Cowboy Up!

"What's a dazzling urbanite like you
doing in a rustic setting like this?"
- Gene Wilder in "Blazing Saddles"

"Why don't we just take a walk and we'll just talk about
the Wild West and how to get the hell out of it?"
- Kathleen Lloyd in "The Missouri Breaks"

It’s no secret in the Moviehouse that we love westerns. We love the creak of saddle leather, the jingle of a spur’s rowel, the clip-clop of horse hooves on a rocky mesa, the rustling of a tumbleweed rolling down a dusty street, the flapping of a saloon’s batwing doors, the jangle of a bone-jarring stagecoach, the metallic click of a hammer pulled back on a six-gun.

There’s nothing we enjoy more than steeping ourselves in frontier lore, leafing through yellowed, often forgotten pages of legends and tales of the Old West. For instance, most of you have probably never heard of the so-called Baron of Arizona, a 19^th century hustler and forger named James Reavis who attempted to defraud the U.S. government in the early 1880s. Reavis, a fromer Confederate soldier, was the notorious mastermind behind the Peralta Land Grant, fraudulent claims also known as the Barony of Arizona that would have given Reavis ownership of thousands of square miles of property in central Arizona Territory and western New Mexico Territory.

Reavis (pictured above) planted forged documents in a number of historical archives. His scheme also involved passing off his bride as the last surviving descendant of the original claim recipient of land grants sanctioned by the Spanish crown. Reavis managed to collect over $5 million in cash and promissory notes (over $150 million in today’s economy) before the jig was up. Reavis waltzed off to prison in 1896 but was released less than two years later for good behavior. By 1913, after a series of failed financial endeavors, Reavis was living in a poor house in Los Angeles. He died in Denver at the age of 71 and was buried in a pauper’s grave.

When this story came to Hollywood in 1950, as “The Baron of Arizona,” the unlikeliest of actors was handed the reins of a frontier buckboard. Noted for his eloquent elocution, Vincent Price could never belie his aristocratic roots as the St. Louis-born son of a well-to-do family. His grandfather, Vincent Clarence Price, invented Dr. Price’s Baking Powder, the first cream of tartar baking powder, which secured the family’s fortune. Receiving a degree in art history from Yale, Vincent continued his study of the fine arts at the University of London.

Onscreen, Vincent’s inimitable, velvety vocal intonations injected new life into the tales of the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, when producer-director Roger Corman cast the actor in a series of low-budget thrillers in the 1960s, including “House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum.” “Tales of Terror,” “The Raven,” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Apart from Corman, Vincent Price solidified his persona as the movies’ Merchant of Menace in such chillers as “House of Wax,” “The Mad Magician,” “House on Haunted Hill,” and “The Tingler.”

 

Vincent Price towers over costars Jack Nicholson, Peter Lorre,
and Olive Sturgess in "The Raven" (1963).

Inevitably, Price depicted James Reavis as a cultured con artist whose genteel demeanor couldn’t conceal his contempt for the local settlers as boorish rubes. “The Baron of Arizona” was directed by Samuel Fuller, a World War II veteran, pulp fiction author, and singularly independent filmmaker known for tense film noir, offbeat westerns, and, particularly, taut war pictures, including “The Steel Helmet,” “Fixed Bayonets,” “Merrill’s Marauders,” and “The Big Red One.” Vincent Price remembered Fuller as “a very flamboyant character, much like an old-time director. He wore puttees and a megaphone and everything.”

Reavis remained one of the actor’s favorite roles. In her 1999 biography of her father, Victoria Price wrote that the part allowed him “to display more versatility, which impressed the critics. George H. Jackson of the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express felt, ‘Vincent Price was a happy choice for the title role. He carries it off to perfection and is believable throughout.’ The Los Angeles Times concurred, noting that ‘Vincent Price makes the Baron a brilliantly resourceful, fascinating fellow, and his adventures absorbing.’” The Independent Film Journal called “The Baron of Arizona” “an absorbing, beautifully acted impressive film that would reflect credit on any studio,” offering "a fine blend of drama, action, and amusement. Vincent Price is a suave combination of rascal and lover.”

 

Just when you think Vinnie P. is headed toward the same sort of grisly demise
in "The Baron of Arizona" that he suffered in so many of his films, he saves his
skin by actually insulting the lynch mob. 

Also in 1950, Vincent Price costarred in “Curtain Call at Cactus Creek,” s comedic western about a traveling theatrical troupe. Donald O’Connor stars as the company’s one-man backstage crew who gets mixed up with a gang of bank robbers led by Walter Brennan. In a literally scene-stealing role, Price portrays the troupe’s featured performer, Tracy Holland, an unmitigated ham “affecting a voice so theatrical he practically sings his dialogue,” according to Lucy Chase Williams, author of The Complete Films of Vincent Price. “He spouts Shakespeare for every occasion. ‘Tracy, you’re a very romantic man,’ comments (Eve) Arden drily. ‘You’re conducting one of the great love affairs of all time – with yourself.’”

Walter Brennan, Eve Arden, and Vincent Price pose
in a publicity photo for "Curtain Call at Cactus Creek."

The Hollywood Reporter remarked, “Vincent Price’s ham actor is artfully overplayed,” while the Los Angeles Daily News called him “the consummate ham” who “sprouts a classical quotation for every occasion.” Victoria Price noted that “Curtain Call at Cactus Creek” gave her father the “opportunity to explore his gift for comedy…Reviewers appreciated his gift for travesty; Newsweek opined that ‘Price wading pompously through an old-time melodrama called “Ruined by Drink” is alone worth the price of admission.’”

Victoria Price recalled, “In the film, Vincent had to ride a horse, one of his most unhappy requirements in movies. Hollywood was always trying to get a saddle under him, but Vincent Price hated horses. As he later wrote, his lifelong relationship with the animal had been a troubled one. ‘The horse and I just don’t see eye to eye. In the first place, the top of a horse and my bottom don’t fit. My legs are too long and my torso too short…I look ridiculous on top of a horse and I suppose it feels ridiculous under me.’”

 

In "The Jackals," Vincent Price plays "Oupa," an Afrikaner term for "grandpa."

In 1967, Vincent Price played a grizzled but kindly prospector (channeling Jack Elam, according to one reviewer) in a South African “western” called “The Jackals,” a remake of the 1948 western “Yellow Sky,” which starred Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, Richard Widmark, and Harry Morgan. Originally titled “The Scavengers,” the movie was inspired by the Transvaal gold rush in the late 1800s. Victoria Price noted that the film gave her father a rare shot at playing the good guy, and “he enjoyed both the change of image as well as the chance to explore South Africa and to discover the local contemporary artists, both black and white,” reinforcing the actor’s belief that art “transcends any barrier of color or race.”

Vincent Price saved his splashiest frontier role for his fourth and last horse opera, portraying the proprietor of Dan Ruffalo’s Shooting Show and Death Display in 1968’s “More Dead Than Alive” (pictured above). In what The New York Times dismissed as “a dinky little western with the perfect title,” Clint Walker (best known as the star of the TV western “Cheyenne” from 1955 to 1962) plays an ex-convict nicknamed “Killer Cain” whose unsuccessful attempts at settling down to a peaceable life lead him to star as a sharpshooter in Price’s traveling Old West show.

Utilizing a colloquial but unplaceable dialect, Price eyes the 6’ 6” Walker and says, “Yer a big sonuvabitch!” However, when Price disses the show’s rival marksman with, “You ain’t nuthin’, just a little pissant!” the veteran actor suffers a gory, agonizing death as the young ingrate empties his revolver. Price’s daughter, Victoria, wrote, “He was given a death scene worthy of any of his horror movies as, pumped full of bullets at close range, he expired bloodily and in very slow motion.” The author of The Complete Films of Vincent Price noted, “A stupefyingly inappropriate music track makes the spectacle somehow even more macabre.”

 

"Yer a big sonuvabitch!"

Mr. Price’s rare participation in westerns got us in the Moviehouse thinking about other actors who likewise looked uncomfortable in the saddle. Probably one of the last actors you’d expect to see in the Old West on the screen, Westminster, London-born Chirstopher Lee, after a decade of supporting roles in over 40 motion pictures, cemented his screen presence as Count Dracula in at least nine films beginning in 1958 (pictured below).  A new generation of moviegoers rediscovered Mr. Lee as the evil wizard Saruman in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and as Count Dooku in the “Star Wars” prequels.

In the violent 1971 western “Hannie Caulder,” a British production filmed in Spanish locations for spaghetti westerns by American director Burt Kennedy (best known for the tongue-in-cheek horse opera “Support Your Local Sheriff,” starring James Garner), veteran character actors Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and Strother Martin portray a trio of bumbling outlaw brothers who kill Raquel Welch’s husband and viciously rape her. In a marvelously understated performance, Robert Culp plays a world-weary bounty hunter who reluctantly takes the half-naked widow under his wing and schools her in the arcane skills of gunslinging. Enter Christopher Lee as a master gunsmith who crafts a specialized, one-of-a-kind revolver for Miss Welch.

In the Moviehouse, it was a toss-up between a picture of Christopher
Lee as the enigmatic gunsmith in "Hannie Caulder" or this racy publicity
photo of Raquel Welch clad only in a serape and holster that actually
has very little to do with what happens on the screen...

More than one filmgoer likened the unwashed, uncouth, unholy trinity of Borgnine, Elam, and Martin to a psychotic version of The Three Stooges. As a matter of fact, an appearance in a western picture became a required rite of passage for most screen comedy teams, all of whom managed to put their personal stamp on the genre, among them Laurel and Hardy (“Way Out West”), the Marx Brothers (“Go West”), Abbott and Costello (“Ride ‘Em Cowboy”), Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (“Pardners”), The Three Stooges (in numerous short films and the feature film “The Outlaws Is Coming”), and Rowan and Martin (“Once Upon a Horse”).

 

Three fun things to know about the Three Stooges comedy western "The
Outlaws Is Coming" (1965): (1) The hero is played by future "Family Guy"
Mayor Adam West; (2) "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" flower-child poet
Henry Gibson portrays a beatnik Indian called Charlie Horse: and (3) the
outlaws are all played by kiddie TV hosts from across the country whose daily
broadcasts were responsible for the resurgence of the Stooges' popularity.

Solo comic performances in western comedies include W.C. Fields, teamed with Mae West, in “My Little Chickadee’ (1940). Fields plays a cardsharp duped into masquerading as the town sheriff, replete with Holstein cow-print chaps (pictured below), and Jack Benny in “Buck Benny Rides Again,” also from 1940.

Twenty years later, Jack Benny guest-starred on a Phil Silvers TV special called “The Slowest Gun in the West.” Benny plays Chicken Fensterwald, a mincing coward who walks a like a duck, while Phil Silvers, in his trademark horn-rimmed glasses, portrays The Silver Dollar Kid. Both are notorious as the yellowest men in the history of the Arizona Territory, and when they ultimately face each other in the climactic showdown, it’s a hilarious standoff of “Draw!”-“No, you draw!”-“You draw!” as the sun sets and rises and seasons change.

Jack Benny and Phil Silvers play the yellowest gunfighters in
the Arizona Territory - Chicken Fensterwald and The Silver
Dollar Kid-  in "The Slowest Gun in the West."

Producer-writer Nat Hiken, who created and was the principal writer for the 1950s sitcom “The Phil Silvers Show,” managed to gather a game cast of recognizable faces from several westerns, namely Bruce Cabot (“McLinotck!”), Ted de Corsia (“Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”), Jack Elam (“Once Upon a Time in the West”), Robert J. Wilke (“High Noon”), Lee Van Cleef (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”), and John Dierkes (“Shane”). The supporting players in this forgotten gem of vintage video include such familiar faces from TV as Parley Baer (the mayor of Mayberry in “The Andy Griffith Show”), Jack Albertson (“Chico and the Man”), Marion Ross (“Happy Days”), and Bill Fawcett (ranch hand Pete on “Fury”).

A “Slowest Gun in the West” wannabe, the 1972 television movie “Evil Roy Slade” features the comically versatile John Astin (forever endeared to TV viewers as patriarch Gomez on the series “The Addams Family”) as the “meanest villain in the West.” Dick Shawn (best known as the volatile beatnik beach bum Sylvester in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and as L.S.D., the flower-power actor cast as Hitler in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers”) hams it up mercilessly as spaced-out singing marshal Bing Bell, leading to the film’s funniest running gag, as whenever someone utters his name “Bing Bell,” another character says, “Oh, I’ll get the door.”

 

John Astin (left) portrays title character Evil Roy Slade, with Dick Shawn (right) as
Marshal Bing Bell ("Marshal Bing Bell" - "Who is it?" - "That's his name, you idiot!")

Written by Garry Marshall (the creator of “Happy Days,” “Laverne & Shirley,” and “Mork & Mindy) and directed by Jerry Paris (the house director of “Happy Days”), “Evil Roy Slade” seemingly wanted to resurrect laughs from “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” by casting Dick Shawn, Mickey Rooney, Edie Adams, and Milton Berle, alongside Henry Gibson, Dom DeLuise, Pat Morita, Penny Marshall, and John Ritter.

Jane Russell sports the unlikeliest of saloon fashion in "Son of Paleface,"
with Roy Rogers and Bob Hope.

Bob Hope brought his 20^th century sensibilities and wisecracks to the western frontier in “The Paleface” (1948), costarring Jane Russell, “Son of Paleface” (1952), with Jane Russell and Roy Rogers, and “Alias Jesse James” (1959), costarring Rhonda Fleming, with cameos by Gary Cooper (as Will Kane from “High Noon”), James Garner (as Maverick), James Arness (as Matt Dillon), Fess Parker (as Davy Crockett), Jay Silverheels (as Tonto), Ward Bond (as wagon master Seth Adams), Roy Rogers, and Bing Crosby. Three years after leaving “The Andy Griffith Show” (on which he had garnered five Emmy Awards), Don Knotts starred in a remake of “The Paleface” appropriately titled “The Shakiest Gun in the West" (pictured below).

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Eli Wallach grew up in a neighborhood that was strictly otherwise Italian-American. He studied Method acting under Sanford Meisner at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. After World War II, he became a founding member of the Actors Studio, taught by Lee Strasberg. He turned down film offers, saying, “What do I need a movie for? The stage is on a higher level in every way.” When he finally began accepting screen roles, he did so to help pay bills, explaining, “For actors, movies are a means to an end.”

Before being cast as Calvera, the Mexican bandit in 1960’s “The Magnificent Seven” (only his fourth motion picture), Eli Wallach had never ridden a horse, much less even seen one…probably. On the commentary for the DVD, the actor refers to himself as a New York Jew on a horse.

Speaking of Jewish cowboys, Gene Wilder, who was bullied and abused at a private academy in Hollywood because he was the only Jewish student, was not Mel Brooks' first choice to portray The Waco Kid in "Blazing Saddles." Brooks likes to promulgate the apocryphal anecdote that he gave John Wayne a copy of the script at a studio commissary after the latter expressed an interest in playing the role. According to Mel, the Duke drawled, "Naw," he couldn't appear in "a movie like that," but added, "I'll be the first in line to see it!" Hollywood veteran Gig Young, an Academy Award winner for his depiction of the cynical dance marathon emcee in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (1969), was cast as The Waco Kid, but, on the first day of shooting, the actor, a long-suffering alcoholic, succumbed to delirium tremens and collapsed on the set before being rushed to medical treatment.

Incidentally, Gene Wilder (pictured above) did portray a full-fledged Jew in a western when he was cast as a Polish rabbi in the 1979 comedy "The Frisco Kid," costarring Harrison Ford and directed by Robert Aldrich ("The Dirty Dozen"). In his autobiography, Wilder claimed that Ford's role of a soft-hearted bank robber was originally planned for (here we go again!) John Wayne. Salary issues nixed that notion, and, in any case, the ailing actor died before the movie opened. But we digress.

Watch Eli Wallach’s face in "The Magnificent Seven" whenever he brandishes his six-gun, and you can’t help but notice that he always looks down afterward as he was not used to drawing a revolver and didn’t want to look like an idiot when holstering it.

Coincidentally, the Mexican extras cast as Calvera’s gang adopted Eli Wallach as one of their own. Wallach, in full costume, and his bandoleros would head off and ride together on mornings before filming was scheduled. His loyal followers also insisted on making sure that the actor’s pistol and his horse’s saddle and bridle were properly prepped for each day’s shooting.

Two years later, in the final chapter of the Cinerama epic “How the West Was Won,” Eli Wallach portrayed Charllie Gant, a colorful outlaw dressed in black who playfully clowns around with the marshal’s sons in one scene and threatens a deadly visit to the family’s home in the next (pictured above).

When Eli Wallach was cast as the scene-stealing bandit Tuco in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), a lot of people assumed director Sergio Leone was inspired by the actor’s strutting and posturing as Calvera in “The Magnificent Seven” (“If God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep!”), but the iconoclastic filmmaker actually drew on the actor’s unsettling combination of impish mischief and murderous anger as Charlie Gant in "How the West Was Won." In a 2003 retrospective on “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” Roger Ebert noted, “This is one of Wallach’s inspired performances, as he sidesteps his character’s potential to seem ridiculous, and makes him a desperate and frightened presence.”

The love-hate relationship between Tuco (Eli Wallach) and Blondie
(Clint Eastwood) continues in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

In 1968, Eli Wallach attempted to reprise some of the devilish charm of Tuco when he portrayed ex-convict Caco (that’s short for Cacopoulos, since he claims to be the grandson of a Greek seaman) in the revenge spaghetti western “Ace High." Playing second and third fiddle to Wallach are the stars of several “Trinity” spaghetti western comedies, Terence Hill (whose character here is named Cat Stevens) and Bud Spencer. Wallach’s American costars are Brock Peters (best known for his portrayal of ill-fated Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird”) and Kevin McCarthy (best known as the star of the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”). Terence Hill and Bud Spencer would repeat their roles in the sequels “God Forgives…I Don’t” and “Boot Hill.”

Terence Hill, Eli Wallach, Brock Peters, and Bud Spencer
face off for the final showdown in "Ace High."

As a young man at the Actor Studio in New York City, Eli Wallach studied the Method alongside Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe, future director Sidney Lumet, future wife Anne Jackson, and Marlon Brando. Brando himself seemed an unlikely actor to cast as a cowboy, and although he starred in three westerns, he always looked ill-at-ease in the saddle.

“One-Eyed Jacks” (1961), the only film directed by Marlon Brando, started out as a Rod Serling adaptation of a 1956 novel titled The Authentic Life of Hendry Jones, a fictionalized version of the Billy the Kid saga. Serling’s treatment was rejected, and Sam Peckinpah was hired to write the script. Brando bought the rights to the book, hired Stanley Kubrick to direct, and fired Peckinpah, replacing him with Calder Willingham, who would have a hand in the screenplays for “The Graduate” and “Little Big Man.” In due course, both Willingham and Kubrick were fired, and Brando selected himself as the new director. Years later, when Karl Malden – who plays Brando’s partner, oddly named (attention, Sigmund Freud students) Dad – was asked who wrote the movie, he replied, “There is one answer to your question – Marlon Brando, a genius in our time.”

Obviously inspired by the excesses of Stanley Krubrick, Brando’s first cut of the film was five hours. Paramount took the production away from him and recut it down to two hours twenty minutes. Brando admitted the result was “a good picture” for the studio, but it wasn’t “the picture I made,” adding, “Now the characters are black-and-white, not gray-and-human as I planned them.”

“The Appaloosa” (1966) cast Marlon Brando as a long-errant buffalo hunter who hopes to settle down in his sleepy border hometown, only to have his prized horse stolen by the local bandit chieftain (a Golden Globe-nominated performance by John Saxon). Brando made no secret of his lack of interest in the production, as he would have to have his nose yanked out of a book he was reading for his closeups.

Anjanette Comer hopes Brando kept his receipt for the sombrero in "The Appaloosa."

When Brando and director Sidney J. Furie met again years afterward, the actor said, “I didn’t know if I could trust you, but I saw the film and you have the great sense of one of the best visual directors. Let’s do another film together.”  Furie, best known as the director of “The Ipcress File” and “Lady Sings the Blues,” replied, “Never!”

By the mid-1970s, Marlon Brando had followed his Best Actor Oscar for “The Godfather” with a nomination for “Last Tango in Paris,” while Jack Nicholson had turned in Academy Award-nominated performances in “The Last Detail” and “Chinatown” before garnering the Oscar statuette for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Somebody’s ingenious notion of teaming these titans in a revisionist western titled “The Missouri Breaks,” directed by onetime Hollywood wunderkind Arthur Penn (“Bonnie and Clyde”), resulted in one of Hollywood’s most infamous critical flops and box-office disasters.

Brando struts through his scenes like a vainglorious peacock, willy-nilly discarding one indecipherable dialect and one silly hat after another as the eccentric, dry-gulching “regulator” Robert E. Lee Clayton, hired by Montana ranchers to rid the territory of Nicholson’s rough-and-tumble but likable gang of horse thieves. After a head-scratching bit when Brando inexplicably adopts his fey British accent as Fletcher Christian from “Mutiny on the Bounty” to feed his horse a carrot from his mouth, the audience breathes a collective sigh of relief moments later as Nicholson asks him, “You know what woke you up? You just had your throat cut.”

Even more so than Marlon Brando, nobody stuck out more like a sore thumb in a cowboy hat than Hollywood tough guy Humphrey Bogart. In “The Oklahoma Kid” (1938), Bogart plays Whip McCord (pictured below), a villainous antagonist for good bad guy James Cagney. Sizing up his costar in his western costume with an oversized Stetson, Bogart famously said Cagney looked like “a mushroom.”

Bogart sported an ill-advised pencil-thin mustache as real-life outlaw John Murrell in “Virginia City” (1940), starring Erroll Flynn and Randolph Scott, and directed by Michael Curtiz, who would later work with Bogart on “Casablanca” and “We’re No Angels.” Wisely, Bogart never made another western. James Cagney, on the other hand, stocky and past middle age, dubiously appeared in a pair of westerns in the mid-1950s, “Run for Cover,” directed by Nicholas Ray (“Rebel Without a Cause”), and “Tribute to a Bad Man,” directed by Robert Wise (“The Sound of Music”).

Historical Footnote: In case you’re wondering whatever happened to John Murrell, the real-life outlaw played by Humphrey Bogart in “Virginia City,” a ten-year stretch at Tennessee State Penitentiary broke the man’s mental spirit and left him imbecilic. Before succumbing to tuberculosis nine months after leaving prison, he worked as a blacksmith.