Day of the Outlaw: (1959. dir: Andre De Toth) This is one of greats; certainly it's one of De Toth's best. A Western with a difference, it takes the old Rancher vs Farmer conflict and sets it in a tiny, isolated town amidst vast, snowy expanses of wilderness. Underwritten in a good way, like one of those old Monte Hellman Westerns, it's got inspired moments which stay with you: my favorite is when Ryan's rancher shows down alone against three farmers inside a tiny barroom. He has his drunken friend roll a bottle down the bar on the understanding that when it hits the floor everyone will draw and the reckoning will be had. The bottle never gets there, but that's another story; it's one of the tensest moments I've seen in a long time.
Ryan reteams with the impossibly luscious Tina Louise after the mutual chemistry of God's Little Acre, this time as estranged lovers stuck in the awkwardness of a small town. Only when Burl Ives and his men enter, soldier-criminals on the run from a tragedy which seems to be the Mountain Meadows Massacre, does the plot shift, the townsfolk forget their differences and band together to try and save their women and their honor. It's got some terrible casting: Ricky Nelson's older brother David holds his own as the male ingenue, but the girl has got to have been somebody's niece or something, because she's no actress by any stretch. Even Ives is ultimately disappointing as the dying leader haunted by his sins. I kept asking myself, now, why are these men so loyal to him? why are they scared of him, again? Which may be a result of having grown up thinking of him as the snowman in Rudolph, but a really fine performance, I'd like to think, would have overcome that preconception.
Anyway, it's still one of the best Westerns I've seen in a long time, with a great feeling of space, and Ryan could play this role blindfolded.
God's Little Acre: (1958. dir: Anthony Mann) Yet another chronicle of southern white trash from the pen of Erskine Caldwell, the crazy person who brought you Tobacco Road. This family, the Waldens, poor in money and common sense but rich in land, much the same as Tobacco's shiftless Lesters, certainly films better than the other, and that has a great deal to do with Anthony Mann, who takes the near-impossible material on boldly and does not cringe from its challenges as John Ford had before him.
And those challenges are daunting: the story is equal parts satire and dead-serious, and Mann finds just about the right balance. Robert Ryan proves he runs with the stars in this one; we already knew how well he played the bad guy, but in this, he gives a magnificent and canny performance as the wily, good-natured patriarch who is blind to his own shortcomings but steadfastly loyal to family ties. There are some good comic moments and a relaxed attitude towards Caldwell's usual pornographic slant, which is emphasized by the strange fact that Tina Louise is practically pornographic just by walking around being Tina Louise.
The trouble lies inside the material itself: it's a schizophrenic story, half Faulkner and half Eugene O'Neill, and the mix is not felicitous. The O'Neill part, a subplot in which a drunken son-in-law (played by Aldo Ray) is desperate to re-open the local mill, a grand and empty gesture which he ultimately makes and for which he pays the ultimate price with absolutely no good coming from it, does not resonate well with the main, "Faulkner" part, in which Ryan's gold-digging dreamer ruins the farm by turning it into a wasteland of holes and piles of dirt. There's some kind of sly brilliance in the repeated refrain Caldwell gives him ("What in the pluperfect hell is going on here?"), as he, and his entire family, are caught in some purgatorial overlapping place between past and present, with one foot in each and no foot necessarily in the real world at all.
Somehow they pull it off, this film, helped immeasurably by fantastic camera-work from Ernest Haller, who shot the original Richard Barthelmess Dawn Patrol, Captain Blood, Dark Victory, a couple of little things called Gone With the Wind and Rebel Without a Cause, and, more importantly, that early episode of the original Star Trek, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," the strange one with an overwrought Sally Kellerman and Gary Lockwood metamorphosing into silver-eyed gods.
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