BY FRED BLOSSER
John Sturges’ “Last Train from Gun Hill” was released in 1959 as one of several
high-profile Westerns of its era, designed to lure audiences away from
their television sets and back to their neighborhood movie theatres. Against
TV’s advantage of free programming that you could enjoy from the
leisure of your easy chair, films like “Last Train from Gun Hill,”
“Warlock,” “The Horse Soldiers,” and “The Hanging Tree” countered with
A-list stars, widescreen CinemaScope and VistaVision, Technicolor, and
sweeping outdoor locations. The
studios wagered, correctly, that viewers would welcome a change from
the predictable characters, cheap backlot sets, and drab black-and-white
photography of “Gunsmoke,” “Wagon Train,” and “Cheyenne.” The
approach was successful, sporadically continuing through the next
decade with expensive epics like “How the West Was Won” (1962), “Custer
of the West” (1967), and “MacKenna’s Gold” (1968) before it collapsed
from dwindling returns, scaled-back studio budgets, and changing popular
tastes at the end of the 1960s.
As Sturges’ movie opens, two loutish cowboys chase down, rape, and murder a young Indian woman. Although the rape and murder occur offscreen, the lead-up is viscerally terrifying. In a bizarrely poor choice of words, Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times referred to the murderers as “scallywags.” At least in my lexicon, scallywags are mischievous kids who make prank phone calls, not perpetrators of a horrendous sexual assault. When the pair flee in panic after realizing what they’ve done, they inadvertently leave behind a horse and saddle. The
murdered woman’s husband is Matt Morgan (Kirk Douglas), the marshal of
the nearby town of Pawley, who immediately identifies the letters “CB”
branded on the saddle. They’re
the initials of Craig Belden (Anthony Quinn), a powerful rancher who
controls Gun Hill, a community further down the railroad line. One
of the murderers was Belden’s hired hand Lee (played by Brian Hutton,
later the director of “Where Eagles Dare” and “Kelly’s Heroes”), and the
other was Belden’s son Rick (Earl Holliman). When
Morgan arrives in Gun Hill with arrest warrants, Belden first tries to
convince him to go easy by reminding him that he and Craig were once
good friends. After that doesn’t work, he resorts to intimidation. The
cowardly local marshal refuses to help Morgan, unashamedly admitting
that he fears the boss man’s wrath more than he respects the rule of
law. (I’ll leave it to you to decide if you see a similarity to recent political controversies.) The
other townspeople are chilly if not hostile, and when Morgan finally
subdues Rick and handcuffs him in a hotel room, waiting for the arrival
of the train back to Pawley, Belden surrounds the building with his army of hired guns.
The only person sympathetic to Morgan is Belden’s battered girlfriend Linda (Carolyn Jones). Even she believes the determined marshal faces overwhelming odds:
“You remind me of Jimmy, a fella I used to know,” she remarks. “Stubborn as a mule.”
“Next time you see Jimmy, say hello,” Morgan answers dryly. “We seem to have a lot in common.”
“More than you know. He’s dead.”
“Last
Train from Gun Hill” originated with a story treatment by writer Les
Crutchfield, expanded by James W. Poe with an uncredited assist from
Dalton Trumbo, whom Douglas brought in to sharpen the dialogue. The exchanges between the characters, like the one quoted above, crackle with Trumbo’s signature style. Crutchfield
contributed scripts regularly to “Gunsmoke,” and “Last Train from Gun
Hill” unfolds like a traditional episode of the long-running series,
dressed up with a little more complexity, a rape-murder that would never
have passed network censorship, and a striking climactic scene that
also would have run afoul of the censors. Standing up, Morgan drives a wagon slowly down main street to meet the arriving train. Rick
stands beside him, handcuffed, with the muzzle of Morgan’s borrowed
shotgun pressed up under his chin to keep Belden and his gunmen at bay. When
Dell Comics adapted the movie as a comic book at the time of the film’s
release, it chose that scene as the cover photograph. As
far as I know, the graphic come-on of imminent shotgun mayhem didn’t
raise the ire of parents, educators, child psychologists, or media
pundits in that distant year of 1959. Back then, of course, pervasive gun violence wasn’t the social catastrophe that it is today. In 2022, the comic book would surely raise a firestorm of controversy on social media and cable news.
“Last
Train from Gun Hill” falls just short of a true classic, since the plot
mostly relies on ingredients that we’ve seen many times before in other
Westerns—the incorruptible lawman, the overbearing cattle baron, his
bullying but weak-willed son, the old friends now at cross-purposes, the
unfriendly town, the tense wait for a train—but Douglas, Quinn, and
supporting actors Carolyn Jones, Earl Holliman, Brian Hutton, and Brad
Dexter are at the top of their form, and Sturges’ no-nonsense direction
keeps the action moving at a tense pace. The
Blu-ray edition of the film from Paramount Pictures’ specialty label,
“Paramount Presents,” contains a sharp, remastered transfer, an
appreciative video feature with Leonard Maltin, and theatrical trailers. Even
though “Last Train from Gun Hill” ran frequently on local TV channels
in the 1970s and ‘80s, its visual quality there was seriously
compromised by the broadcast format. Worse, endless commercial breaks disrupted Sturges’ masterful mood of mounting tension. Revisiting
the production in its original, intended form, we may better appreciate
its merits as classic Hollywood professionalism at its finest. Highly recommended.
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Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)