As the movie Unforgiven opens, we see a man digging a hole near a medium-sized tree, while we hear “Claudia’s Song,” a nice piece of sentimental music.  From the written prologue, we gather that the man is William Munny (Clint Eastwood), burying his wife Claudia, who died of smallpox, leaving him to raise two young children.  Munny used to be an outlaw, but Claudia got him to quit drinking and give up his wicked ways. Whenever we hear her eponymous melody, we know that Munny is still under her influence.

The scene shifts to the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, and to Greely’s Beer Garden and Billiard Parlor in particular, which is really just a saloon and a whorehouse.  One of the whores named Delilah giggles when she sees the small penis of one of her customers, a man named Mike, and he gets out his knife and starts trying to cut her up.  His friend Davey is in the next room, humping on Strawberry Alice, and the two of them hear Delilah’s screams and come running.  Mike yells at Davey to hold Delilah. It’s a little hard to see what is going on because the room is dark, and so, just from watching the movie, I never thought that Davey did anything.  However, in the “Original Screenplay,” it says that Davey reluctantly holds Delilah while Mike slashes her face.

The present owner of Greely’s, a guy named Skinny, breaks it up by putting a gun to Mike’s head. Someone fetches Little Bill Dagget (Gene Hackman), the sheriff.  He decides that Delilah is essentially the property of Skinny.  As a result, Little Bill merely fines Mike and Davey for cutting Delilah’s face up.  They are told to bring Skinny seven horses in compensation for the damage to his property.

The whore with a heart of gold is a Western cliché, but in this movie, we have six whores with six hearts of gold.  They are outraged by the way Little Bill let Mike and Davey off with just a fine. They put their savings together and put out the word to their customers that they are willing to pay a thousand dollars to anyone that kills the two men that cut up Delilah.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas, we see that Munny is a pig farmer, which makes me think of Shane (1953).  In that movie, Alan Ladd, as the title character, walks into a bar to get some soda pop for Joey (Brandon De Wilde), a young boy, not old enough to enter the bar himself.  Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson) is sitting at a table with some other cowpokes.  When he sees Shane, he says to the bartender, “Will!  Let’s keep the smell of pigs out from where we’re drinking.”  Chris works for Rufus Riker (Emile Meyer), who owns a ranch. We know they are real men because they herd cattle. Homesteaders, on the other hand, may have a single dairy cow, but they typically own pigs.

And so, we see that Munny has sunk pretty low.  To make matters worse, we see him falling down in the mud trying to move the pigs around, mud that is probably mixed with feces.  While this is going on, a young man rides up, calling himself the “Schofield Kid.”  He’s heard about Munny’s reputation for being a killer, and he wants him for a partner to help collect the bounty of a thousand dollars for killing the two men that cut up Delilah.  Except that the story, as he relates it, has grown some.  He says that the two men not only cut up the face of a “lady,” but they also cut her eyes out, cut off her ears, and cut off her teats. This is the first indication we have that the stories about the Old West were exaggerations, which suggests that this is a revisionist Western.

At first, Munny declines the offer to be the Schofield Kid’s partner, saying he’s not like that anymore.  However, he soon decides to go for the bounty.  He is no longer good with a pistol, but he decides he can make do with his shotgun.  And his horse is not used to be ridden on, so he has trouble mounting her.  But he eventually manages to ride over to the farm of his old partner, Ned (Morgan Freeman), and talk him into going along with him.  Ned agrees, grabs his Spencer rifle, and they set out to catch up with the Schofield Kid.

Munny keeps talking about how his wife Claudia got him to quit drinking and killing. Another Western cliché is the gunfighter with a guilty past, and he has the guiltiest past of them all.  He thinks back on some of the men he killed, men that he admits didn’t even deserve it.  Later we find out that he was responsible for setting off some dynamite that killed women and children.  But Munny keeps saying, as a kind of mantra, that Claudia changed him, that he’s not like that anymore.  It’s just that he needs the money for a new start for him and his children.

Meanwhile, another man is on a train heading to Big Whiskey to collect the bounty.  He is English Bob (Richard Harris), accompanied by W.W. Beauchamp, his biographer, who has written about English Bob’s exploits in his book The Duke of Death.  There is a discussion on the train about the recent shooting of President Garfield.  English Bob says that’s why it would be better if America were ruled by a monarch, since people are intimidated by majesty and are less likely to assassinate a king or a queen.  Not only does he have the effrontery to come over here and tell us how to run our country, but he doesn’t seem to realize that being a gunfighter is an American preserve.  We know things are not going to end well for English Bob.

As English Bob and Beauchamp arrive in Big Whiskey in a mud wagon, they pass a sign that says firearms are not allowed in town and must be deposited in the county office. When they get off the mud wagon, a deputy politely informs them that they must surrender their sidearms for the duration of their visit. Although there is a pistol in full view on English Bob’s hip, he denies that he or his companion have any sidearms.

Now, if I rode into town hoping to collect a bounty and was told that guns had to be turned in to the sheriff, I would have turned in my gun.  Then I would have looked around town, talked to the whores, and reflected on this unexpected turn of events. Once I decided what I was going to do, whether to give up on the bounty altogether or try to collect it by other means, I would have told the sheriff I was leaving, received back my gun, and ridden out of town, intent of leaving for good or executing Plan B.

Anyway, after refusing to hand the deputy his pistols, English Bob gets himself a shave. When he comes out of the barbershop, he is surrounded by Little Bill and his deputies. Little Bill takes two guns away from English Bob, and proceeds to knock him down in the street and then repeatedly kick him, to serve as a warning to anyone else who might be thinking about collecting that bounty.  He then throws both English Bob and Beauchamp in jail.

Meanwhile, Munny and Ned finally catch up with the Schofield Kid.  But just before they do, Ned gets curious about Munny’s sex life.  Ned is so needy sexually that he hated the idea of leaving his wife, an Indian named Sally Two Trees, even for just a couple of weeks.  So, he wonders if Munny ever goes to town to have sex with a whore. Munny says Claudia wouldn’t want him doing that.

And then Ned asks him if he masturbates.  That qualifies this movie as a modern Western, suitable for the 1990s.  Of course, if the movie had been made ten years later, Ned and Munny would have pulled a Brokeback Mountain (2005).  And if made ten years after that, around the time that The Shape of Water (2017) was receiving the Academy Award for Best Picture, I suppose Munny would have found a deep, meaningful relationship with one of those pigs he had.  It’s important for a movie to stay up with the times.

Back at the sheriff’s office, Little Bill is reading The Duke of Death, only he insists on calling it “The Duck of Death” instead.  He is especially interested in this one part of the book, telling how English Bob protected a lady by killing seven men with two pistols.  It turns out that Little Bill was there that night, and he proceeds to tell Beauchamp how it really was.  And how it really was turns out to be a sorry mess.

Beauchamp becomes so interested that Little Bill lets him out of his cell so that he can start writing stuff down.  Little Bill revels in his revisionism, and Beauchamp becomes more interested in that than in the romanticized stories he has been writing about English Bob.  The next day, Little Bill runs English Bob out of town, but Beauchamp stays behind.  They end up at Little Bill’s house, which he has been building himself. It’s a running joke among the deputies that Little Bill is no carpenter, one of them saying there is not one straight angle in the whole house.

That night, while Beauchamp is writing down more of Little Bill’s revisionist tales, it starts raining, and the roof starts leaking in several places.  Beauchamp jokes that Little Bill should hang the carpenter, not realizing who the carpenter was.  The joke does not go over well with Little Bill.  The house is symbolic of his revisionism, in that it is as ugly and deformed as the stories he tells.

Back out on the prairie, the Schofield Kid asks Munny if that story is true about how two deputies had rifles pointed at him, and he drew his gun and killed both of them. Munny says he doesn’t “recollect,” either because he really forgot, on account of being drunk at the time, or because he feels guilty about his past and doesn’t want to talk about it.  The Kid then claims he has killed five men, although Ned and Munny don’t believe him, and, as we later learn, it turns out he’s never killed anyone at all. Once again, the movie is saying that stories of the Old West were exaggerations, if not complete fabrications, as when men like English Bob and the Schofield Kid brag about their fictitious exploits.

But later on, Ned says to Munny that the way he remembered it, there were three deputies that had the drop on him, not just two, and Munny killed all three of them. Munny says he’s not like that anymore.  This is the opposite what we have seen up till now.  The true story about Munny killing three deputies changed over the years to just two deputies in order to make the story more believable.  And whereas English Bob and the Schofield Kid made up stories about themselves, Munny refuses to acknowledge the stories about him that really happened.  This is the first instance of anti-revisionism in this movie, a counterpoint that gets stronger as we go along.

Eventually they arrive in the town of Big Whiskey and go into Skinny’s saloon.  Munny has become ill, owing to the cold rain they have been riding in.  While the Kid and Ned go upstairs to discuss the bounty and get a little advance on it by having sex with a couple of whores, Munny remains seated at a table, shivering. Word has gotten out about their arrival, and soon Little Bill and his deputies show up, surrounding Munny, as Little Bill asks him if he or his friends are carrying any guns.  Munny says he is not armed, and his friends don’t have guns either.

Here we go again!  At first, I thought English Bob was just being foolish in denying he had a couple of pistols on him, as another way of saying that British immigrants have no business being in a Western, especially in the role of a gunslinger.  But now we have Munny doing the same thing.  And so, once again, Little Bill finds that Munny does have a pistol, and once again, he starts kicking him just as he did English Bob, after which he throws Munny out into the street.  Strawberry Alice tells the Kid and Ned where they can hide out, somewhere outside of town. They find Munny, now barely on his horse, and they head on out to the place Alice told them about.

This is exactly where they could have ended up without any trouble.  Munny could have admitted that they didn’t see the sign, apologized while handing over his gun, and admitted his friends had guns too.  Then, the next day, they could have told Little Bill they were leaving town, collected their weapons, and ridden out to the house Alice told them about. Instead, Munny has not only been beaten severely, but he no longer has his pistol anymore either.

In expressing my dismay at the way these two men, English Bob and William Munny, refuse to hand over their guns, I am not saying that this movie is being unrealistic in this regard.  It reminds me of those stories we see on the news where some guy is pulled over by the police and asked to show his drivers license, and instead of simply complying with that request, he wants to argue about it.  Some people are like that, stubbornly resistant to authority, even when it is likely to cause them grief.

The fact that some people are like that does not answer the question, why are English Bob and William Munny like that?  That is to say, the mere fact that there are people like that in real life does not, by itself, warrant their being in a movie.  It has to be justified dramatically as well.  The only thing I can figure is that having Little Bill kick Munny all around the barroom floor makes the revenge Munny gets on Little Bill later on all the sweeter.  And then, having English Bob do the same thing previously, only to get kicked around in the street, normalizes their behavior.  If Munny had been the only one to do this, we might have said to ourselves, “Boy, that guy sure is dumb!”  But having had English Bob do it as well is intended to make us believe that gunslingers in the Old West, who went around killing people on a regular basis, would have been strongly averse to handing over their firearms.

After three days, Munny recovers.  He and his two companions find out where Davey is with some other cowboys herding cattle.  Ned shoots at him with his Spencer rifle, hitting his horse instead, which falls on Davey, breaking his leg.  As he tries to crawl away, Ned can’t bring himself to finish him off.  Munny takes the rifle and finally hits Davey in the gut.  He is dying, but slowly and in much pain.

This is not the kind of kill we usually see in a classical Western, where men die immediately, unless their death is delayed for just a moment in order to allow for some final bit of dialogue.  The ugliness of Davey’s death brings us back to the revisionist mode.  After it’s over, Ned says he can’t do it anymore, and he leaves to go back home.

Later, Munny and the Kid find out where Mike, the other man with the reward on his head, is holed up. When Mike comes out of the cabin to use the outhouse, the Kid sneaks up on him, opens the outhouse door, and shoots him right in the middle of his bowel movement.  And this leads to a fundamental principle:  if you want to make a movie that the audience will regard as revisionist, it helps to have an outhouse scene. Outhouses in Westerns were frowned upon while the Production Code was still in force, and a classical Western would have eschewed them in any event.  But once the Production Code was replaced by the ratings system in 1968, outhouses started showing up regularly.  Making sure that bowel movements are given their due lends a Western an aura of authenticity.  At first, we only saw them from the outside, but in 1972, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid moved us right into the outhouse, where we found Robert Duvall and another man sitting side by side, discussing their next robbery, while they each were taking a dump.  If only that movie had been filmed in Smell-O-Vision. That would have really have been revisionist!

So, if Davey’s death was unromantic on account of being drawn out and miserable, Mike’s death in the outhouse is downright ignominious, and the Kid can take no glory in it.  In short, the deaths of these two men seem to confirm Little Bill’s account of how messy and unpleasant things really were in the Old West.

Unfortunately for Ned, some cowboys from the same ranch where Davey and Mike worked catch up with him as he tries to make it back home.  After working him over, they bring him to Little Bill, who proceeds to interrogate him with a bullwhip, trying to find out who his friends are and where they are hiding out.  But Ned won’t talk, so Bill tortures him even more, so much so that Ned dies.

Unaware of Ned’s death, the Kid sits under a tree, drinking whiskey out of a bottle, while Munny watches Kate, one of the whores, riding up from town in the distance. The Kid admits that Mike was the first man he ever killed, and it is clear that it bothers him. At this point, Munny begins delivering some heavy lines.  “It’s a hell of thing killing a man,” he says.  “You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever going to have.”  The Kid looks for reassurance, saying they had it coming, hoping Munny will agree with him. Munny replies, “We’ve all got it coming, Kid.”  No one in a revisionist Western ever said anything like that.

They find out from Kate that Ned died, and that before he did, he told Little Bill that his partner was William Munny, the man who killed women and children when he dynamited the Rock Island and Pacific in ’69, and who killed a U.S. Marshall in ’73.  After Ned died from the beating, Skinny propped him up in an open coffin outside his saloon, and put a sign on him saying that this is what happens to assassins.  While Kate tells them this, Munny takes the whiskey bottle from the Kid and starts drinking from it.

That night, a storm comes up.  Munny gives the Kid the money to take out his cut and then see to it that the rest is split between his kids and Sally Two Trees, in case he doesn’t make it back.  He takes the Kid’s Schofield pistol, which the Kid says he is never going to use again anyway, and then Munny rides into town. Just before he reaches Greely’s, he throws the empty whiskey bottle on the ground, and we know he is now the killer he used to be.

In the saloon, plans are being made to ride after Munny and the Kid, but then Munny steps in through the door, holding a shotgun, just as we hear a crash of thunder.  It’s real wrath-of-God stuff. We see the look on Beauchamp’s face, as the camera slowly moves in on him, and it is clear that he is spellbound.  All that revisionist stuff is gone from his head, as he realizes he is about to witness something more glorious than anything he ever wrote about.

After finding out that Skinny owns the place, Munny shoots him for decorating his place with Ned’s body. He starts to shoot Little Bill, but the shotgun misfires.  He draws his pistol, and what follows is reminiscent of the story Little Bill made fun of when he was reading from The Duke of Death, only this time it’s real. Munny shoots Little Bill and then one deputy after another.  And except for Little Bill, who is still alive, the death of each of the deputies is quick and clean, not slow, painful, and ugly, like that of Davey and Mike.

In the “Original Script,” Munny says to those still in the room, “Every asshole that doesn’t want to get shot best clear out the back quick.”  But in the movie, he says, “Any man don’t want to get killed better clear on out the back.”  Now, I’m no expert on prosody, but this version strikes me as poetic, as having the kind of meter one might find in a ballad that tells a tale like this.  And it is fitting that such a line be spoken by this man at this moment, as he undoes all the revisionism that has come before.

Little Bill is still alive, and he makes a feeble effort to shoot Munny, but Munny knocks the pistol aside and points Ned’s Spencer rifle, which he retrieved from where it was in the room, at Little Bill’s head.  Little Bill says, “I don’t deserve this.  To die like this.  I was building a house.”

His reference to the house is fitting.  Munny is about to put an end to Little Bill’s life, and that will mean the end of that ugly house he was working on, which is a metaphor for the way Munny is putting an end to the ugly revisionism that Little Bill and his house represent.

Munny delivers another heavy line, saying, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”  That sounds good, but I’m not sure what it means.  After all, it would seem that Little Bill does deserve to die for all that he has done. Perhaps this refers back to Munny’s earlier remark.  If “we’ve all got it coming,” then it is not a question of who deserves to be killed, but rather who it is that gets to do the killing.

Before he leaves, Munny threatens the whole town, telling them that they had better not shoot at him as he is leaving, or he’ll not only kill any man that does so, but he’ll kill his wife and burn his house down. Now we know why there has been so much emphasis on the fact that Munny once killed women and children, for the townsfolk know that he means what he says about killing wives.

Munny further threatens them, telling them to bury Ned right and not to bother the whores, or he’ll come back and kill everyone in the town.  Then he rides away, leaving behind the fearful citizens of Big Whiskey and an awestruck W.W. Beauchamp, already envisioning his next book, which will surpass everything he has ever written.

The epilogue tells us that Munny used his share of the bounty to move to San Francisco, where he became a successful dry-goods merchant.  In short, the movie has a happy ending, as every classical Western should.

In the 1950s, Budd Boetticher directed seven Westerns starring Randolph Scott, often referred to as the Ranown cycle. The first of these was 7 Men from Now (1956), in which seven men rob Wells Fargo, steal a lot of gold, and kill the wife of Randolph Scott in the process. He sets out to avenge her death, and while he is at it, he retrieves the gold as well. Justice is served. But there is another injustice that has to be addressed in this movie.

When Scott first happens across Walter Reed and his wife, played by Gail Russell, we can see right off that this guy is a wimp, and we wonder how he ever got himself a wife like Russell. Even when she falls in the mud, she oozes sex appeal. In fact, that may even make it better.  Some men would love to just get down and wallow in the mud with her. Later, when they are joined by Lee Marvin and his partner, Marvin says to his friend, “It just don’t seem right to me…., why a full woman like that would settle for half a man.”  He is right. Reed just does not deserve Russell.

A man like Marvin is the sort who cannot help stepping on something little, so one night while Scott, Reed, Russell, and Marvin are inside the covered wagon, Marvin starts talking about how deliciously desirable Russell is, practically ravishing her with his words, while her husband, who is being verbally cuckolded, just sits there and takes it. Marvin also talks about how he once knew another woman like Russell, who eventually ran off with a real man, suggesting that she has a thing for Scott. And apparently she does, because later, when Scott says goodbye to her, she moves in to be kissed, although he does not avail himself of the opportunity. For one thing, he is a recent widower, and for another, he is too upright to take another man’s wife.

We know that Scott will eventually kill all the men who stole the gold and caused his wife’s death, because that is routine for a Western. It is the injustice of Reed’s being married to Russell that worries us, for there is no standard convention for handling that situation. In The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), there is a similar injustice of Lana Turner being married to Cecil Kellaway, and so she and John Garfield kill him.  But that is simply one form of injustice being corrected at the expense of creating another. As a result, Turner and Garfield never really get to enjoy the love they deserve, because they must be punished for committing a murder.  What is needed is a way of bringing about the sexual justice we want without having it undone with the criminal injustice of murder.

When Scott discovers that Reed had been hired by the robbers to transport the gold, he takes the box of gold away from Reed and tells him and Russell to go west. We get a sinking feeling. The sexual wrong will never be righted. Fortunately, Reed decides to go south to inform the sheriff of Scott’s situation.

Before Reed can get to the sheriff’s office, the leader of the men who hired him to transport the gold shoots him down in the street. Because Reed knowingly risked his life and lost it trying to help Scott, Marvin says he was wrong, that Reed was a man after all. Well, it is nice of Marvin to say that, being generous about the husband now that he is dead, but we know better. After all, Reed was not wearing a gun, and in a Western, that is the mark of a weakling. And thus it is that when Reed is shot in the back unarmed as he walks to the sheriff’s office, we breathe a sigh of relief. Though Russell says she loves her husband, yet we know that this is for the best.

Later, after Scott has returned the gold, he tells Russell where he will be working as a deputy and indicates that he would be glad to see her, if ever she should be passing by that way. She quickly decides that after a decent interval (both have recently murdered spouses), she will take him up on that offer. This makes us feel good, because Scott is the man she has needed all along. When they finally get married, and he gives it to her the way her first husband never could, justice will finally be restored.

Boetticher was obsessed with what it meant to be a real man.  Men in his movies often explain their actions by saying a man does this or a man does that.  Not only had Boetticher been an athlete in college, but he had a lifelong fascination with bullfighting as well.  And didn’t we learn from Hemingway that bullfighting is a most manly endeavor?  As a result, he had a thing about beautiful women being married to men lacking in the proper amount of manhood, and this form of injustice is a recurring theme in most of the movies he made with Randolph Scott.  One can almost imagine Boetticher in college, wondering why a pretty coed would date some nerd when she could have a big, strapping man like himself.  Perhaps he expressed his frustration on this score through the movies he made.

Before moving on the the other movies in the Ranown cycle, let us look at four of the critical features of sexual injustice in the movie just considered:

The Dead Wife:  Randolph Scott’s wife has been killed by bandits.

The Unworthy Husband:   Gail Russell is a pretty woman that is married to a man that doesn’t deserve her.

The Perceptive Outlaw:  Lee Marvin is an outlaw that talks to Scott about how desirable Russell is and how she deserves better than the man she has.

The Worthy Replacement:  Russell is freed of her husband and will eventually marry Scott, a man that is appropriate for her.

Not every movie in the Ranown cycle has all these features.  In some cases, there are minor variations. And there is one movie that has none of the elements listed above.

In The Tall T (1957), Maureen O’Sullivan plays a middle-aged, supposedly homely woman, although we know she is better looking than some of the characters in this movie seem to think.  She was on the verge of becoming an old maid when a man married her for her money, because her father is rich.  The husband turns out to be a spineless heel. Just as Marvin, in 7 Men from Now, was an outlaw that got into a discussion with Scott about Russell, so too is Richard Boone in this movie an outlaw that gets into a discussion with Scott about O’Sullivan.  He says O’Sullivan would be more attractive if she fixed herself up, and he refers to her husband as “low grade.” So, it is clear that it is a form of sexual injustice that she is married to that man.  That husband is killed by Henry Silva, one of the outlaws in Boone’s gang, before the marriage is consummated.  But she never loved her husband anyway, so she let’s Scott kiss her passionately.  After the bad guys are killed off, Scott and O’Sullivan go off together with his arm around her.  He’ll give her the love she needs.  Sexual justice has been restored.

In this movie, the first feature is missing:  Scott does not have a wife that died for the simple reason that he has never been married.

In Decision at Sundown (1957), Scott plays a man who had been cuckolded by various men while he was off fighting the Civil War.  After his wife’s last affair with a sleazy character played by John Carroll, she committed suicide.  Scott blames Carroll for that and tracks him down, determined to get revenge.  When he finally catches up with him, Carroll is about to get married to Karen Steele. We are suspicious of Carroll because he is a dandy.  We get the sense that he is marrying Steele, not because he loves her, but because he is a social climber, something a real man would never do.  As she learns more about him, she refuses to marry him.  This is similar to the way the marriage was never consummated in The Tall T.  Carroll ends up leaving with the town whore, the one he is suited for, while Steele seems to be pairing up with the local doctor, a more suitable match.

There is a minor variation on the second feature:  the woman is not yet married to the man that is unworthy of her. The third feature is absent:  there is no perceptive outlaw to talk about Steele with Scott.

Buchanan Rides Alone (1958) is an outlier.  None of the features listed above are present.  There are maybe three women in this movie, two of whom have speaking parts, but neither is of much significance. What little we can discern of their relationships with men, there appears to be no sexual injustice.

In Westbound (1959), Andrew Duggan, a secret agent of the Confederacy, has married the woman Scott used to love, Virginia Mayo.  Scott is a captain in the Union Army.  On the stagecoach, he meets a Union soldier played by Michael Dante, who lost his left arm in the Civil War from gangrene.  He is married to Karen Steele.  This is the first of these movies in which the husband of the leading lady has a physical handicap instead of a character flaw.  Dante keeps referring to himself as being “half a man,” the same expression Marvin used in reference to Russell’s husband in 7 Men from Now.

Now, we were fine with the way three of the previous movies depicted sexual injustice by pairing a beautiful woman with a man that was not worthy of her because he was weak or effeminate.  And we were glad when these marriages were stopped or broken up.  But do we really feel it is an injustice for a man that is physically impaired to be married to a beautiful woman?  Well, maybe we don’t, but apparently that’s the way Boetticher must have felt, because he has Dante is killed off.

Somewhat later, Duggan, Mayo’s husband, is killed in a gunfight.  Mayo seems to still be in love with Scott and would like to have him back, but we see Scott saying goodbye to her as she leaves on the stage.   Then, in a manner similar to the ending of 7 Men from Now, we get the impression that Scott and Steele will end up getting married as soon as the decent interval of mourning has passed.  When that happens, she will get a whole man and not just half of one.

In this movie, there is a variation on the first feature:  Scott’s wife has not been killed for the simple reason that the woman he loved married someone else instead.  This is similar to Decision at Sundown, where an unfaithful wife committed suicide while Scott was off fighting the Civil War.  Here, the woman he loved was unfaithful and married someone else while he was off fighting the Civil War, depriving Scott of a wife in a different manner.  The third feature is absent:  there is no perceptive outlaw that talks to Scott about how desirable the woman is that is married to a man that is unworthy of her.

In Ride Lonesome (1959), Scott is a bounty hunter, bringing in a prisoner.  Pernell Roberts and James Coburn are two outlaws that want to be the ones to bring the prisoner in themselves.  If they do, they will receive an amnesty for their past crimes, allowing them to go straight and become partners running a farm on a piece of land Roberts owns but cannot return to while he is wanted by the law. When we first meet Karen Steele, she has just been made a widow by some Indians.  She and her husband had been managing a staging post out in the middle of nowhere.  Scott makes some derogatory remarks about her deceased husband, saying he should never have brought her to that isolated place, and having done so, he should never have left her alone to go chase after some horses.  So, even though we never meet the husband, we know from Scott’s assessment that he was unworthy of Steele.  We get the feeling that, sorry as she is that her husband has been killed, the love in that marriage had long since died.  Roberts, like Marvin and Boone in two of the previous movies, gets into a discussion with Scott about how nice it would be to have a woman like Steele for a wife.

The principal outlaw that Scott must contend with is Lee Van Cleef, the brother of Scott’s prisoner. Toward the end of the movie, we find out that Van Cleef once hanged Scott’s wife for revenge.  After Van Cleef has been killed, Scott lets Roberts and Coburn have his prisoner for the amnesty.  From the dialogue, we get the sense that, after the usual period of mourning, Steele will end up marrying Roberts.  We don’t know what her deceased husband had been like, but Roberts is definitely the real man she needs.

The fourth feature is unusual in that it is the perceptive outlaw that becomes the worthy replacement.

In Comanche Station (1960), Scott’s wife was captured by the Comanches ten years ago. Whenever he hears about a white woman being held by the Comanches, he goes to their camp to barter for the woman, in hopes that it will be his wife.  Upon arriving at a Comanche camp for just such a purpose, he ends up trading for Nancy Gates, a more recently captured woman.  He tells her he will take her back to Lordsburg, where her husband is.  Because all the braves have been having their way with her (we see bruises on her arms), she worries that her husband won’t want her back.  At this point, the question seems to be not so much whether her husband is unworthy of her, but whether he will think her unworthy of him.  Scott says that if he loves her, it won’t matter, which tells us more about his attitude toward his wife, if he ever finds her, than it tells us about Gates’ husband.

Claude Akins and two other men have been looking for Gates too.  Akins knows what Scott and Gates do not, that her husband offered a $5,000 reward for her return, dead or alive.  Akins says that the husband will pay even if she is returned dead so that he will know for sure what happened to her.  But we can’t help thinking of The Searchers (1956), where John Wayne wants to kill Natalie Wood because she has been raped by the Indians.  If it is like that, then the husband is unworthy of Gates.  But we don’t know.

Akins is the perceptive outlaw in this movie that talks to Scott about how desirable Gates is.  Scott once had Akins court martialed for killing peaceful Indians to get their scalps, for which a bounty was offered. Akins talks about how nice it would be to have a woman like Gates, and how her husband can’t be much of a man, or else he would have gone looking for her himself.  He talks about how he knew a man once that set out to find another man’s captive wife. He found her, but before they got back to her husband, they became lovers.  This remark is reminiscent of the remark made by Lee Marvin in 7 Men from Now, the one about a woman like Russell running off with a real man, suggesting that Scott would be that man, just as Akins does in this movie.  Akins’ assessment of the situation makes us think the husband is unworthy of Gates.

Akins plans to kill Scott so that he can collect the reward.  But since Gates would be a witness to the murder, he plans on killing her too, after which he will return her dead body to the husband.  Needless to say, Scott kills Akins on the way back to Lordsburg.

There is a scene in which Gates says that she hopes Scott will stay in Lordsburg for a while after they get there, saying it will make things easier, since she is afraid things will never be the same with her husband, now that she has been raped.  Scott says she’ll forget.  There’s no PTSD in a Boetticher Western.  But Gates may be wondering more about whether her husband will forget than whether she will.  She points out that Scott hasn’t forgotten about his wife.  He says that knowing Gates has made him forget, at least for a little while.  All this sounds familiar, like the dialogue in some of the previous movies that suggest that the woman, once freed of her unworthy husband or fiancé, will soon be getting together with a man that deserves her.

But when they arrive at Gates’ home in Lordsburg, a young child comes running out to her, calling her “Mommy!”  That changes everything.  There never were any children involved in the previous movies, and the presence of a young child confers a movie’s blessing on the marriage that produced that child.  Then her husband comes out, and we see that he is blind.  Gates and her husband embrace, and we know all will be well, that they truly love each other.

Did Boetticher have a change of heart?  Maybe.  But we meet this husband and find out about his condition only at the end of the movie.  We just barely have a moment for it to register that he is blind before Scott rides away and the movie is over.  But suppose we had been introduced to this married couple early on?  Suppose, similar to Dante in Westbound, he was a soldier that had been blinded during the war, and we see him reunited with his wife in the first twenty minutes of the movie?  And assume there was no child.  Would the husband have survived then?  I doubt it.  I don’t think Boetticher could have stood it.  He would have had to kill him off so that Scott and Gates could hint to each other that they will be getting together just as soon as it is socially acceptable for them to do so.

We suspect that the first feature is present in this movie.  That is, we figure that Scott’s wife is dead by now.  And the third element is present, in that Akins is the perceptive outlaw that talks to Scott about what an attractive woman Gates is, and how he thinks her husband is unworthy of her.  But is the second element present?  Is Gates’ husband unworthy of her by Boetticher standards, owing to the fact that he is blind? Or has she herself become less worthy on account of having been raped by all those Comanches, in which case, she and her husband are now suited for each other?  We may not think that way, but given the movies that have come before, we can’t help but wonder if this was Boetticher’s way of bringing about what for him would be sexual justice

The Movie

The Man with Three Names

Hombre is a movie about John Russell (Paul Newman), a white man who was kidnapped as a child and raised as an Apache, who was eventually rescued and educated among white people, but who then returned to live among the Apaches. There is also an indication that he has spent time living as a Mexican, but no emphasis is placed on that, mostly just the fact that he was a white man steeped in Apache culture. Because he has spent time among three different cultures, he has three names, one for each.

Russell Inherits a Boardinghouse

When the movie starts, he finds out that he has inherited a boardinghouse in the town of Sweetmary from “Old Man” Russell, his adoptive father.  He looks over the boardinghouse, which is run by Jessie (Diane Cilento).  She shows him the books and tells him he can make a regular income off the place without lifting a finger.  But he is not impressed.  He says he has an offer on the place for a herd of horses in Contention, and he has decided to take it.  Jessie is disappointed, for she really liked her job.

She has been sleeping with Sheriff Frank Braden (Cameron Mitchell), so she goes over to his office and tells him she no longer has a job, hoping he will marry her.  He doesn’t want to get married, however, so she decides to take the next stage leaving town and try to make her way somewhere else.

The Stagecoach Is Held Up

And so it is that she ends up on a stagecoach with Russell, who is on his way to Contention, along with a variety of characters, one of whom is Dr. Favor (Frederic March), the Indian agent at San Carlos, and his wife (Barbara Rush). Along the way, the stage is held up, and one of the passengers, Cicero Grimes (Richard Boone), turns out to be the ringleader of the bandits. We then find out that Dr. Favor has been embezzling funds by starving the Indians, and the bandits steal the money he has with him.

But things get complicated when Russell retrieves his rifle off the top of the stagecoach that the bandits did not know about.  He kills a couple of them, getting back the money, which he intends to return to the Indians that still live on the reservation.  One of the bandits he kills is Sheriff Braden, who admitted to Jessie when asked what he was doing there, “Going bad, Honey.”  No wonder he refused to marry her, if he was planning on being a part of this.

The Standoff

The rest of the movie is a struggle between the two groups of people, the bandits and the passengers.  But among the passengers, there is also a struggle between the ways of the white man and the ways of the Indian.  Russell has trouble understanding why white people persist in helping other white people, even though they don’t deserve it. He especially dislikes Mrs. Favor because she expressed contempt for the Indians, and because she was party to her husband’s embezzlement.  During the final standoff, Grimes has Mrs. Favor tied out in the hot sun with no water, saying that she will stay there until either she dies or someone brings him the money.  Russell is willing to just let her die, but Jessie is determined to save her. Russell knows Jessie will be killed if she tries to bring Grimes the money in exchange for Mrs. Favor’s release, and since he likes Jessie, there is nothing for him to do but rescue Mrs. Favor himself.  In the end, Russell kills Grimes and mortally wounds a Mexican bandit. Russell is also killed, though he did succeed in saving Mrs. Favor, which was white of him.  As a result, when the dying Mexican asks what the name was of the man that shot him, he is told the man’s name was “John Russell” rather than being given his Indian or Mexican name.

Was Mrs. Favor in on It?

Back when the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) had discussion boards for each movie, the question was posed, “Was Mrs. Favor in on it?” to which many people answered in the affirmative.  It certainly is an interpretation that makes sense of some of the peculiar things that happen in this movie. From what we can gather, Dr. Favor has been embezzling for years. For some reason, he suddenly decides to take the money and run. Perhaps he found out that the federal government was sending someone to San Carlos to do an audit, and he figured he would get out before the embezzlement was discovered. So, using the excuse that he and Mrs. Favor were going to Bisbee for a couple of days to settle some affairs, they go into town to take the stagecoach, intending to go to Mexico.

And yet, when they get to town, the heist is all set up. Not only do the bandits know that Dr. Favor has been stealing from the Indians, they also know that he has chosen just this moment to make off with the money, and that he and his wife intend to take the stage. Furthermore, because most of these bandits were from out of town, they had to know about Dr. Favor’s intention to abscond well in advance, so they could ride into the area and get things ready, which includes Grimes also getting on the stagecoach. Presumably, they had inside information. And a likely source would be Mrs. Favor. She could have been having an affair with Grimes, and during some pillow talk, told him about the money and exactly when she and her husband would be leaving.

After the robbery takes place, Grimes says to Mrs. Favor, “I figured you’d ride along with us a way.” And Mrs. Favor says, “I’d better not.”

I’d better not? That is not what an attractive woman says when she is about to be abducted by a bunch of desperadoes that, she should have every reason to fear, will gangrape her and leave her for dead in the desert. What we would expect her to do is scream and beg for mercy.

By way of contrast, consider the movie Niagara (1953). Marilyn Monroe is married to Joseph Cotten, who is very jealous and possessive. One night some young adults that are staying at the same hotel are having an outdoor party. Marilyn asks a young man to play her favorite record for her. He does, and then he asks her to dance. She looks over at her hotel room and sees her husband watching her through the window. She turns back to the young man and says, “I’d better not.”

Now, that is where that line makes sense, when a woman is worried about making her husband jealous. What would explain this is that Mrs. Favor and Grimes planned this robbery, and they agreed that she would rendezvous with him later in Mexico. This sudden change in plans worries her, for it might make her husband suspicious, especially since he has had time to wonder, as we do, just how the bandits knew so much about his plans.

Toward the end of the movie, the passengers, who are trying to make their way back to town by walking, decide to hide in an abandoned shack near a mine until nighttime.  It is located on top of a hill.  At the bottom of the hill is a smaller shack, which the bandits, with Mrs. Favor as their hostage, use as their base of operations when they discover where the passengers are hiding.  Grimes goes up the hill to try to make a deal, trading the woman for the money, but Russell rejects the offer. As Grimes tries to get back down the hill, Russell puts three slugs in him.  When Grimes collapses in the doorway of the small shack, we see the hands of Mrs. Favor dragging him inside, saving him from being shot any further. This means she cares about Grimes, confirming the theory that they were having an affair.

On the other hand, this could be an instance of the Stockholm syndrome. In fact, just prior to Grimes’ deciding to ascend the hill and try to make the deal, he asks her if she wants to send her husband a message, and she says, “Tell him I’m being well looked after,” which is characteristic: as a victim, she might be grateful that she has not been raped, thereby bonding with her captor. Furthermore, since they are alone in that scene, we would expect some kind of communication between them making it explicit that they were in cahoots, if indeed they were, but nothing of that sort is forthcoming.

At least, movie logic would require that.  Now, in real life, just because Grimes and Mrs. Favor were having an affair and had conspired against her husband, that would not mean that they would say something about it whenever they were alone.  But even though real-life logic would not require it, movie logic would, and this is, after all, a movie.

Let us further undermine the case against Mrs. Favor. A running theme through the movie is the irrational way white people, from Russell’s Apache perspective, will stick together and protect one another even after acts of betrayal. That Mrs. Favor would drag Grimes to safety would be just one more instance of this. That he would subsequently tie her up in the hot sun without water would simply underscore Russell’s belief that white people are foolish to be so trusting and forgiving of one another.

Finally, since the sheriff was also in on the job, he might, as a law-enforcement officer, have gotten wind of Dr. Favor’s treatment of the Indians, and might have also found out through someone connected to the reservation that Dr. Favor seemed awfully anxious to make that so-called trip to Bisbee.

In short, while there is a strong circumstantial case that can be made that Mrs. Favor was in on it, it is equally possible to make the case that she is innocent, at least in the sense that she did not betray her husband.

In any event, as noted above, Russell ends up in a shootout with the bandits, in which he and they are killed, leaving only the passengers still alive.  Actually, there is one more bandit, who went behind the hill to cut off their retreat, but we figure the passengers will not have any trouble with him, outnumbering him as they do.

Did Jessie Act Precipitously?

While we are thinking about what will happen after the movie has ended, allow me to suggest a subsequent scene:  About a week later, the man that was planning on buying the boardinghouse arrives in Sweetmary to find out why Russell didn’t show up to finalize the deal and take possession of that herd of horses.  And while he is there, he decides to check out the boardinghouse, asking, “Where is the woman who runs the place?  Did she quit?”

After all, there is nothing surprising about the fact that someone might inherit a business, but immediately sell it because he didn’t want to bother with it.  But you have to figure that the person who bought the business wanted to keep it as an income-producing asset.  Therefore, it makes no sense that Jessie would assume that she no longer had a job running the boardinghouse until she had a chance to talk to the man who bought the place.

The Novel

So, what with my wondering if Mrs. Favor was in cahoots with Cicero Grimes, and wondering why Jessie wouldn’t wait to see if the new owner of the boardinghouse would want to keep her on as the manager, I decided to read the novel, written by Elmore Leonard, to see if that would shed any light on the subject.

If you told me that the novel was written in the first person, I would have assumed that Jessie would be the narrator.  There are only two scenes in the movie she is not in.  The first is when Billy Lee (Peter Lazar) tells John Russell that the stage line is closing down and will no longer need horses, which Russell and a couple of fellow Indians were regularly supplying.  The second is when Russell goes to Delgado’s to talk to Mendez (Martin Balsam) about the boardinghouse, a conversation that gets interrupted when a couple of white men enter the bar and start insulting Russell’s two Indian companions. Russell bashes one of the white men in the mouth with the butt of his rifle just as the man was putting a whiskey glass to his lips.  Mendez, a resident of the boardinghouse, could have told Jessie about what happened.  On the other hand, there are several scenes with Jessie in which others in the story are not present.  She is the one that ties all the pieces of the story together.

Much to my surprise, then, I found that there is no such character as Jessie in the novel.  Needless to say, that means that the question as to why Jessie didn’t wait to talk to the new owner never comes up in the novel.  In fact, it is not even a boardinghouse that Russell inherits, but just the house his adoptive father lived in.  But even more striking is Jessie’s absence from the novel throughout.  We are used to movies eliminating characters in a novel to keep thing simple, but here is a case where the novel seems empty and flat without a character that exists only in the movie.  She is the one that makes this movie so much fun to watch, especially the way she is wont to make brutally frank comments about sex.

Also, I cannot help but mention that while the John Russell of the movie is a man with a ready wit, Apache style, of course, the novel is excessive in depicting Russell as the strong, silent type, practically making him a zombie.  In criticizing the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain said that Cooper violated most of the rules of romantic fiction.  One of those rules is the following:

 … the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

It is a detail that seems to have been overlooked by Elmore Leonard as well. Interestingly enough, the Natty Bumppo of the Leatherstocking Tales is a white man raised by the Indians just as John Russell was in this novel. Perhaps Leonard was guided by Cooper in creating the character of John Russell.  Now, I know that the old movies never represented Indians as being loquacious, but I always figured that was because their English was limited.  Hence, the stereotypical Indian who merely says, “Ugh!” But it seems that Cooper and Leonard both regard Indians as inherently laconic.

In any event, Russell and Jessie are not the only ones that made the movie better than the novel in this regard.  Billy Lee and his wife Doris (Margaret Blye), who have a miserable marriage, add to the fun, especially when Doris becomes infatuated with Grimes.  She flirts with him, saying she likes to see a man act like a man, and Grimes obliges by roughing her up sexually in the dirt.

Billy Lee of the movie sort of corresponds to Carl Allen of the novel, who is the narrator, but he is unmarried.  And instead of Doris, there is what Carl refers to as the McLaren girl, who had been kidnapped by some Indians.  They kept her prisoner for over a month, during which time Carl figures she had been repeatedly raped, but we never find out for sure.  Replacing Carl and the McLaren girl with Billy Lee and Doris was a good move on the part of the scriptwriters.

We are also used to movies changing the names of characters in a book for seemingly no good reason, but this movie goes one step further.  It turns out that the Cicero Grimes character in the novel goes by the name of “Frank Braden,” the name of the sheriff in the movie.  In what follows, the name “Frank Braden” will be understood to refer to the same character as Cicero Grimes in the movie, not the sheriff in the movie.

Anyway, at first I thought the novel would support the idea that Mrs. Favor and Frank Braden had been having an affair.  Carl describes a scene on the coach:

Frank Braden had eased lower in the seat and his head was very close to Mrs. Favor’s.  He said something to her, a low murmur.  She laughed, not out loud, almost to herself, but you could hear it. Her head moved to his and she said one word or maybe a couple.  Their faces were close together for a long time, maybe even touching, and yet her husband was right there.  Figure that one out.

And after the holdup, when Braden tells Mrs. Favor she is going to have to come with him, she makes the same odd remark:

Braden brought the horse over to her and said, “I thought you’d come along with us a ways,” sounding nice about it.

And just as nice, she said, “I’d better not,” as if they were discussing it and she had a choice.

But even so, the theory falls apart.  Lamarr Dean, the guy that got the whiskey glass smashed into his mouth, used to work for the man that delivered beef to Dr. Favor, and that was how he knew that Favor was claiming more beef was delivered than actually was, and then charging the government to get “reimbursed.”  Regarding Favor’s attempt to take the money he had embezzled and head for Mexico, Dean says, “I’ve seen this coming for two, three months.”

After Dean describes how Dr. Favor was cheating the government, Mrs. Favor says she recognizes Dean, but not Braden.  Dean replies, “No, Frank wasn’t anywhere near.  He was still in Yuma then.” So, Braden and Mrs. Favor could not have been having an affair.

And that might seem like the end of it.  We could just assume that the authors of the screenplay left out Dean’s remarks about how he was the one who figured out that Favor had been embezzling a lot of money and would try to leave with it soon, and that Braden had been in Yuma, presumably meaning the prison there.  In the movie, Dean does make reference to the way Dr. Favor cheated and starved the Indians, but it is not clear how he knows that, or if he is the ultimate source of that information.

But as if to prove that I have spent more time thinking about this than is good for me, it then occurred to me, upon finishing the novel, that these omissions in the movie were no mere oversight, but the result of a deliberate attempt to make us wonder if Mrs. Favor was in on it.  Dean’s explanation of how he knew what Favor was up to, along with the remark that Braden had been in Yuma, would have added only about two minutes to the length of the movie, not a sufficient reason for leaving it out.  One might justifiably conclude that the scriptwriters wanted to create the suspicion that Mrs. Favor betrayed her husband, only to be betrayed in turn by Grimes, the man she loved and trusted.

While that is debatable, there is no question but that the scriptwriters did the right thing by creating Jessie for this movie, even if they did leave us wondering why she didn’t stick around to talk to the new owner to see if she still had a job.

What makes The Fastest Gun Alive so unusual is not only that it has a twist ending, but also that the twist ending so thwarts our expectations that a lot of people do not remember it years later, but only recall the ending they were expecting.

By the time this movie was made, the Western formula of the gunfighter with a guilty past who wants to hang up his gun was well established, as in Shane (1953) and Johnny Guitar (1954).  In some of these Westerns, as in The Gunfighter (1950), the point is made that once a man has a reputation for being fast on the draw, he will be plagued by young punks trying to goad him into a fight so that they can prove they are faster, thereby establishing a reputation of their own.

And so it is that early in The Fastest Gun Alive, we are encouraged to fit George (Glenn Ford) into that category.  We see him practicing with his gun, which he has told his wife, Dora (Jeanne Crain), that he threw away a long time ago.  We believe that she does not like violence and killing, and she has made George promise to give up his gunslinging ways.  This recalls the way Peggy (Helen Westcott) in The Gunfighter left her husband, Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck), because she abhorred his life as a gunfighter. In other towns where George and Dora have lived, his reputation of being fast with a gun has resulted in his continually being challenged to a gunfight, just as with Ringo.  And just as Ringo promises his wife that he is through with gunfighting, and that they can start a new life in California where nobody will know who he is, George and Dora have started a new life in Cross Creek under assumed names.

Unfortunately, there is no glory in being a shopkeeper, and so every time George and Dora settle down in a new town, there eventually comes a time when he just can’t stand it any more, and ends up proving to everybody what a hotshot he is with a gun.  And once the word is out, he and Dora have to move again.  And thus it is that in Cross Creek, George once again finds himself irked one day when he hears a bunch of men in the saloon talking about men like Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford), reputed to be the fastest gun in the West.  George gets his gun and puts on a show, shooting coins out of the air and blasting a mug of beer before it hits the ground.

Now everybody knows.  And now Dora is disgusted.  She tells George that she is all through running.  George tells the townsfolk his problem, and they go along with keeping his expertise with a gun secret, but unfortunately a few letters have already gone out, and word has reached Vinnie, who arrives in town, threatening to burn it all down if George does not come out of the church to meet him in a gunfight.  The townsfolk turn to Dora, begging her to release George from his promise to her not to get into any more gunfights.

And then comes the twist no one expects and which many cannot even remember.  Dora tells them that she doesn’t care if George gets into a gunfight and she never has.  She says he has always been free to use his guns.  The problem is, George is a coward.  He has never been in a gunfight, and so every time men come around challenging him to a fight, he wants to run away and hide out in a new town.  And she is just tired of having to move.

So, George straps on his gun, kills Vinnie in a gunfight, and then the town digs a mock grave with a tombstone that has George’s name on it.  That way, George can stay in Cross Creek without having to worry about men coming around trying to prove themselves by challenging him to a gunfight, and at the same time, he can strut around town like a real man, because everyone knows he is the fastest gun alive.

In the old movies, when the Native Americans were depicted as savage Indians, they were a force to be reckoned with. They were part of what made the Old West a dangerous place, for they were always likely to attack a white settlement or wagon train, hoping to scalp the men and rape the women. This made for great cinematic entertainment. But then our conscience began to bother us, and so we started trying to make amends, with movies depicting the Native Americans as victims, more to be pitied than feared. Though such revisionist Westerns may be more faithful to the facts of the Native-American experience, yet they just are not as much fun, and Cheyenne Autumn is a good example of that.

When the movie begins, we see the pathetic Cheyenne Indians, who are forced to live on a reservation in Oklahoma, suffering from neglect at the hands of white men. They weary of this and decide to leave Oklahoma and return to their ancestral home in Wyoming, with the army in pursuit. Now, if I had been chief of this tribe, I would have waited until spring, because such a trek would be easier to make in warm weather. But no, they leave just before winter is about to set in, which only adds to their misery.

Anyway, things are moving along, and left at that, this could have simply been a boring two-hour movie. But John Ford directed this movie, and you know what that means. He always has to put some corny scenes in his movies. I think he calls it comic relief. So we have this pointless, painful segment about Dodge City, where Wyatt Earp (James Stewart) and Doc Holliday (Arthur Kennedy) act silly. There is only a tenuous connection between this segment and what is happening to the Cheyenne, and if it had been left out, you would never have missed it. But it was not left out, and that means that instead of a boring two-hour movie, we end up with a boring and painful two-and-a-half hour movie.