Stewart and Wayne Bring The Spurs, With Violent Baggage To Boot

BEND OF THE RIVER/DIRECTED BY ANTHONY MANN/1952

STREET DATE: APRIL 16, 2019/KINO LORBER STUDIO CLASSICS

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DAKOTA/DIRECTED BY JOSEPH KANE/1945

STREET DATE: MARCH 28, 2017/KINO LORBER STUDIO CLASSICS

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By ’52, Jimmy Stewart had woven himself into and around multiple genres, always leading with his core dignity and decency even when compromised by revenge (Winchester ’73), suicidal familial distress (It’s a Wonderful Life), romantic angst (The Shop Around the Corner, The Philadelphia Story), or implacable senatorial corruption (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). By this movie, Stewart’s second of eight collaborations with director Anthony Mann, the persona had been so locked up in aw-shucks righteousness that it’s hard to imagine his character’s backstory being true. He plays McLyntock, a cowboy who’s landed a job as the guide for an ant-trail of homesteader wagons headed for Oregon farm country. When they pick up a stray roustabout, Cole (Arthur Kennedy), it comes out that he and McLyntock were both Missouri Raiders – also known as Quantrill’s Raiders, an actual unsanctioned group of Confederates who took the Civil War into their own hands, killing their way through various bloody engagements, one of which claimed the lives of nearly two hundred civilians in Lawrence, Kansas.

If you’re looking for a past to have your character escape from, that’s a good one, for the sake of contrast, but the thought of Jimmy Stewart involved in such wanton bloodshed pushes his image to a dubious brink. The heart of the movie is watching both men, bonded by dark reputations and a bent toward violence, attempt to shove those tendencies to the side, or at least channel them into a good that benefits the codification of a new nation, the underlying thematic mandate of pretty much every western.

The litmus test for the true-blue verity of McLyntock’s career turnabout is a series of gun-weilding confrontations that boil down to “Jimmy Stewart vs. all manner of corrupt capitalism.” After he dispatches a clutch of imposing Indians, an act that at once shows off his armed prowess and his devotion to white Manifest Destiny, he takes the wagon train into small-town Portland to order food and materials for the season of groundbreaking to come in the new land of opportunity. Months later, as winter’s setting in and the supplies have not yet arrived, a return visit to the now-bustling town shows the powers that be in the enthralled grip of commerce, gold rush style. Gold’s been found and the gettin’s good, so every price has been gouged and every bit of the homesteaders’ stuff has been re-priced beyond their means. The tension here is watching good man Stewart fight his way out of a tense business meeting with bullets – by the time the goods are (now-illegally) en route to the de facto good guys in the valley, McLyntock’s killed several townspeople on what could be contsrued as anti-capitalist principle.

A few story minutes later, and he’s doing the same against a cadre of gold miners, subsisting in that offshoot of capitalism that rewards mercenary bullies with lucky strikes and get-rich-quick upward mobility. But for now these miners are hungry, and have banded with treacherous Cole – he’ll get double the price for McLyntock’s already hot goods if he helps them steal it for their men. Of course the plan fails when McLyntock, beaten and left for dead, returns with a Raiders-level score to settle. In this section, McLyntock trails the men in the dark, only spoken of, not seen – and rendered by their fear in shades of Rambo-like legend: the man with deadly skill who could strike lethally at any moment without prejudice.

The barely-stated (it’s still the 1950s) moral of the story seems to be that in America, it takes the un-holstered ruthlessness of a murderer to bring to heel the powerful, corrupting impulses of free-market commerce. In the end, the unholy money grubbers – of all stripes – are brought down, the smiling face of duplicity (Cole) is literally sent up the river face-down, and marital stasis for McLyntock is established as the lasting stamp of the ideological good life somewhere beyond the end credits.

The other impression the film leaves is that of a simple western yarn of high entertainment value. Mann is one of the great painters of the untamed wilderness – his five westerns with Stewart remain some of the best-shot cowboy movies this side of Ford’s Monument Valley – and Stewart, despite his nice guy persona, is always believable as a man with a finger that can quickly out-trigger his stammering charm. Something about the actor’s true-life military actions during World War II gave him an authentic license to glare – perhaps in the same way McLyntock’s bloody military antics frame his quick-drawing abilities in Union confrontations well beyond the war between the states.

Some of the details of Mann’s film call to mind another Kino Lorber Studio Classics release, Dakota (1945), with John Wayne. Forget that Wayne also played a cowboy named McLintock (with an exclamation point!) a decade later, the similarities in character and theme would make it a worthy double feature with Bend of the River. In Dakota, Wayne plays Devlin, a notorious gambler who’s just married Sandy (Vera Ralston), the daughter of a none-too-pleased railroad tycoon (Hugo Haas).

Much of the beginning is played for laughs when Devlin steals her away under dad’s nose, along with her $20,000 dowry. She’s a brash, Hawksian woman who convinces Devlin to forget his California dreamin’ and escape into the Dakotas instead, where they can use her money to buy up land from farmers to then sell for giant payoffs to her dad’s railroad cronies, but they’re beat to the punch by duplicitous town sheriff, Bender (Ward [is] Bond), whose slick-talking henchmen have locked the area farmers into a catch-22 between Bender’s authoritarian protection against scary Indians and looming railroad sell-outs.

Up on top of the story is a rowdy, brawling, gun-blasting tale, in Republic Pictures style, with enough stagecoach stunts to ration through the end of the Korean War, but underneath, as in Bend of the River, there’s a roiling current of American-style greed and violence that leads to murder, kidnapping, and a raging wheat fire visible from Canada. The MacGuffin is that $20K that trades hands multiple times over the course of the movie. As it does – and this is not the ultimate point of the story, though it keeps it propulsive in its own meandering way – it reveals the lengths characters will go to get it and to use it for leverage toward their own greedy ends.

Wayne and wife are there at first for the same thing that Bender is, so no one comes to this movie clean of heart – but more so, like McLyntock above, he comes with some dubious baggage that makes him somehow worse: He’s a former member of Morgan’s Raiders (as opposed to McLyntock’s Missouri Raiders), another unauthorized band of roving Confederates sent against orders to infiltrate Indiana and Ohio, ostensibly to distract Union troops from gaining more important ground, but that devolved over several months into an excuse to steal horses and money, to raid stores, and to sow terror among northerners, until it was finally quashed with the capture of Morgan and other senior officers. That Devlin was part of this group casts him as a figure more insolent and unpredictably dangerous than Wayne’s smiling, gentlemanly cowboy persona usually permits.

At least by end credits, Devlin the gambler has changed, having seen the dark ends that his adventuring pastimes can lead to. He’s like a certain side character in Bend of the River, a traveling poker maven played by Rock Hudson who tends to side with whoever’s winning, until he sees the innate rightness of Stewart’s character. Both films have these implied sidebar lessons that assume the presence of odds-makers in a financial system like ours, but ultimately bring them into the more acceptable fold of fiscal sensibility.

Any comparison of these two titles must mention that both also have audaciously offensive African American stereotypes. Not unheard of for this time, but there’s a sideways fascination in the fact that the black actors in both films play sluggish, drawling first mates aboard riverboats manned by surly, yapping, southern-leaning white men. In Bend of the River, much-maligned Stepin Fetchit is Adam, never too far outside spitting distance of not-so-mellow Captain Mello (Charles Johnson), while in Dakota, prolific character actor Nick Stewart is Nicodemus (his name in many films), who must withstand the crabby put-downs of regular Wayne co-star Walter Brennan. In both cases, these characters are supposed to provide comic relief, but neither allows you to forget for too long that the same Civil War that made our main characters into the dubious heroes they are, also failed to fully rescue an oppressed race from de facto marginality.

Both discs treat their subjects well, image wise, but are lean on the extras, unless you count – as you should – the other sameness of the pair: a fine and informative commentary track by Kino Lorber regular Toby Roan. Bend of the River is the superior film, the one that’s typically hailed as great, whereas Dakota wanders a bit too much in the wide open country of its premise – which, of course, Wayne makes up for with his usual approachable gravitas. Taken together, these two are a subtle post-War indictment of the American life the greatest generation was creating for itself, while still servicing the white-hatted iconography of America’s self-revealingest genre.