierce had Taw framed for murder and sent to prison and in the years that Taw has been incarcerated, Pierce has been stripping Taw’s land of the gold. Taw assembles a motley crew to help him take The War Wagon: Lomax (Kirk Douglas), a gunslinger for hire who once almost killed Taw. Levi Walking Bear (Howard Keel), an Indian fully assimilated into the ways of the white man who talks a Kiowa tribe into the heist. Billy Hyatt (Robert Walker) is an uncontrollable drunk until it comes time for him to handle explosives and then he’s as calm and centered as Sunday morning. Wes Fletcher (Keenan Wynn) works for Pierce and his inside knowledge of The War Wagon’s schedule and Pierce’s organization is vital to the success of the heist.

The plan gets complicated when Pierce contacts Lomax and offers him $12,000 dollars to kill Taw once and for all. Taw has also got to keep Billy Hyatt away from not only the firewater but Wes Fletcher’s extremely pretty young wife who shows just as much of a liking for Billy as he has for her.

One thing you notice about THE WAR WAGON that is different from other roles John Wayne has played: usually in a movie like this, whenever the hero comes back looking for revenge for wrongs done to him, he can usually find a few townspeople willing to help him out. Not here. In fact, when Wayne’s character returns to town, it’s almost as if the townspeople act like Taw Jackson deserved what happened to him. Taw doesn’t have a friend to back him up and indeed, he spends a lot of this movie looking over his shoulder to make sure that Lomax doesn’t try to collect the sure $12,000 bucks as opposed to a share of the half million.

There’s really no point in reviewing John Wayne’s performance in a Western is there? No other American actor looked so comfortable sitting in a saddle as Wayne or so at home in the film genre that made him a legend. John Wayne never looks right when he acts in a contemporary movie, such as his Dirty Harry-ish cop movies “McQ” and “Brannigan” and indeed, he looks seriously out of place. Not so here. Wayne’s right at home on the range where he belongs. Kirk Douglas is equally Wayne’s match as the flamboyant gunslinger Lomax and Kirk Douglas is probably the only man who can look tough while wearing a tight leather shirt. They have some nice sarcastic dialog between them such as the scene where they simultaneously shoot two men. Douglas says: “Mine hit the ground first.” Wayne replies without missing a beat, “Mine was taller.”

If the movie has any major faults is that there’s no really memorable villain here. Bruce Cabot’s Pierce is a little more than a glorified bookkeeper with a mean streak. He’s always hiding behind a wall of flunkies and sneering at Wayne from behind the safety of his hired guns. The movie’s all about the heisting of the gold and that’s it. But it’s an enjoyable heist with loads of action and with interesting supporting roles from some familiar faces. Look for Bruce Dern early in the movie and Gene Evans (who starred in Sam Fuller’s classic war film: “The Steel Helmet”) is in this one as well. THE WAR WAGON isn’t a hard movie to find if your cable/satellite provider has Turner Classic Movies. It seems to air there at least once a month, usually on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and while it may not be on the level of other Wayne westerns such as “Rio Bravo” “El Dorado” “The Shootist” or “True Grit” it is good watching if you’re into westerns or caper films. And make sure you tune in on time so you can catch the rousing “Ballad Of The War Wagon” sung by Ed Ames.


101 minutes
There’s no rating but don’t worry. We’re not talking about a Sam Peckinpah western here. The violence is strictly bloodless and tame by today’s standards.
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3:10 TO YUMA

2007
Lionsgate Films

Directed by James Mangold
Produced by Cathy Konrad
Screenplay by Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas
Based on the short story by Elmore Leonard


Those of you who know me from past movie reviews I’ve written (Warning: cheap huckstering ahead!) which you can find collected in “Derrick Ferguson’s Movie Review Notebook” available through Lulu.com know that my favorite genre of movie is The Western. I love movies, period and I am the type of movie nut that will literally watch anything. Yes, even chick flicks. But Westerns…man, that’s my huckleberry right there. Give me a Saturday afternoon, two or three good Westerns to watch along with some cheeseburgers, potato chips and plenty of Coca-Cola and leave me alone. That’s why it was just such an orgasm for me to go see 3:10 TO YUMA. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to go to a movie theater and see a Western on a big screen that I couldn’t even remember the last time I saw a Western in a theater. I want to say “Silverado” but it couldn’t have been that long ago. In any case, just the idea of going to the movies to see a Western was good enough for me and thankfully 3:10 TO YUMA turned out to be a terrific movie. It’s not one of these “Revisionist” Westerns or a Western where the director is really trying to tell an allegory about Our Modern Times. It’s a horse opera, plain and simple. Told extremely well with outstanding performances by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is a struggling Arizona farmer desperately trying to hold onto his land. He’s lost a lot already. Part of his leg was taken from him in The Civil War and he no longer has the respect of his oldest son William (Logan Lerman) or his wife Alice (Gretchen Mol). Dan is determined to hold onto his farm even though his water has been dammed up and his barn burned down by the local land baron. His chance to hold onto his land comes when the outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) is captured in the nearby town of Bisbee. Ben Wade and his gang have robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad 20 times and their representative Grayson Butterfield (Dallas Roberts) offers $200 dollars to any man who will help him take Wade to a town two days ride away where a prison train will take Wade to Yuma. Dan is eager to sign up along with Doc Potter (Alan Tudyk) the sheriff’s deputy (Kevin Durand) and bounty hunter Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda) who was the only survivor of Wade’s most recent robbery and would rather just put a bullet in his brain rather than see him hang.

The journey is not going to be an easy one. Dan and the others are pursued by Wade’s gang, led by the terrifyingly dangerous Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) Wade’s right-hand man who seems to take it as a personal insult that Dan and the other have even dared to presume to think they’re going to take Wade in to hang. And then Dan and the others have to take a detour through country infested with bloodthirsty Apache renegades. To make Dan’s situation even worse, his son William has taken it into his head to come along against Dan’s wishes as the 14 year old boy is plainly infatuated with Ben Wade’s legend.

There are a lot of things that makes 3:10 TO YUMA work for me but I’ll give you the main three: One is the story. It’s a simple story, sure. But in Westerns it’s the simple stories that work the best. The motivations of the characters is the grease that makes the engine of the story run smoothly and everybody in this movie has a good reason for where they are and why they do what they do. Second are the performances. The actors in this movie all look as if they’re actually inhabiting the period they’re supposed to be living in. The problem with a lot of recent Westerns I’ve seen is that they’re miscast and the actors look as if they’re playing dress up. Not here. And three is the location shooting. 3:10 TO YUMA was filmed in New Mexico and it looks absolutely terrific. It has the look of vintage 1950’s/1960’s Westerns.

The relationship between Dan Evans and Ben Wade is at the heart of this movie and both Christian Bale and Russell Crowe do splendid jobs of acting. Russell Crowe doesn’t play Ben Wade as a foaming-at-the-mouth-mad-dog killer. Wade is surprisingly intelligent, charming, educated, artistic and talented. In fact, he’s probably the smartest person in the movie and he has a scary insight into human nature. He can sit down with you for five minutes and tell you things about yourself you’ve kept shut up deep inside yourself for years. Dan Evans is nowhere near as smart or intelligent or talented. But he has a soul. A soul that intrigues Ben Wade and one he comes to respect. One of the best things about the movie is seeing how the relationship between the two men develops in ways I certainly didn’t see coming.

Christian Bale is an actor that I think one day is going to achieve the status reserved for Brando and Olivier. He’s just that good. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him give a bad performance and I’ve followed his career since “Empire Of The Sun”. I was really interested in seeing how he would handle himself in a Western and I enjoyed his performance a lot. He takes to the Western like a duck takes to water and I certainly hope he does more of them. As for Russell Crowe, this isn’t his first Western. He did a great job in Sam Raimi’s “The Quick And The Dead’ and here he makes his Ben Wade a totally absorbing and interesting character, one that we watch just to see what he’ll do next because this is the type of guy who never does or says what you expect.

The supporting cast does a fine job in the roles and I really liked Peter Fonda here, considering that his dad Henry was in what I consider the finest Western ever made: Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon A Time In The West”. Peter has a lot of fun playing a tough-as-horsehide bounty hunter here. Fans of the TV show “Firefly” will want to keep an eye out for Alan Tudyk who plays a horse doctor who discovers he’s also a man of action.

The action scenes are thrilling and just what I expect from a Western. There’s gunplay aplenty, especially during the last half hour of the movie where we have a number of plot twists that are thrown at us in such a way that I defy you not to be sitting on the edge of your seat. And I’ve said this about a number of recent movies but I’m going to say it again: much as I love CGI there’s some movies you don’t need it for and The Western is one of them. Sometimes it’s a pleasure to go see a movie where it’s Real People doing the stunts.

So should you see 3:10 TO YUMA? If you’re as big a Western fan as me, Hell, yes. Even if you’re not a Western fan and just want to see a movie with great action, solid acting and stunning cinematography, yes. If you’re a fan of Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, definitely. They give wonderfully strong, fully characterized performances here. 3:10 TO YUMA is one of those movies that if you didn't see it in the theater then you need to rent or buy the DVD and catch up on it.



120 minutes
Rated R