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REMAKING A CLASSIC WESTERN
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After 50 years, can we make a classic better?
of TheColumnists.com
Exactly half a century ago, Columbia Pictures released Delmer Daves' "3:10 To Yuma," a low budget, black and white western that created little box office stir, but was destined to be hailed as one of the last great classic westerns.
Now an all-new version of "3:10 To Yuma" is playing across America with Oscar-winner Russell Crowe and Christian Bale co-starring in the roles played in 1957 by Glenn Ford and Oscar-winner Van Heflin. It gives us a prime motive for comparing the two versions and drawing some conclusions about how much our society and the film industry have changed in 50 years.
The original version came from the school of the "adult" western, a sub-genre that began in the 1940s with the likes of William Wellman's two classics "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943) and "Yellow Sky" (1948) and most often linked to Henry King's 1950 "The Gunfighter" and Fred Zinnemann's 1952 "High Noon." These were westerns deeply rooted in character rather than plot, featuring hard men facing moral crises.
The movie was derived from a 1953 short story (published in Dime Western magazine) by Elmore Leonard, who was then writing westerns and hadn't yet been recognized as one of America's great crime writers. The story boils down to a standoff between two strong frontier men--a ruthless outlaw named Ben Wade who's captured while the rest of his vicious gang rides free and a down-on-his-luck rancher named Dan Evans, who's so desperate to save his place from imminent foreclosure that, for $200, he agrees to be one of a handful of men assigned to take the prisoner across country to put him on the train to Yuma, where the Arizona state prison is located.
It's considered an almost certain-death assignment because the outlaw's men have vowed to gun anyone down who dares try to reach the 3:10 train to Yuma with their charismatic leader. As in "High Noon," the clock is ticking on this taut western--and every second counts for both men.
In the 1957 film, Van Heflin (1942 best supporting actor for "Johnny Eager") played the ramcher as a peace-loving man who almost always dodged trouble or responsibility. His young son even wonders if the rancher is a coward because he so often seems to avoid standing up for himself. Desperate for money, Dan even seems to seriouisly weigh the offers outlaw Wade makes to him of even more money if he'll look the other way and let him escape.
The 1957 film characterizes Ben Wade as a clever, well-mannered, even rather charming man who seems utterly fearless--and fully confident he'll escape the hangman's noose at Yuma. We constantly suspect Ben Wade might have been a great man if he hadn't chosen a life of crime. He towers above the humble rancher in both stature and self-esteem.
As we get to know these two antagonists, we begin to wonder what the rancher might have been if he had more backbone--and what the outlaw might have been if he'd had a streak of decency in him. Their actions ultimately are governed by what may be their unacknowledged inner instincts. We are forced to think about what's going on inside these two very different men, which is the very essence of the "adult" western.
The original "3:10 To Yuma" was made by a most unusual man to be holding the reins of a gritty western: Delmer Daves, a cultured, Stanford-educated gentleman, who, in real life, collected unusual recipes and bound them in books, which he later donated to Stanford University, along with the scripts and other papers from his long career in movies.
Daves began as an actor in light comedy in the late 1920s, but primarily made his mark as a screenwriter. Though uncredited, Daves had worked on the screenplay for Erich von Stroheim's notorious "Queen Kelly," the unfinished 1928 melodrama starring Gloria Swanson. He went on to write some of the best films of the next 30 years, including the immortal "Love Affair" (1939) with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne as well as its popular remake with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, "An Affair to Remember," He wrote "You Were Never Lovelier" with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth; "Dames," the great Busby Berkeley musical; adapted "The Petrified Forest" from the Broadway play; wrote the original story for Loretta Young's "The Farmer's Daughter" and wrote a majority of the screenplays for the films he made when he became a director in 1943.
Daves' first picture as a director was the thrilling "Destination Tokyo" with Cary Grant. In the 1950s, he turned to westerns and virtually created his own special niche in the genre with such great films as "Broken Arrow" (1950) with James Stewart; "Cowboy" (1958) with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon; "Jubal" (1956) with Ford, Ernest Borgnine and Rod Steiger; "The Badlanders" (1958) with Alan Ladd, a western remake of "The Asphalt Jungle"; "Drum Beat" (1954) with Ladd; "The Hanging Tree"(1959) with Gary Cooper; "The Last Wagon" (1956) with Richard Widmark and, of course, "3:10 To Yuma." After that, he became the No. 1 director of teen romances with "A Summer Place" and "Parrish."
Under Daves' direction, Glenn Ford gave one of his most controlled and deft performances, working against type as the bad guy. He's polished where Van Heflin's Dan Evans seems always unsure of himself. Ford's Ben Wade walks into a saloon, handcuffed, and quickly woos the barmaid, played by pretty Felicia Farr, the real-life wife of actor Jack Lemmon and a frequent player in Dave's pictures at Columia, where she was under contract. Wade knows he's walking a tightrope while in custody since several of his captors would just as soon kill him as put him on the train. Ford plays this expertly, letting us know every step of the way that he's not resigned to his fate.
For Heflin, the role of Dan Evans puts him back in the same framework of the character he played earlier in George Stevens' "Shane"--a peace-loving farmer who's barely holding out against the cattlemen who want to drive him off his land. When burned-out gunslinger Shane (Alan Ladd) stops at the farm to water his horse, he's drawn into the fight on Heflin's side. After that, Heflin worries that his young son (Brandon deWilde) has lost faith in him, comparing him unfavorably to the bolder, tougher Shane. Again, in "3:10 to Yuma," Heflin's character has to measure up to someone else to earn his son's respect.
Director of the 2007 remake is James Mangold, who's spent most of his time recently as executive producer of the contemporary TV series "Men in Trees." He's among the more promising of the newer Hollywood directors, choosing mostly contemporary dramas like "Girl Interrupted" (1999) with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. Again, he seemed an unlikely choice to remake a classic western since his only real connection as a director to anything remotely western was his popular "Walk the Line," the biographical film about country music star Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter Cash.
But Mangold clearly respects the now faded western genre because his "3:10 To Yuma" is a bold re-imagining of the classic story, giving it new vigor and meaning for a modern audience possibly attracted principally by its two male stars--Russell Crowe and Christian Bale--and the promise of a lot more action than the original film contained.
For starters, the new film wants to balance off the two antagonists a little better. Dan Evans now has an additional reason to avoid physical trouble: He's a disabled Civil War veteran who has an artificial leg. His son (Logan Lerman) is now a very grown-up and rebellious 14-year-old who actually joins the procession toward the train station, against his father's orders. This puts him there, in the center of the action, to see his father finally stand up to Ben Wade and his men.
Christian Bale's Dan Evans is equally reluctant to put himself in the line of fire except for the most practical reasons: He is about to lose his ranch and needs the $200 fee to block foreclosure. The new version also forces him closer to the edge of total failure as a rancher by starting the film with a raid on his ranch by his enemies, resulting in the burning of his barn. Now it's not just cattlemen after his land, but also forces lined up with the railroad, which wants to seize his land and run tracks through it.
Crowe's Ben Wade is nowhere near as smooth or elegant as Glenn Ford's version. Rather he's a tougher, nastier edition who probably could break a couple of Gleen Fords like dry pretzels and have them for breakfast. He's mean and vicious and so are all the men in his outfit, most notably his chief gunsel, Charlie Prince, who was played like an impatient teenager by Richard Jaeckel in the original film, but becomes a sadistic killer as portrayed by Ben Foster in the new film. (He sets fire to a stagecoach in one scene and lets the man trapped inside burn alive.)
The new version also adds a couple of extra action sequences to not only show us how fearless Ben Wade is, even with handcuffs on, but also to break up what was essentially a two-man snarling contest in much of the original film. One sequence has the prisoner escort party attacked while in Apache country. Another has them confronting a tunnel-digging road crew that wants to string Wade up on the spot.
The bloody finale at the train station also has one very dramatic change--a totally different conclusion than the one in the 1957 film. Some will find it upsetting and illogical, but others may find it more credible than the original ending. I can take it either way and didn't mind the decision to head in a different direction.
Russell Crowe has long since established himself as one of our most versatile actors today. He's utterly convincing as a frontier bad guy and you'll have no trouble believing he's been doing westerns for years. His "Yuma" character always did have a certain built-in appeal anyway, but Crowe is such a forceful presence that it's a joy just to watch him munch through this tangy part.
Christian Bale is going to be another major star, too. He jsut hasn't yet found the role that will make his name as Crowe did with "Gladiator." He already has turned in one of the year's best performances as the German-born American soldier who escapes from a Vietnamese prison camp in Werner Herzog's overlooked "Rescue Dawn." Later this year, we'll see him as one of several actors who play folk/rock legend Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There." Busy now filming "The Dark Knight," his second film as comic book hero Batman--the first was "Batman Begins"--Bale gives a very nuanced and fully convincing performance as Dan Evans in "Yuma."
It's interesting to see how this vintage story is altered by the passage of half a century. Take the character of Emmy, the saloon girl Ben Wade seduces in the 1957 film. As played by sweet Felicia Farr, she's just a bored small town girl who's attracted by a handsome, glib fellow with an awfully appealing "element of danger" in him. That's pretty much the way you had to play such characters in 1957, but today actress Vinessa Shaw plays Emmy as a girl who may be looking for an easy way out of a tank town saloon, but who probably would settle for a good ride between the sheets with the sexy outlaw. Innocence has been lost in large quantities since 1957,
Likewise, the violence level in the 1957 edition was minimal. It could have played on commercial TV in the 1950s without any editing. The 2007 edition gives us large gouts of blood whenever slugs hit flesh--and that's a very frequent happening.
But the new "3:10 To Yuma" doesn't grind up the original version and spit it out as outdated garbage. It's a respectful remake and will be regarded as one of the standout westerns of the first decade of the 21st century, a time in which even finding a western on the big screen is like finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
Now there are two great "3:10 To Yuma" movies--and what's so bad about that?
©2007 by Ron Miller. The DVD cover reproductionof the 1957 "3:10 To Yuma" is courtesy of Sony Corp. and Columbia Pictures. The 2007 movie poster is courtesy of Lionsgate Picures.
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