Westerns of 1950

This is an essay I never intended to write. But among the films I watched for my Errol Flynn retrospective were two midcentury Westerns: the first — a high-spirited Technicolor extravaganza taking on a subject Hollywood unfathomably found fascinating (cattlemen vs. sheep herders) — was ghastly; the other — a moody black-and-white tone poem about a ragtag group of Confederate soldiers torn between duty and decency — was splendid. The disparity in budget, approach, look and quality prompted me to idly wonder, “How many other Westerns were released that year?” It’s the kind of question Wikipedia lives for, and it had a ready answer: 112 of them, ranging from big-budget features to Poverty Row programmers.

And you know, in some parallel universe, there’s someone writing this blog who would be satisfied with that bit of trivia — that 114 Westerns were released in 1950 — and not feel a need to watch them all. But you didn’t get that blogger; you got me. I managed to track down 96, and sat through every one. Some looked like they cost a mint; others were clearly made on a shoestring. Some were so grim, they classified as noir; others were so lighthearted, the cowboys regularly burst into song. Some featured actors who’d been playing the same character for scores of films, often with the same writer and director in attendance. And in one instance, six B-Westerns were filmed simultaneously — a core group of actors shooting scenes from six different scripts, out of sequence — to save costs. (One cast member later recalled that none of the actors had any idea which film they were shooting, let alone which role they were playing, even as the cameras were rolling.)

And it occurred to me as I was watching that 1950 was a great year to sample Westerns. I make no claim that it was “the best year for Westerns,” or anything of the sort. I won’t even claim that it was a great year for them. But it was a great year to sample them, because 1950 has something for everyone: highbrow, lowbrow, dark, light, epic, modest. Scenery that consumes the screen, and A-list stars eager to chew every inch of it. B-movie veterans appearing in more Westerns than there are months in the year — frequent heavy Roy Barcroft frequented 14 in 1950 — and never once slacking off. And singing cowboys finding new ways of staying in tune with the times. So let’s look back at the Westerns of 1950, in completely random categories. Saddle up.

GOLD LE MAY: Alan Le May is best remembered for writing the novels on which two beloved Westerns were based: The Searchers and The Unforgiven. But he was one of Hollywood’s most dependable scripters throughout the ’40s, penning a host of fine films (The Adventures of Mark Twain, The Walking Hills) — not to mention one of my favorite, highly undervalued Westerns (Cheyenne). But as the saying goes, what he really wanted to do was direct. He’d written some of the loveliest prose Hollywood had been treated to; all he craved was for that dialogue to reach the screen untarnished. When studio heads rejected his request for a shot behind the camera, he and second-unit director George Templeton started their own production company, which released its first two features (through Eagle-Lion) in 1950. Le May wrote both of them, and directed one. A few months later, Warner Bros. produced — as Le May put it — “the first [big-studio] picture I ever had my name on that I enjoyed looking at”; the writer Warners hired to do the final polish, Winston Miller (who had written the 1946 classic My Darling Clementine), kept everything that Le May cared about. So 1950 was a very good year for Alan Le May, and if you’re a fan of his poetic western slang, you have three chances to check it out. In The Sundowners, the first film from Le May/Templeton productions, Robert Preston is gunslinger Kid Wichita, who returns to town to help defend his family ranch from cattle rustlers; Robert Sterling is his upstanding brother Tom Cloud, who’s stayed behind all these years to look after their property — and youngest brother Jeff (John Drew Barrymore). Tom is afraid that Jeff will fall under the influence of their notorious older brother — but just how wicked is Kid Wichita anyway? And is Tom as virtuous as he makes himself out to be? The Sundowners is quintessential Le May, serving up a premise we think we know by heart — here, the classic “good brother/bad brother” story — then steadily undermining our expectations. It’s a film about the authority we try to assert over the ones we love: fathers over sons, husband over wives, older siblings over younger ones. The editing is choppy, and the direction largely uninspired, but the solid writing and some top-notch performances see you through. (The film is a reminder — like DeMille’s 1939 Union Pacific — how good Preston was playing a likable rogue. His eventual casting as con man Harold Hill in The Music Man wasn’t the great gamble it’s often made out to be.) Rocky Mountain, the Warner Bros. pic, also tackles a familiar trope: here, Confederate soldiers traveling westward to enlist mercenaries to their cause. But this isn’t some charismatic soldier leading a regiment into battle; this is a broken man (Errol Flynn) steering a bedraggled crew of seven. Defeat hangs in the air; they feel it in their aching joints and empty bellies. And seemingly within moments of reaching their destination, they have to make a choice: follow orders and remain where they are, or save a stagecoach in the distance that’s due to be decimated. Le May imagines a group of Confederate soldiers whose fate is sealed by a single act of kindness, an act that quickly snowballs. And still Le May finds time for anecdotes and remembrances; at times the tone grows almost elegiac, and you might just hear war referenced and redefined in ways you’ve never thought of. Le May is equally adept at plot-driven misdirects and character-driven ironies, and part of the fascination of Rocky Mountain is how he interweaves the two. And Flynn responds by forging a character whose suffering has both exhausted and exalted him: a man who — knowing he’s on a collision course with his maker — has determined to make every brief, bitter moment count. Finally, High Lonesome, the film where Le May got his shot behind the camera, finds John Drew Barrymore as a young drifter who wanders onto a family ranch after witnessing (or perhaps committing) a murder — inadvertently reigniting a decades-old fence war. (In a nice touch, because he’s discovered raiding the pantry and family members — hearing the noise — presume it’s just a cooncat foraging for food, they end up calling him “Cooncat”; we never learn his name.) Le May lacks the ability to make the images sing as his words do; the staging is largely stodgy, but the film commands your attention nonetheless. Kristine Miller — a Hal Wallis discovery whose career never took off — is a force to be reckoned with as the family’s older sister. (She’s equally good in 1950’s Young Daniel Boone.) When her fiancé insists she needs protection, she sets him straight with a shattering display of marksmanship, but when he responds with a playful spanking, she relishes the chance to let down her guard. (She hates the tough veneer she assumes to hold the family together, but she wears it well.) Le May’s characters don’t engage in the drab clichés you’ve come to expect of the genre; they stubbornly refuse to reduce to type. As they argue over issues of trust and privacy that seem rooted in backstory, or just fret about the right hat to wear to a barn warming, you sense that even if there weren’t a mystery to solve, their stories would be just as absorbing. And the lines are lovely. When Barrymore and younger sister Lois Butler spend the night holed up in a deserted shed, hunting for clues about the murder, and Butler — seeing the dawn breaking — alerts him, “I can see a little streak of mustard in the east,” you’re reminded just how good Le May can be.

GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR: 1950 was one of the last years when you could see Westerns in full three-strip Technicolor; Kodak introduced Eastmancolor that same year (a cheaper, one-strip process), and within a few years, its less lustrous look had become the industry standard. But Technicolor doesn’t just shape the look of these mid-century Westerns; it often informs their theme. The late ’40s saw quite a few Westerns embrace that moody introspection we now call noir. That darkness carried through to the ’50s — in fact, it deepened. And as Westerns grew more grim, a popular character became the morally bankrupt antihero, and a standard plot became his quest to reclaim his soul. Technicolor — especially when applied to the great outdoors — helped a man regain the ability to dream; by dwarfing him in his surroundings, it encouraged him to look beyond his personal needs. In Paramount’s Branded, scenarists Sidney Boehm and Cyril Hume (adapting a novel by Max Brand) establish gunslinger Alan Ladd’s bitterness and isolation early on in short, bold strokes. Holed up in a mercantile store after killing a man in self-defense, he finds himself grilled by the owner, who’s eager he turn himself in: “You got any friends?” “My guns.” “Kinfolk?” “My horse.” In a lot of these films, the flawed hero is paired with an irredeemable accomplice (he makes the hero look good by comparison): here it’s Robert Keith, who talks Ladd into posing as the missing son of a wealthy rancher. But Ladd — after making easy inroads — finds the deception eating away at his soul; the family is more loving and trusting than any he’s known. (The waves of self-loathing are tailor-made for Ladd, and he responds with one of his two or three best performances.) Branded, as directed by Rudolph Maté, keeps reaching strong emotional ephiphanies. When Ladd comes clean to his “sister” midway through, he hasn’t yet fully reformed; he’s merely overcome by guilt. It’s not until he sets out in search of the real long-lost son — and inadvertently wounds another innocent soul — that he vows to stop painting himself as a victim: to stop reducing the world to black and white and embrace the full palette of colors before him. Cinematographer Charles Lang takes full advantage of Arizona’s sweeping landscapes and rough canyon trails; how can a man exposed to such beauty remain immune to it? In The Outriders, MGM’s Technicolor contribution to the Western genre in 1950, it’s the waning weeks of the Civil War, and the three Confederate POWs (Joel McCrea among them) — all with a criminal past — are coerced into helping rob a civilian wagon train secretly carrying a million in gold. But first they have to escort it from Santa Fe to Chicago. Roy Rowland, Louis B. Mayer’s nephew-in-law, was a competent director, but when the drama grew too sincere (e.g., Our Vines Have Tender Grapes), that competence could become cloying. The Outriders inspired the best work of his career. After an action-packed opening — a prison escape that’s startling in its violence — he slows down the pace and softens the tone. The muted mood takes you initially by surprise, but you come to understand his methods; the moments he does heighten gain in stature and suspense. When the men take the night off to engage in a bout of drinking and dancing, the sole female passenger (Arlene Dahl) decides to quench McCrea’s thirst by playing Cinderella to his Prince; an evening of raunchy camaraderie eases into a moment of erotic intimacy. And when the wagon train is forced to cross a raging river that’s overflowed its banks, Rowland achieves a level of feverish anticipation unmatched by any other Western of 1950; you thought you understood the parameters he had established, but the force of this sequence takes you by surprise — just as the force of the river itself does the weary travelers. The cinematography is by Charles Edgar Schoenbaum, the music by André Previn. There are times when Previn’s symphonic score envelops the screen, and you swear you can feel the warmth of the sun against your skin, and the wind streaming through your hair — and you realize that whatever path east McCrea chooses, his ultimate journey leads to redemption. Honorable mention: The Eagle and the Hawk, set just across the Mexican border during Benito Juarez‘s final push for democracy. It starts as a leisurely buddy comedy, in which John Payne and Dennis O’Keefe — as a Texas Ranger and a Union spy united to track down missing arms shipments — engage in steady acts of one-upmanship. Then Rhonda Fleming appears and adds the requisite touch of romance. You get the pleasure of seeing Payne take a bath in a bucket (the script finds reasons for him to regularly strip down), and if that’s not your thing, Travis Banton — star costumer for Paramount during the ’30s — was engaged to design Fleming’s gowns, and rarely has a female Western star been better served. It’s easy to write off The Eagle and the Hawk as a trifle; it’s a lot of talk and little action, and no one takes the risks quite as seriously as they should (and the last twenty minute are a bust to boot). But the talk is blithe, the actors game and Fleming’s red hair so striking, you don’t need much more.

HONEY FROM THE B’s: Most of the B-movie cowboys who dominated the screen in the ’40s were still around in 1950, and most made at least one film worth a look. Trail of the Rustlers is one of eight films Charles Starrett did in 1950 as the Durango Kid. (He starred in 64 Durango Kid vehicles, all of them for Columbia.) The gimmick that distinguishes the series is that the Durango Kid operates on the outskirts of the law; in Trail of the Rustlers, the crooks use that ambiguity to their advantage — a nice touch. The plot concerns a shady family determined to take control of all the property in town — because they’ve discovered a lost river that would send prices skyrocketing. There’s too much of Starrett’s sidekick Smiley Burnette (I’d make the case that any Smiley is too much Smiley, although he worked well with Gene Autry), but Starrett is amiable and effective, and the family matriarch walks off with the film: she’s like a warm-up for Jane Wyman on Falcon Crest. She’s hilarious when feigning interest and concern for her fellow townspeople — but when she drops the act, she’s as humorless, rigid and ruthless as any Mafia mamma. (The actress is Mira McKinney; she gave a memorable performance as another malicious matriarch in one of Sunset Carson’s best vehicles, Rough Riders of Cheyenne, and it’s a shame Hollywood didn’t give her more to do.) Consider Salt Lake Raiders as a “Rocky” Lane vehicle. Allan Lane was a B-movie fixture before moving to B-Westerns; he played Red Ryder for seven films, then a fictionalized version of himself for 39. He was square-jawed and sexless, and he’d lost a lot of his luster since courting Lucille Ball in programmers a decade earlier, but he retained his presence. Eddy “Nugget” Waller, twenty years his senior, was his sidekick in almost all his Republic vehicles, and as long as the script gave the pair of them something decent to do, the films got by on their rapport. Salt Lake Raiders gives us a fresh take on the Rocky and Nugget relationship, as Nugget finds himself having to defend a friend that Marshall Lane is intent on bringing in. The plot is a solid one, in which Rocky — on the hunt for an escaped convict — ends up solving a cold case in a ghost town. (All the B-movie cowboys seemed to visit a ghost town at least once a year — the Durango Kid had Streets of Ghost Town that same year; in addition to providing an atmospheric change of pace, it was a clever way of justifying the rickety sets common to low-budget features.) Although snipers positioned strategically throughout the town limit Lane’s movements, the script still finds plenty of opportunities for him to go chasing after bad guys (Lane was an expert rider), and there’s a solid fistfight near the end. And in one of the lighter moments, Blackjack — Lane’s Morgan stallion, who gave Roy Rogers’ Trigger competition for the title of “world’s smartest horse” — manages to unlock a barn door on his master’s instructions. In King of the Bullwhip, a vehicle for Bogart lookalike Alfred “Lash” LaRue, Ron Ormond — who had written and produced scores of B-Westerns — took his place behind the director’s chair for the first time and pulled off a film in just five days with a “can do” spirit. Well, no, he couldn’t, but what his work lacks in clarity, it makes up for in energy, and it includes a guest cast surprisingly high on charisma: Jack Holt as a bank president, Dennis Moore as his cashier and mustachioed Tom Neal as a saloon owner. (At one point, Neal flashes a smile at half profile, and he’s a dead ringer for Clark Gable. Between Bogart and Gable, the film starts to resemble an Old Hollywood cosplay convention.) The first 50 minutes are just setup for the climactic mountaintop fight between LaRue and the bandit he’s been dispatched to bring to justice, El Azote: a 10-minute silent showdown between two whip-wielding opponents. LaRue starts by whisking the pistol out of Azote’s hand, then snatching the cape off his shoulders. At one point, Azote catches LaRue around the neck, and LaRue struggles to breathe and break free; later, with LaRue on the offensive, he manages to send Azote’s whip flying — then tosses it back to him, taunting him to grab it before he lacerates his hand. Ormond works all the angles. LaRue was such a big star at the time (he was the one who taught Harrison Ford how to use the bullwhip for the Indiana Jones movies) that Monogram Pictures decided to clone him, and one Roland Charles Meyer was christened Whip Wilson. The key difference: Lash LaRue looked like Bogart and had presence; Wilson had a paunch, a receding hairline and no discernible personality. (He got by on the classically handsome profile that emerged when he donned his cowboy hat and his ability to crack the occasional winning smile.) He churned out six Westerns in 1950; some, like Silver Raiders, are unbearable, but I quite like Gunslingers. It understands that if your leading man is as exciting as a tree trunk, you need to distract from all his inadequacies. And so it gives us a novel set-up: a payroll robbery gone wrong, a friend of Whip’s killed in the fracas, then a jump to a jury trial where the dead friend’s father has been wrongfully convicted of cattle rustling and sentenced to hang. And it falls to Whip to figure out how the pieces connect and clean up the mess. Screenwriter Adele Buffington imagines a shady marshal, a smooth-talking swindler, a twitchy underling, an old-coot blacksmith (who eases into the role of sidekick), and best of all, an indomitable storekeeper, played by veteran actress Sarah Patton. She plays an old-timer named Rosie Rawlins, whom her friends have dubbed “Rawhide Rosie”; sometimes you can’t help but love a Western that tells you everything you need to know about a character by their nickname. Gunslingers is a minor film, but not without merit. The same Monogram Pictures devoted 10 films to the exploits of Canadian Mountie Corporal Rod Webb (Kirby Grant) and his faithful dog Chinook, drawn from the Northlands novels of James Oliver Curwood. There were two 1950 entries, and I’m particularly fond of Call of the Klondike. The supporting cast is well chosen (Anne Gwynne and Tom Neal, leading lady and shady entrepreneur, respectively, had filled much the same roles in King of the Bullwhip), the mystery is engaging, and the Big Bear setting (standing in for the Canadian wilderness) looks unlike anything you’re likely to encounter in a Western of 1950. With its lone lawman dispatched to track a killer, its vigilante posse fingering the wrong suspect, and its climactic hunt through a dark and dangerous mine, it juggles a whole lot of Western staples — then it tosses in something tonally unexpected (like a screwball squabble aboard a canoe) that distinguishes it and distances it from its contemporaries. The unblinking Grant was the most versatile of the B-Western stars I’ve listed above — his hit TV series Sky King lasted from 1952 to 1959 — but none of these cut-rate cowboys could hold a candle to Tim Holt. Holt triumphed in such major titles as Fifth Avenue Girl, Back Street, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre before settling into a series of B-Westerns for RKO. Of the 46 he did there, 29 featured Richard Martin as his Irish-Mexican sidekick Chito Jose Gonzalez Bustamonte Rafferty. Holt and Martin made six films in 1950. Border Treasure, Rider From Tucson and Storm Over Wyoming are all worth a look, but Riders of the Range is the best of the bunch; the camaraderie and shorthand between Holt and Martin is particularly strong. Holt’s onscreen persona is uncommonly dark here; he’s unafraid to resort to physical violence to get answers, which gives the film a gravitas a lot of his later entries lack. Here Jacqueline White — tough and smart and appealing — runs a ranch that her brother Robert Clarke is endangering; he’s lost $3000 to the local saloon owner (Reed Hadley), and agrees to pay off some of the debt by letting Hadley rustle some of his sister’s cattle. Holt and Martin foil the rustling, but as ever, no good deed goes unpunished. Riders of the Range avoids a lot of the clichés that plagued the genre. When evidence mounts that Holt is guilty of murder (the final-reel frame-up so common to B-Westerns — Rocky Lane could barely get through a film without being wrongfully accused of a crime), White isn’t quick to turn on him; it’s only when he makes his escape as smoothly as any bandit that she admits to having her doubts. (It’s the rare B-Western that not only makes sense, but where the characters act sensibly.) If you’re looking to check out a B-Western from 1950, Riders of the Range is a great place to start. If it leaves you cold, the year’s other entries probably won’t be to your liking.

WHERE’S WALTER?: The oft-repeated story about actor Walter Brennan is that exposure to mustard gas during World War I battered his vocal cords and left him with that reedy sound that became one of the most recognizable voices in show business. He appeared in over 230 roles on the big and small screen, and over 100 were in Westerns, the genre he’s best remembered for. He remains the only actor to take home three Oscars for supporting roles; the first two were for romantic dramas, but in the third — The Westerner — he delivered an iconic portrait of Judge Roy Bean that pretty much upstaged the film’s nominal star Gary Cooper. More memorable Western roles followed: in My Darling Clementine, in Red River and in Rio Bravo, to name three. Brennan could be amiable or cranky, folksy or thorny — only his onscreen charisma remained a constant. I can’t claim that his best roles or his best performances came in 1950, but the three of the films in which appeared — fine movies in their own right — are aided immeasurably by his presence. Curtain Call at Cactus Creek is a wonderful showcase for Donald O’Connor‘s nimble athleticism. He’s the apprentice to a small theatrical troupe traveling the west in the late 19th century. While they’re onstage performing, he’s tending to everything else: accompanying at the piano, changing the scenery, managing the sound effects, climbing up and sliding down ladders. He’s practically a one-man show, except that the stage is full of great performers: Vincent Price as the ham given to reciting Shakespeare to bolster arguments no one’s interested in having; Eve Arden as the former beauty deadpanning and wisecracking her way into maturity. Brennan is a hardened criminal head of — as he puts it — “the most efficient bank-robbing organization in the southwest,” who sees the energetic but unappreciated O’Connor as the ideal choice to replace him when he retires. (The speed and smarts required of a theatrical apprentice, we learn, aren’t all that different from those required of a bandit.) Brennan’s verbal finesse matches O’Connor’s physical dexterity; the film takes advantage of his gift for making the most convoluted dialogue roll off the tongue. (“Why, by tomorrow morning, that polecat’ll be so downright mortified, he’ll turn in that tin badge of his and retire to an old man’s home.” He speaks the way O’Connor moves.) Longtime Universal director Charles Lamont had done a number of Abbott and Costello vehicles; he knew a thing or two about pacing and timing. The songs and skits are mostly from the early 20th century, but staged in the style of a generation earlier; the juxtaposition works well. (You just have to close your eyes during the blackface number at the end: appropriate for the setting, of course, but unwatchable today.) Singing Guns is an unexpected treat. Republic cajoled bandleader and vocalist Vaughn Monroe into doing a film (his third of four) and settled on an adaptation of a Max Brand novel from 1928. Contract writers Darrell and Stuart McGowan did a loose adaptation, and turned out a nasty little tale about vigilante justice. Monroe plays a miner who had his claim seized by a large conglomerate, twice — and the law sided with big business, because of the well-paid and well-spoken lawyers pleading their case. Monroe has been stealing gold and stashing it away — but he’s just trying to get back what was taken from him, and as such, he’s less criminal than crusader. He crosses paths with three people who are equally willing to bend the law and justify it as justice — among them, a sheriff (Ward Bond) eager to manufacture evidence to see Monroe put away and a doctor (Brennan) who — no doubt due to his doubling as town preacher — delights in playing God. Everyone clings to the maxim that “the end justifies the means” — and that includes the well-dressed lady (Ella Raines) used to using her looks and her wiles to get what she wants. (It’s impossible to determine until the end if Raines is playing a heroine or femme fatale. She’s too coy by half — she was for much of her career — but she improves as the film goes along.) And for all his acting inexperience, there’s something appealing about Monroe; he has an imposing presence yet a soft touch: muscular yet meek. Singing Guns is a cat-and-mouse game played out among four well-defined characters, and there are a lot of good visual gags to boot. (Monroe gets a handful of songs — including his 1949 hit “Mule Train,” shrewdly interpolated — but this is no singing cowboy movie. This is Republic churning out one of their rare A-Westerns, and managing it well.) Another Republic release, The Showdown, is one of the most relentlessly angry of Westerns; it starts with Bill Elliott — in the midst of a thunderstorm — digging up his brother’s grave, while strangers Walter Brennan and Harry Morgan look on in bewilderment. (Elliott is fiery, steadfast and determined — someone murdered his brother, and he won’t rest until he catches the killer — but he’s positively beatific compared to Morgan, who’s like a firecracker forced to explode at regular intervals.) The leading role calls for a level of intensity that suits Elliott well. He wasn’t known for his range, but in a role where he steamrolls over people to get what he wants (he takes a job as the trail-herd boss on a cattle drive, because he knows one of the cowhands is the killer), he’s ideally cast. He receives sterling support, in particular from Marie Windsor and William Ching as a saloon owner and her steadfast sweetheart. The McGowan brothers, who scripted Singing Guns, did this one too, and Republic let them direct as well. As novice helmers, they have few tools at their disposal (their POV shot during a climactic bull charge is laughable); the best you can say is that they know how to get their own lines across. But for a studio-bound vehicle, cinematographer Reggie Lanning provides a suitably stormy atmosphere. It’s an old-fashioned whodunnit with some effective red herrings. The most important clue is dropped almost at the start, and repeatedly — but because it comes from Brennan. who makes everything sound so sensible, you don’t ponder its possible meanings. The script uses the good will Brennan has engendered to disarm the audience, as diabolical a maneuver as any crime committed onscreen.

LIKE (SACRED) COWS LED TO SLAUGHTER: From my half-century of watching vintage films, here’s one of the few insights I have gleaned: no genre prompts fans to place actors and directors on a pedestal quite like the Western. The directors in particular aren’t just admired — they’re revered. (And if a star and director work in tandem on a succession of films, then their work is practically sacrosanct. Try saying a bad word about the collaborations between Anthony Mann and James Stewart, or Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott, or John Ford and John Wayne — and see if you come away unsinged.) And perhaps that’s not unusual; the myth of the Old West is powerful — it speaks to the promise of hope and redemption, to courage and conviction: qualities many of us not merely aspire to, but ache for. No wonder Western fans are so passionate about their onscreen and offscreen heroes. My friend Jerry commented at my William Dieterle essay how much I enjoy slaughtering sacred cows. I don’t particularly enjoy it — but sometimes I can’t help it. There’s hardly an essay I’ve written — on TV or film — where my opinions don’t differ in some way from popular consensus; sometimes that’s the very reason I take on the essay, but sometimes it just works out that way — as is the case here. I suspect if you asked most aficionados of the genre what their favorite Westerns of 1950 were, most would come back with the same four among their top five — movies you won’t see here. You won’t see Broken Arrow, in which Union captain James Stewart falls in love with an Apache maiden who has just completed her puberty rituals, making her — what — 14? Ick. (It’s not just me who gets squeamish; Stewart himself was horrified when he discovered that co-star Debra Paget was a mere 15 when shooting began.) The film is ostensibly an attempt to humanize the country’s indigenous population, instead of portraying them as savages — but it’s more about the enlightened white man who has the foresight and bravery to attempt to communicate with them. (“Isn’t Jimmy Stewart wonderful, to understand that primitives can be talked to like real people?”) It’s a different kind of racism. Speaking of racism, you won’t see Devil’s Doorway, with Robert Taylor as a decorated Shoshone soldier, a performance that makes me deeply uncomfortable. It didn’t make anyone uncomfortable in 1950 (and from what I can see, it doesn’t bother folks much today either) — but for me, it’s a film at odds with itself, taking on the bigotry and brutality of white men who think little about casting Native Americans aside — while handing the lead role to a white actor slathered in redface. (As noted above, racism comes in all forms. Would I rather the movie not have been made, because no studio was going to risk such a downbeat story on a Native American lead? Yes. Don’t do a film about white men denying a Native American his voice, then steal his voice.) I have a lot of respect for Anthony Mann, but I find this effort unpleasant and misguided. (I don’t find his The Furies, also from 1950, unpleasant or misguided; I just find it uneven.) You won’t see Wagon Master, which wonders: can you build a movie on nothing but John Ford’s infatuation with himself? In telling a kaleidoscopic tale of Mormon settlers making their way to the Promised Land, Ford returns to Monument Valley for the fifth time; the scenery is as stunning as ever (although I’m told other parts of the country look nice, too), but there are also awkward comic bits, undernourished characters and inexplicable behavior. And that’s true of many Ford films, but when there’s a strong narrative to camouflage them — as opposed to a series of events — you don’t notice as much. I see folks praise Wagon Master for emphasizing the virtues of solidarity and sacrifice, and for the sense of community it creates, and I have no issue with that. But those are Ford’s calling cards — those are staples of his work; their presence isn’t indicative of accomplishment — if anything, in a film like this, they’re emblematic of his limitations. And perhaps most heretically, you won’t see the first collaboration between Jimmy Stewart and Anthony Mann, Winchester ’73: a film I think I have tried harder to love than just about any other. I understand the praise lavished upon it; it’s a likable film. I don’t understand the worship or the hyperbole. I saw someone on TCM recently proclaim it “the first psychological Western,” and I wanted to giggle. Stewart’s seeking revenge on the man who killed his father; that’s not a “psychological Western” — that’s the sort of plot that had been a staple of the screen for decades. Stewart in Winchester ’73 is the hero he always was (I’d argue he gives a darker performance in It’s a Wonderful Life); he’s admirable and upstanding — except for one well-remembered scene where he gets violent to get results. It’s a tame and listless movie at times, in which the “big surprise” is telegraphed in pretty much the first 20 minutes, and the conceit at its heart — that we’re watching a valued rifle pass hands, which continually crosses paths with Stewart’s quest for vengeance — never seems more than a contrivance. Stewart’s the best thing in it, but he’s surrounded by characters who are either overbaked or underfed. (Only a zaftig Shelley Winters seems underbaked and overfed.) On the credit side, somebody makes the wise move of giving Steve McNally a mustache, which does wonders for him: it gives him a face. If you’re looking for a real “psychological Western,” you have to wait until Mann and Stewart’s next collaboration, Bend of the River, in which Stewart reexamines his relationship to the audience and his own longtime approach to text — and Mann seems energized at capturing his metamorphosis. Bend of the River is a masterpiece that’s better than just about any Western released in 1950; Winchester ’73 is a promising, tentative and uneven warmup. And finally, a brief word about the film version of the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, one of 1950’s biggest hits, in which Betty Hutton — apparently drawing the conception of her character from the couplet “folks are dumb where I come from” — comes off less like an unconventional sharpshooter and more like the village idiot. (She has maybe thirty good minutes in the middle.) Director George Sidney kept getting handed plum musical assignments at Metro, but he had little feel for the form. To be clear: all five of these films are professional jobs, boasting either strong performances or persuasive direction or impressive production values. Could I really make the case that they’re worse than the six B-movies I praised above? Of course not. But the best of the B’s give me repeated pleasure that I find eludes these five. I find them overpraised and underwhelming — and more to the point, uniformly uninviting.

SING HAPPY (TRAILS): Gene Autry was the most popular Western star from 1937 to 1942; in 1942, he enlisted in the Air Corps and by the following year, Roy Rogers had assumed the top spot, which he held even after Autry’s return from battle. Both singing cowboys were Republic artists, but in 1947, Autry left Republic for Columbia, which offered him his own production unit. Determined to keep Rogers on top of the box office rankings and popularity polls, Republic upgraded him from black-and-white to color, and engaged the services of director William Witney, whose use of quick edits in fight scenes had helped reenergize low-budget Westerns. The changes were highly successful; his series was still humming along in 1950. (Since 1941, his films had eschewed the frontier era and been set in the “modern west,” or at least a Hollywood version of it.) The films were shot in Trucolor, a two-strip process that’s deteriorated badly, leaving most of his films of this era a muddy study in orange and green, often available only in versions truncated for television. But happily, two of Rogers’ 1950 films have been beautifully restored by Kino Lorber, and you can see what all the fuss was about. Trigger Jr. has some moments that are as wondrous as anything in the Rogers catalog (including a song he performs as accompaniment to a young boy’s nightmare: a musical and visual manifestation of the fear that consumes him), but the main story-line concerns a elderly man saddled with a grandson whom he loathes for being sensitive (and therefore “weak”) — and as the film is unwilling to condemn the old codger for his abuse, it’s not a film I particularly enjoy. Turn to Trigger Jr. for the curiosity factor, but choose Sunset in the West for pure bliss. And choose it for the costumes, too. Most of the Republic Trucolor pics have deteriorated so badly that it’s easy to forget what a fashion icon Rogers was: how well he wore clothes, and how those clothes were part of his — and his films’ — appeal: the handsome shirts — striped or Burberry check or Scottish plaid — with the double sawtooth pockets and the six button snap cuffs, and the silk scarves with their bright borders and exotic prints. The silver-studded gun belts and the hand-tooled boots. (Even Trigger was better attired than any movie horse.) Sunset in the West boasts a fine cast: Penny Edwards subs for Dale Evans, as she would again a few times, and what she lacks in ease she makes up for in sparkle; Estelita Rodriguez enlivens the proceedings with songs and sass; and the two criminals at the heart of the plot (a gun-running enterprise that hijacks trains to transport their weapons), William Tannen and Steve Pendleton — who had a combined 560 screen appearances between them — know just how to pitch their sense of menace so that it doesn’t overwhelm the sunniness of the surroundings. (Tannen’s great in Riders on the Range, too, as an unctuous underling.) There are bar brawls and gun fights and horse chases — plus several characters working undercover — and the result is the most endlessly rewatchable of Rogers’ six films that year. With Rogers winding down his film career — his TV series began the following year — Republic knew they needed to groom a replacement. They chose wisely. Rex Allen made his debut in 1950 with four films. The studio was still zeroing in on the sort of stories and supporting players that suited him best, but the first and fourth are bullseyes. His debut film, The Arizona Cowboy (the nickname by which he eventually became known — he even had a song to match, which he excerpted in the opening credits of later films), works every angle to ensure the audience takes to him. At the start, he happens upon a ranch where a temperamental horse is due to be “disciplined“; the horse bolts, and Allen comes to its rescue, taming it and befriending it. (“They say you got bad blood in you, huh? They say that about me, too. Maybe we can kind of stick together and prove them wrong, you reckon?”) He’s surrounded by a fine cast: Teala Loring (in her final film), whose wisecracking delivery nicely balances Allen’s easy-going, guileless manner; amiable sidekick Gordon Jones, far better served here than in Sunset in the West; and best of all, 56-year-old Minerva Urecal as old family friend Cactus Kate, who’s given to sparring with her parrot Nicodemus and shooting the hat off any intruder. (“Annie Oakley and I went to the same finishing school,” she informs them.) The plot manages to incorporate ditch riding, a radio giveaway contest and a haunted hotel — and the musical numbers are surprisingly well integrated; Allen uses one to gain employment, another to suss out who wants him dead and another to make his escape. Allen’s a little lower energy than he’ll eventually become — although devoutly sincere, with a smile that could melt a glacier — but the story is so sturdy in enumerating all the reasons we should love him, we do. Allen fits the Republic mold nicely — he even has Roy Rogers’ penchant for pretty scarves. In Under Mexicali Skies, Allen and co-star Buddy Ebsen — as undercover treasury agents — get such a nice rhythm going that the studio decided to keep Ebsen around as sidekick for the next four films in the series. Dorothy Patrick — here equal parts Betty Hutton and June Allyson, and the best parts — is, as always, game for anything (she’s practically forgotten today, but always worth seeking out: 1949’s The Blonde Bandit and Follow Me Quietly showcase her especially well), and if her onscreen father Percy Helton is a bit strident, Allen humors him, so we’re inclined to, too. Near the end of the film, Allen — following smugglers across the Mexican border — grabs onto the landing gear of their helicopter and flies off into the distance; the journey back is made by Allen and Patrick on horseback, while two men in the chopper chase after and take shots at them, culminating in a shoot-out in a mountain pass. This final sequence is so deliriously action-packed that you forgive any slower patches that preceded it; it’s during this extended helicopter sequence that the series finds its wings: showcasing an appealing new star with a honey-colored voice who’s still young enough for feats of derring-do. Roy Rogers and Rex Allen did the singing cowboy proud in 1950; their efforts were smooth and solid and professional. But I’d be remiss not to mention the singing cowboy who got by that year without any of those qualities. Spade Cooley was a violinist and cellist, a singer and a songwriter, who had a wildly popular TV series starting in 1948. In 1947, Astor Pictures gave him his first starring role, in The Kid from Gower Gulch, which lay unreleased until 1950; shoddy and indecipherable, it’s largely considered one of the worst Westerns ever. His third film, Eagle-Lion’s Border Outlaws (1950), has a plot that at least makes sense, for which Cooley is surrounded by professionals on both sides of the camera — and folks usually praise it as the best of his three films. And although there’s fun tomfoolery with some acrobats, it rarely rises to the level of even the worst Whip Wilson film. But allow me to make the case for The Silver Bandit — the second of his three films, also shot by Astor Pictures in 1947 but held until 1950 — because no one else will. It’s as universally loathed as The Kid from Gower Gulch, but parts of it are like watching a pre-Code Paramount comedy. It was written and directed by Elmer Clifton, who’d been directing since 1917. (He’d introduced Clara Bow to audiences in the 1922 classic Down to the Sea in Ships.) Occasionally Clifton gives the film the look of an early silent comedy, as when Cooley tries to saddle a horse — and some of his conceits are positively Dadaesque. (When the leading lady first appears, she’s singing a song about — singing a song.) Although the performances are barely adequate, and the choppy editing suggests studio interference verging on sabotage, Clifton’s method and madness are undeniable. He understands how to showcase Cooley; he’s an innocent, but not an idiot: bashful, but eager to prove his manhood by taking a swing at anyone who offends him. Clifton keeps subverting expectations and piling on surprises; he lifts you up and wears you down — and by the time a trumpeter takes up “Old Folks at Home” at a party, and a mop-headed puppet appears (for no earthly reason) to finger his keys, if you’re not laughing — or at the very least amused — you might need to check that your funny bone isn’t broken.

FADE INTO THE SUNSET: There are some also-ran 1950 Westerns I rather enjoy, but not enough to talk about in detail here: Return of the Frontiersman, slight but appealing, in which Gordon MacRae and Julie London prove an attractive pair; The Capture, a sturdy Lew Ayres noir that holds its own for two-thirds of its length, then dissolves into one of those “the police won’t believe me, I’ll have to make a run for it“ contrivances; and Wyoming Mail, in which Alexis Smith and Steve McNally (in one of the best performances he manages onscreen) share startlingly good chemistry. And then there’s The Fighting Stallion, which may be the single most shabbily-made film I’ve ever found myself not merely drawn to, but unwilling to disengage from. A former soldier (Bill Edwards), slowly losing his sight, chooses a horse to act as his guide. This gentle relationship between a man and the emotional support animal he’s chosen to journey beside him is so affectionate and so genuine, the failings fall away. (The film is lacking in pretty much every department — writing, directing, acting — but it’s sustained by its premise, and by this magnificent white stallion, who doesn’t just save his master, but the movie itself.) But for all their felicities, the Westerns of 1950 include a lot of heavy hitters taking swings and missing. I sing the praises of Roy Rogers above; his chief competition, Gene Autry (whose 1949 entry The Cowboys and the Indians had pretty much done everything that Broken Arrow prided itself on doing, only unassumingly), did not have a good year; if you want to see the best of mid-century Autry, check out 1948’s The Strawberry Roan (essentially the story of how Autry came to meet his horse Champ), one of his most sentimental and compassionate stories — or if sentiment and compassion aren’t your thing, try 1951’s Whirlwind, far more action-oriented than the typical Autry vehicle. Autry struck out regularly in 1950; so did Randolph Scott. Few actors are more associated with Westerns than Scott; starting in 1947, when he decided to devote himself exclusively to oaters, he could be counted on to produce at least one keeper a year. In 1947, he starred in Gunfighters; the following year came Coroner’s Creek, then The Walking Hills. 1951’s Man in the Saddle was followed the next year by Hangman’s Knot, then Thunder Over the Plains in ’53. Those are great films; only in 1950 did he come a cropper. But at least Autry and Scott’s films — second-rate as they are — are professional jobs. Some of the Westerns of 1950 are like amateur night at the local Elks Hall: The Texan Meets Calamity Jane, Return of Jesse James, Gunfire, I Shot Billy the Kid, Johnny Mack Brown’s West of Wyoming and Six Gun Mesa and Rocky Lane’s Vigilante Hideout and Rustlers on Horseback. And remember those six Westerns shot at the same time, with the same cast on the same sets, enacting six completely different stories? Well, unexpectedly, most are dreadful. But even more unexpectedly, one is quite delightful. That would be Marshal of Heldorado, with James Ellison anticipating Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent in Superman. Ellison was so classically handsome and so good at both physical and light comedy, he should’ve been a star when screwball ruled the screen — but the studios were content to pass him by. He ended up in B-Westerns instead — and was mostly wasted — but he gets a chance to show his gift for self-parody here, and he’s irresistible. In this uncredited rip-off of the 1935 Bob Steele vehicle The Rider of the Law, Ellison’s US Marshall is dispatched to a western town being terrorized by a band of gangsters. To keep them from catching wise to his identity, he poses as a rube traveler: donning a pair of spectacles, raising his voice an octave higher than usual and embracing exclamations like the occasional “gosh.” (His arrives in town on a donkey — sitting backwards, no less.) Ellison does wonders with the role for about half the film’s length, then the writer and director promptly forget all about his disguise and drop it — but the first half is so delectable, you give the second half a pass. And then there’s Train to Tombstone: the one truly dreadful Western of 1950 that must be experienced at least once in a lifetime, the same way you are morally obligated to see Plan 9 From Outer Space before you die. A film about a set of passengers traveling out of Albuquerque, whose train is attacked for the gold bullion on board, it’s got some of the worst editing and rear projection in the history of movies, and major plot points that go unexplained or unresolved. You admire it for its determination to do something a little different: to get away from crooks trying to drive people off their land, or marshals coming to town incognito — the usual B-movie fare. But it’s basically Stagecoach set on a train, done at a cost your local high school drama club could afford, and directed by some nerd in the AV department who hadn’t slept in weeks. But before we’re finished dredging up the dregs of 1950 Westerns, let’s take a moment to mourn Sunset Carson. In the B-Western arena of the mid-’40s, there was no one better. His boyish features belied and balanced his cocky behavior. A decade younger than Rogers, nearly two decades younger than Autry and Lane and Starrett, he could handle stunts that most of his colleagues had to hand over to their doubles; due to his vigor (and his lack of acting experience), director Les Selander initially announced that his films would feature “action, action and more action” — but Carson surprised everyone with his knack for dialogue. For his first three films he was second billed to Smiley Burnette, but once he assumed his first starring role, in 1945’s Sheriff of Cimarron, he blazed a trail of Westerns that remain as invigorating today as they were then. He made 12 films in 1945 and ’46, and such titles as Santa Fe Saddlemates, Oregon Trail, Rough Riders of Cheyenne and Rio Grande Riders remain classics of the genre. Then he made the incalculably bad decision to bring an underage girl to a studio function, and Republic canceled his contract. He persevered with a handful of low-budget programmers for Yucca and Astor Pictures that pretty much killed his career. His sole 1950 release, Battling Marshal, is also his last starring role (as well as his last film credit until 1972); it’s also the year’s single worst Western, with glacial pacing, soporific line readings, half-hearted brawls where the fists don’t even connect with the faces, and camerawork so inept that — in indoor settings — you can clearly spot that the rooms have no ceilings.

THE REST OF THE BEST OF THE WEST: Branded, The Outriders and Rocky Mountain — which I praise above — are wonderful, but they’re not the year’s best. That honor goes to The Gunfighter. Over the opening credits, we see the title character racing on horseback across desert, prairie and mountain range; is he running from something, or rushing towards it? Gregory Peck is the notorious Jimmy Ringo: an outlaw who can’t outride his past. Past his prime, but still at the height of his infamy, he’s paying the price for decisions made nearly a decade earlier, when he abandoned his wife and newborn to lead the life he felt he couldn’t leave. Now he’s come to Cayenne, where his wife — under an assumed name — took shelter as a schoolteacher; he’s eager to reconnect — he’ll settle for a glimmer of what might have been — yet something so simple is so difficult to manage. The Gunfighter marked the second of Peck’s six collaborations with director Henry King; it was one of his favorite films, and his pride is justified: it’s like an epic poem projected onto the screen. Time is running out for Ringo; easy prey for every smug young thug who wants to make a name for themselves by taking down the great gunslinger, he’s (literally) a walking shadow from his first entrance. King and Peck keep broadening the tension without diffusing it; there’s a mistaken-identity sequence (during which Ringo dupes the town’s most self-righteous doyennes) that plays like deadpan farce, and a father-son reconciliation that could have gone sickly-sweet — but Peck and King are careful not to sentimentalize Ringo. Oh, the years have dulled his edges, but the film reminds us how these rulebreakers got their reputations; to be an effective outlaw in the Old West required a degree of ruthlessness that’s always ready to resurface. The Gunfighter is not merely one of the high points of the genre, but an extraordinarily pointed and poignant character study; dare we call it — gasp — a “psychological Western”? Stars in My Crown and Bright Leaf would rank among the year’s top Westerns, too — if either were Westerns. Oh, Wikipedia lists them as such, and the opening scenes suggest that’s what you’re in for. But Stars in My Crown is a warmhearted film about a pastor in a small Southern town, and Bright Leaf is a revenge tale set in the tobacco growing region of North Carolina. They’re about as western as Gone With the Wind. But Two Flags West is most assuredly a Western, and supremely enjoyable, despite its defects. It takes its cue from Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation permitting Confederate soldiers to enlist in the Union army to shore up its thinning lines. Here a company of Georgia cavalry POWs (under the command of their colonel, Joseph Cotten) are offered amnesty if they’ll join Union forces in manning the isolated Fort Thorn in New Mexico, under the supervision of major Jeff Chandler. The setup — the friction between previously warring factions, the inability of soldiers to let go of old animosities — is the best thing about Casey Robinson’s screenplay; Chandler and Cotten can’t even sit at the same dinner table without baiting and goading each other. The wounds that Chandler suffered at the hands of Southerners have left him almost sociopathic, desperate to cling to a world that has vanished; recognizing Chandler’s instability, Cotten fights to hold his bitterness in check as he searches for a means of escape for himself and his men. Sadly, Chandler and Cotten are so vivid that Cornel Wilde and Linda Darnell, who serve as the film’s moral compass, are overshadowed; it’s the rare Robert Wise film where he seems so overwhelmed by the scope of the production that he can’t look after his actors. But even when the character development disappoints, Leon Shamroy's crisp cinematography — deep blacks against a sea of gray — grabs your attention, and the climactic assault on the fort holds it. Of the best Westerns of 1950, MGM and Paramount are very much in the picture, as are Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros. But don’t rule out Poverty Row stalwart Republic Pictures. My indifference to Wagon Master is offset by my affection for John Ford’s other Western of 1950, Rio Grande. It’s the final chapter in what’s come to be known as Ford’s “cavalry trilogy” — and many, I find, think it the weakest of the three. It’s not. It’s a film Ford didn’t want to make — and did only so that Republic head Herbert Yates would let him film The Quiet Man — and perhaps because of that, it tends to be underrated, as if Ford’s initial disinterest predetermined its quality. It’s startling from the start — as you hear Victor Young’s stirring theme unfold over the opening credits — to hear the composer most recently attached to romanticists like Mitchell Leisen and William Dieterle work his magic on a Ford film. (Ford’s usual composer Richard Hageman was unavailable.) And he transforms it. Whereas Hageman repurposed folk songs as cavalry marches, powering the proceedings, Young uses them to weave a more seductive spell; he ties the (misguided) romanticism of America’s westward expansion to the deep-rooted hunger between estranged husband and wife Lt. Col. Kirby and Kathleen Ward (John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, in their first screen pairing). The two have been replaying the same battle for 15 years, and finally get the chance to see it through to its conclusion when their onscreen son enlists in his father’s regiment. Ford and scenarist James Kevin McGuiness can’t quite figure out how to tie the Wards’ reunion to the ongoing military mission — to outwit the elusive Apaches who keep escaping across the Rio Grande — but ironically, the limited time allotted to the love story works to its advantage; it forces Kirby and Kathleen to push their relationship forward in bold gestures (the screenplay leaves no time for tentative steps) — and those bold gestures convince us of their devotion and desire. That’s not to suggest that Rio Grande reinvents the wheel; in fact, you could argue that it’s made up of a lot of bits from earlier Ford films — but they’ve been re-examined; in particular, everything that didn’t work in Fort Apache (the first film in the trilogy) is either trimmed, justified or better integrated. The result boasts — of all the Westerns of 1950 — the best love story. There’s another good love story in Republic’s California Passage, perhaps the most underrated Western of 1950. At the start, Adele Mara and her kid brother are making their way west in a covered wagon to meet up with their elder sibling, but they’ve gotten separated from their wagon train. When a native tribe seizes upon them as easy prey, Forrest Tucker — at the right place at the right time — intercedes and saves them. It’s the sort of fortuitous meeting that often leads to instant romance, but not this time: Tucker is barely more civilized than the so-called savages. “She might be pretty,” he tells his horse as they ride off to meet her: “She sure oughta be grateful.” And she’s very grateful — but she’s not having any. The attraction is clear — so are the obstacles: obstacles that only intensify when we get to the nearest town (where he’s the saloon owner), and he’s forced to shoot a man in self-defense — and that man happens to be her older brother. The summary sounds like a lot of contrivances, but it doesn’t play that way. The script is character- rather than plot-driven, and when people behave irrationally, it’s because they’re only human. When Mara’s set up into thinking that Tucker’s a killer, and sends her brother to alert the sheriff, she comes to regret it almost instantly; when Tucker turns up, she tells him to run. (Nothing says love like scrambling to save the man you just fingered for murder.) The cast makes the most of the ambiguity afforded their characters. Jim Davis, as Tucker’s business partner, may be a scoundrel and a thief, but is he evil? Is Charles Kemper’s sheriff — who insists he’s “civilizing the town by degrees” — laid-back to the point of being lazy, or is he practical, shrewd and effective? The last minute or so limps to a conclusion, but up until then, the playing is subtle and detailed, the script uncommonly intelligent, and the direction crisp and assured. (And Republic’s top cinematographer John MacBurnie keeps the mountain ranges shrouded in dust and smoke and fog, as if Tucker and Mara have layers of lies to uncover before they can be together — as indeed they do.) Tucker, Mara, writer James Edward Grant and director Joseph Kane had teamed up earlier that year on Rock Island Trail, a film where the tone is so arch, it’s a chore to sit through. They reunited on California Passage and got everything right. The Westerns of 1950 are — forgive the Peckinpah pun — a wild bunch. Forget reputations; abandon expectations. You never know what you’re going to get until you watch.

Want more Classic Hollywood? If so, I take an expansive look at the career of one of my favorite Classic Hollywood directors, the sadly forgotten William Dieterle, here. I take a look here at all the films Errol Flynn did for Warner Bros. between 1935 to 1950: from his first starring role in Captain Blood to the termination of his contract after Rocky Mountain. I delve into one of Hollywood’s most extraordinary actresses, Margaret Sullavan, and her 16 films here. I serve up The 10 Best Screwball Comedies, and The 25 Best Film Noirs, and some of the titles are sure to surprise you. My other essays are all about TV, past and present, but if you take to TV as much as film, there's an index of the more than 100 TV essays I've written; you might see something you like, be it a drama series or a sitcom or one of my “best of” lists.