*CAUTION: SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN IT YET, GO OUT AND DO SO NOW. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?*
PART ONE. THE STORY
When the original Elmore Leonard story "Three-ten to Yuma" first appeared in Dime Western Magazine in 1953, it was not much more than ten pages long. It begins with a sheriff's deputy pulling up in front of a hotel in Contention, Arizona, with an outlaw in tow. The two spend the next several pages holed up in a hotel room before making a short and ultimately successful trip through town past the outlaw's gang to the railroad tracks. At no time does this prisoner assist his guard. It ends with the deputy hoisting his bad guy (who must have been a far tinier human than Russell Crowe) bodily into the train car and the bad guy himself admitting a grudging admiration for his captor.
It's a story of temptation, an unpretentious psychological drama focused on the personalities of two men, not an action story at all. There is reference to the hold-up of a stagecoach (in the story, the outlaw has already been tried), and also to the clever ruse (used in both films) the deputy used to throw the gang's scent off the trail, but we see neither. There are two bits of action we do see in the hotel room: once when the outlaw tries to make a break for it, one involving the brother of the dead stage driver (who, interestingly, the outlaw has been cleared of having killed; whereas in both films, we watch him commit the crime) who busts in with vigilanteism on his mind. When the moment of the final showdown arrives (and it is, really, only a moment), the outlaw's Man Friday yells for the boss to drop, the boss drops, but the deputy is the one who gets the lucky shot. The bulk and heft of the story, though, lies in the canny psychological tactics the brigand uses to try and talk his way out of his chains, and how very tempted the good guy is to acquiesce.
PART TWO. THE TRICKSTER
The story was first filmed in 1957, directed by Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow, the Last Wagon) using one of the Old West's greatest screenplays, by Halsted Welles, a man who wrote mostly for television. With Van Heflin as deputy Dan Evans, now become a struggling cattleman who's taken the job because his family's fallen on hard times, and Glenn Ford as badman Ben Wade, it's a near perfect film. Perfect, my boyfriend will tell you, except for the Lady-in-the-Buckboard scene, in which Evan's wife drives into Contention at the last minute to make sure her husband knows she loves him. It's a scene that messes with time, strains credulity, dips a toe into sentimental hogwash, adds nothing to the story and little to their characters. The single thing it DOES add, and it's arguable that this justifies its inclusion, is a quiet change in the Glenn Ford character, subtle and unspoken, as he watches the intensity of emotion between husband and wife, a change which will magnify to become a deciding factor later on.
Van Heflin had a huge talent for playing salt-of-the-earth farmers, with his big, physical presence and his knack for playing simple, non-introspective men without condescension. As for Glenn Ford, there had never been an outlaw as charming and relaxed as his Ben Wade, nor would there be again until Butch Cassidy came along a decade later. This is a man who enjoys life. He'll kill if he must, but it's not for sport or pleasure. When he shoots his own man along with the stagecoach driver, he does it quickly, instinctively, because it's necessary to get the job done (and without making a big, speechifyin' deal out of it like Russell Crowe's Ben Wade does). He loves life, and he loves women. This man is not just a player and a flirt--I mean, he's those things, too, but he genuinely loves women. Loves the perfumes and the sussurations of silk, the hair and the sound of feminine voices. Generally when left to muse unencumbered his thoughts will turn to the pleasures of feminine company, usually with a joyful nostalgia. You can hear it in his voice as he reminisces with the saloon girl about the canteen where she used to work, see it in his flirtation with Evans' wife, sense it while he listens to a woman's faraway song. And it's what gets him into trouble.
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"Behind trickster's tricks lies the desire to eat and not be eaten, to satisfy appetite without being its object. If trickster is initially ridden by his appetites, [sometimes] such compulsion leads him into traps..."
--Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
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The genius of the first film lies in taking a hint from the short story and expanding Ben Wade into a full-fledged trickster figure. Some of the hallmarks of the trickster archetype include shapeshifting, agility, parasitism, thievery, cunning, versatility, skill at talking and lying, a leaning toward pranksterism, a sense of humor. He has a tendency to fall into his own traps, and an equal propensity for escaping from them after an adventure. According to Wikipedia, the trickster "...breaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimes maliciously... but usually, albeit unintentionally, with ultimately positive effects." Ben Wade is captured because his weakness for women keeps him in town too long, and there is a wonderful scene in which Evans stalls him even longer in the saloon with a conversation that delightfully sets up both the cautious rivalry between the two and their tentative enjoyment of it, as evidenced by the look on Glenn Ford's face when he realizes he's been had.
PART THREE. THE BIG BAD KILLER
Compared to Russell Crowe's Wade, Ford's is less complex and, in the end, when he makes his shapeshifting transition, easier to believe. In last year's remake (directed by James Mangold), we find Ben Wade much changed. Crowe's Wade has been cartoonified into the coldest, Bible-quotin', power-manipulatin', sharp-shootin' psychokiller this side of the Pecos. The implication is that he is--or, rather, the REPUTATION he fosters bills him as--the Old West's equivalent of a sociopathic serial killer. We find out (and he does, too, to an extent) ultimately that he's not, although it's much too simple to claim he's a killer with a hidden heart of gold. He's far more than that, but you can't call him good. To balance his badness, this Wade has been given an artistic bent and a close bond with his horse (nobody who's all bad could be real friends with his horse), a wry sense of humor, and that watchful, always-engaging Russell Crowe intelligence. All in all, Crowe has a tough tightrope act to walk with this one, juggling all these factors, and the end result does him credit.
Near-perfect as the first film is, and imperfect as is the remake, it's the remake I love best. It's flawed, but it's a shindig, beginning to end. It pays its respects to the first film by using big chunks of its dialogue, then throws in an Apache attack, a barn-burning, an immolation, a psychological battle over the admiration of an impressionable youngster, the death of the Old West as symbolized by the coming of the railroad, a strait-laced, hard-shooting Pinkerton (the older he gets, the more Peter Fonda sounds and looks like his dad, and how good is THAT?), electrode-wielding vigilantes, the whole shebang and the kitchen sink. Where the short story commences in the town of Contention and the first film jumps from the posse leaving Evans' ranch to pulling into Contention, this one has a full forty minutes, maybe longer, of travelling between the two, in which folks get killed and get to know one another, escape and get recaptured. It's a romp. It's a shindig. Come on down.
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"Seizing and blocking opportunity, confusing polarity, disguising tracks--these are some of the marks of the trickster's intelligence... He can encrypt his own image, distort it, cover it up. In particular, tricksters are known for changing their skin. I mean this in two ways: sometimes tricksters alter the appearance of their skin; sometimes they actually replace one skin with another."
--Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
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My friend Jeff said his big problem with the remake was that Wade's switcheroo at the end is so extreme (much more so than in the original) that we need to see, plainly and clearly, exactly where he makes the decision to jump the fence and come down on Evans' side. I kept this in mind during subsequent viewings and I think it's unclear because the decision, like most decisions of such enormity in life, is made in two moments instead of one, like a step forward then a temporary retreat before he sets the choice in stone. The first moment is when he tells Evans about the time he read the Bible at the train station; the second when Evans tells him how he lost his leg. The first moment establishes that a certain intimacy has been offered, a certain trust that we know, more than Evans does, is unusual for Wade. The second is the returning of that trust, which changes the tide and the end of the story.
PART FOUR. THE RANCHER
When you ask someone who's the best actor alive, they usually say Ian McKellen, sort of automatically, the way people used to say Olivier. Some might branch off into musings about Daniel Day-Lewis or Ralph Fiennes. But in twenty years, when Sir Ian has followed Glenda Jackson into Parliament and Daniel Day-Lewis has retired to a tiny island off Ireland to live in the ruins of a monastery sacked by Vikings in the 12th century, a place without electricity or running water where he shears his own sheep, lives off mutton and berries and leads the most fantastically joyful and visionary life any man ever has, people will answer the question, "Who's the best actor working?" with the words Christian Bale.
Bale is smart and disciplined and seemingly without fear or unhealthy ego needs. Engaging and likable as Crowe is, and as much as we all love spending time with him, it's Bale who gives the standout performance here. His Dan Evans has been modified in that he lost his leg fighting for the Union, and the scriptwriter turns this to lovely advantage in two places: early on when he ruefully tells his wife that if they'd taken a few more inches off they'd have given him an extra few hundred dollars, then in a great turn-around moment of revelation in the hotel room when he likens the money he's being offered to abandon the job to the money the government gave him for the loss of his leg--money that lets the giver off the hook, buys them the freedom to turn away. From the first moments to the last, Bale skillfully avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality and self-righteousness, giving us a full-bodied, three-dimensional man whose integrity is ultimately more admirable because it is consistently tested and in question.
POSTSCRIPT. CHARLIE PRINCE
A last word should be spoken about Charlie Prince, the outlaw's faithful right-hand man, a great character in both films. Played by Richard Jaeckel in the original with mischief and humor, he's very much a Ben Wade-in-training. In the remake, Ben Foster gives us a dandified badass with an ugly habit of gut-shooting folks so they die slow. He's harboring a seriously romantic case of hero-worship for his boss which results in unwavering loyalty and some of the movie's crazier bloodshed. The moment that pulls his performance from very good up into very, very good comes with the line, "You boys some kind of posse?" It looks simple on the page, but he wields it with a wicked, twisting underplay that turns it into a classic.
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