Silver River: (1948. dir: Raoul Walsh) I am often struck by the loping, easy pace of Errol Flynn Westerns. I used to think it was intimately connected with Michael Curtiz's direction, but this is one of Raoul Walsh's, and it moves at the same amble, from one set-piece to another in the life of the old-West equivalent of a Citizen Kane, winningly (when is he not winning?) played by Flynn.
He is Michael McComb, gambling tycoon, silver tycoon, banking tycoon. We begin with the great formative experience of his adult life: charged with guarding a Union payroll wagon outside Gettysburg and under attack by Jeb Stuart's men, he chooses to burn the money rather than see it fall into Rebel hands, an action which sees him court-martialed and cashiered out of the armed forces, leaving him with cynical views of both money and authority. We cross the years with him, watching his meteoric rise into wealth and power and his plummeting fall into bankruptcy and disgrace, brought low largely by his single most dastardly crime, which is also the only one he ever committed for love.
Thomas Mitchell is in wonderful form as the steadfastly loyal, drunken lawyer who becomes the crumbling face of McComb's own betrayed conscience. There are exciting stunts: when McComb and his crony overtake the runaway payroll wagon in the beginning, it smacks of a Yakima Canutt kind of joy and masterful timing. The end-battle, when the miners at last rise up against the bad guy (Barton MacLane) who has boldly gunned down Thomas Mitchell during his stand for senator, it's well-edited and enjoyable.
In the end, though, a Flynn movie stands or falls by Flynn himself, and this time he gives us a cynical character who nonetheless wins our hearts through his genuine, boyish joy whenever he looks on his beloved wife (Ann Sheridan), and that makes it a good film.
San Antonio: (1945. dir: David Butler) This is a vast, color-saturated showboat of a Western which lets itself amble over sweeping vistas of the insides of dance-halls rather than across the open plains, with which it has little concern. The conflict is between wildly successful cattle-rustlers and the once-powerful cattle-barons whose herds have been drastically diminished by organized mobs who stampede the beasts across into Mexico then sell them back north. Flynn is Clay Hardin, one of these victimized ranchers. We first meet him in Mexico where he has gone to find proof that his arch-nemesis and saloon-owner Roy Stuart (Paul Kelly) is El Rustler Supremo. He's found it in the very convenient and easy-to-carry form of a "tally-book" Stuart sloppily left with a ranch-hand who got himself shot in the larcenous act. Following the tally-book instigates much of the ensuing action.
But like most Flynn Westerns, the real story is about the town, about how a frontier town keeps its principles of freedom and integrity while cleaning up lawlessness. The other kind of Western, about a man alone facing bad hombres and moving on once he's done his bit, is for other stars. Flynn's cowboy heroes always tend to settle at the end, with a ranch, a job as marshall, a girl and a lot of money in hand. Because Flynn is a social creature, isn't he, and it's hard to imagine his characters existing in solitude. Think of John Wayne or Randolph Scott or, God knows, Clint Eastwood, living a whole year in the wild without contact outside of the odd mountain man or wildcat, and it's just conceivable, but who can picture Flynn in that scenario? He's a townie, Flynn is, charming and insoucient, and whatever grudges he holds against mankind, he'll work them out in and amongst his fellow man.
He's at his most charming in this one, and funny, to boot. Some of the humor is over-the-top forced, as embodied in the English-impaired SZ Sakall character; it often feels like the director would rather be making a farce or a musical. There is, though, clever dialogue (Alexis Smith as an eastern singer hired by Stuart: "Is it a Western custom to push yourself in on other people?" Hardin: "Yes, ma'am. That's how the West was settled,") and much of the funny comes of Flynn and the others, even the director, just enjoying themselves. There's a bit I've seen bad-mouthed but that cracked me right up where bad-guy Stuart is standing at his own bar when a cat walks across it and starts lapping up his drink. Stuart: "Get that drunken cat off the bar." Barman (examining cat): "He is a little drunk, isn't he?" It leads to nothing, it's apropos of nothing, but it's the kind of little indulgence you get when the pace is easy and the budget is unlimited.
Poor Alexis Smith has to wear some of the most excruciating costumes you'll ever see (what kind of a person gets up in the morning, worried that her lover thinks she conspired to have him killed, and before she goes out into the streets -- streets in front of the Alamo, remember,-- in search of him she puts on a hat with a clump of cherries on top of it?) (That was going to be a rhetorical question, but I'm going to answer it: nobody. Nobody has ever done that, not in the whole long history of the earth.) She comes across as petulant and stiff most of the time, but she and Flynn always play easily enough together, and she doesn't ruin anything. (I mean, she might have ruined the songs, I don't know, because I generally fast-forward through those, unless it's Mae West or Marlene Dietrich or someone I know will be interesting.)
The shootout scenes are almost hysterically over-played, with stuntmen diving into great, swooping, balletic death-throes, but the climactic stalking scene, in which Hardin stalks one villain who stalks another through the moonlit ruins of the Alamo, is beautifully lit and satisfying.
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