September 24, 2013 (XXVII:5) Delmer Daves, 3:10 TO YUMA (1957, 92 min)

National Film Registry—2012 Directed by Delmer Daves Written by Halsted Welles (screenplay) and Elmore Leonard (story) Music by George Duning Cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr. Edited by Al Clark Glenn Ford...Ben Wade Van Heflin...Dan Evans Felicia Farr...Emmy Richard Jaeckel...Charlie Prince DELMER DAVES (director)(b. Delmer Lawrence Daves, July 24, 1904, San Francisco, California—d. August 17, 1977, La Jolla, California) Daves wrote 50 films, among them 1965 The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, 1964 Youngblood Hawke, 1963 Spencer's Mountain, 1959 A Summer Place, 1957 An Affair to Remember (screenplay), 1956 The Last Wagon (screenplay), 1955 White Feather (screenplay), 1954 Drum Beat (screenplay and story), 1947 Dark Passage (screenplay), 1943 Destination Tokyo (screenplay), 1943 Stage Door Canteen (screenplay), 1940 The Farmer's Daughter (story), 1936 The Petrified Forest (screenplay), 1932 Divorce in the Family (screenplay and story), and 1929 Queen Kelly. In addition to writing, Daves directed 30 films, including 1965 The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, 1964 Youngblood Hawke, 1963 Spencer's Mountain, 1962 Rome Adventure, 1961 Susan Slade, 1961 Parrish, 1959 A Summer Place, 1959 The Hanging Tree, 1958 The Badlanders, 1958 Kings Go Forth, 1958 Cowboy, 1957 3:10 to Yuma, 1956 The Last Wagon, 1956 Jubal, 1954 Drum Beat, 1954 Demetrius and the Gladiators, 1953 Never Let Me Go, 1953 Treasure of the Golden Condor, 1952 Return of the Texan, 1951 Bird of Paradise, 1950 Broken Arrow, 1949 Task Force, 1949 A Kiss in the Dark, 1948 To the Victor, 1947 Dark Passage, 1947 The Red House, 1945 Pride of the Marines, 1944 Hollywood Canteen, 1944 The Very Thought of You, and 1943 Destination Tokyo. HALSTED WELLES (writer, screenplay) (b. December 29, 1906,

Alma, Michigan—d. January 24, 1990) wrote 44 films and television shows, including 1976 “Doctors' Hospital” (TV series), 1973-1974 “Kojak” (TV series), 1971-1973 “Rod Serling's Night Gallery” (TV series), 1969 “Mannix” (TV series), 1966 “12 O'Clock High” (TV series), 1965-1966 “The Virginian” (TV series), 1959-1962 “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (TV series), 1960 “Bonanza” (TV series), 1957 3:10 to Yuma (screenplay), 1957 “The George Sanders Mystery Theater” (TV series), 1957 “Playhouse 90” (TV series), 1955 “Lux Video Theatre” (TV series), and 1949 The Lady Gambles (adaptation). ELMORE LEONARD (writer, story) (b. Elmore John Leonard Jr., October 11, 1925, New Orleans, Louisiana—d. August 20, 2013, Bloomfield Township, Michigan) 43 films and television shows, including 2013 Life of Crime (novel: The Switch), 2010-2014 “Justified” (TV series, 53 episodes), 2012 Freaky Deaky (novel), 2009 Sparks (story), 2008 Killshot (novel), 2008 The Tonto Woman (story), 2008 “The 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films: Live Action,” 2007 3:10 to Yuma (short story), 2005 Be Cool (novel), 2003-2004 “Karen Sisco” (TV series), 2004 The Big Bounce (novel), 1998 “Maximum Bob” (TV series), 1998 Out of Sight (novel), 1997 Jackie Brown (novel: Rum Punch), 1997 “Gold Coast” (TV movie) (novel), 1997 “Pronto” (TV

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movie) (book), 1997 Touch (novel), 1997 “Last Stand at Saber River” (TV movie) (novel), 1995 Get Shorty (novel), 1992 “Split Images” (TV movie) (novel), 1990 Border Shootout (novel The Law at Randado), 1989 “Desperado: Badlands Justice” (TV movie), 1989 Cat Chaser (novel and screenplay), 1989 “Desperado: The Outlaw Wars” (TV movie), 1988 “Glitz” (TV movie) (novel), 1988 “Desperado: Avalanche at Devil's Ridge” (TV movie), 1988 “The Return of Desperado” (TV movie), 1987 The Rosary Murders, 1987 “Desperado” (TV movie), 1986 52 Pick-Up (novel and screenplay), 1985 Stick (novel and screenplay), 1984 The Ambassador (novel: 52 Pick-Up), 1980 “High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane” (TV movie), 1974 Mr. Majestyk, 1972 Joe Kidd, 1971 Valdez Is Coming (novel), 1970 The Moonshine War (novel and screenplay), 1969 The Big Bounce (novel), 1967 Hombre (novel), 1957 3:10 to Yuma (story), 1957 The Tall T (story), and 1956 “Schlitz Playhouse” (TV series). In addition, he was the executive producer on 5 projects for TV and film, including 2010-2013 “Justified” (TV series), 2008 Killshot, 2005 Be Cool, and 1997 Jackie Brown. GEORGE DUNING (original music) (b. February 25, 1908, Richmond, Indiana—d. February 27, 2000, San Diego, California) was a member of music departments on 264 film and television projects, among them 2004 “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II” (TV series), 1997 “Law & Order” (TV series), 1983 “Zorro and Son” (TV series), 1980 “Top of the Hill” (TV movie), 1978 “Child of Glass” (TV movie), 1978 “Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color” (TV series), 1977 “The Father Knows Best Reunion” (TV movie), 1975 “The Abduction of Saint Anne” (TV movie), 1971-1974 “The Partridge Family” (TV series, 23 episodes), 1971 “Black Noon” (TV movie), 1969 “Then Came Bronson” (TV series), 1967-1968 “Star Trek” (TV series), 1964 “Slattery's People” (TV series), 1963 Toys in the Attic, 1963 Island of Love, 1961 Sail a Crooked Ship, 1960 The World of Suzie Wong, 1960 Let No Man Write My Epitaph, 1960 All the Young Men, 1959 The Wreck of the Mary Deare, 1959 The Last Angry Man, 1958 Bell Book and Candle, 1958 Cowboy, 1957 The Brothers Rico, 1957 Jeanne Eagels, 1957 3:10 to Yuma, 1956 Storm Center, 1955 Picnic, 1955 My Sister Eileen, 1955 The Man from Laramie, 1955 The Long Gray Line, 1953 Salome, 1953 Last of the Comanches, 1951 The Barefoot Mailman, 1951 Lorna Doone, 1950 Harriet Craig, 1949 Jolson Sings Again, 1949 The Doolins of Oklahoma, 1949 Johnny Allegro, 1947 Johnny O'Clock, 1946 The Jolson Story, 1945 Eadie Was a Lady, 1944 Kansas City Kitty, and 1943 Around the World. CHARLES LAWTON JR. (cinematography, director of photography) (b. April 6, 1904, Los Angeles, California—d. July 11, 1965, Pacific Palisades, California) was the

cinematographer for 113 films, including 1967 Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, 1965 A Rage to Live, 1964 Youngblood Hawke, 1964 Ensign Pulver, 1963 Spencer's Mountain, 1962 13 West Street, 1962 Rome Adventure, 1961 Two Rode Together, 1961 A Raisin in the Sun, 1960 The Wackiest Ship in the Army, 1960 Comanche Station, 1960 Man on a String, 1959 The Gene Krupa Story, 1958 The Last Hurrah, 1958 Cowboy, 1957 3:10 to Yuma, 1956 Jubal, 1955 My Sister Eileen, 1955 The Long Gray Line, 1953 Miss Sadie Thompson, 1952 Paula, 1952 Boots Malone, 1951 Man in the Saddle, 1951 Santa Fe, 1950 Kill the Umpire, 1949 Tokyo Joe, 1949 The Doolins of Oklahoma, 1947 The Lady from Shanghai, 1947 Her Husband's Affairs, 1946 The Walls Came Tumbling Down, 1946 Perilous Holiday, 1945 Brewster's Millions, 1944 See Here, Private Hargrove, 1942 Joe Smith, American, 1942 The Vanishing Virginian, 1941 Maisie Was a Lady, 1940 Hullabaloo, 1939 Nick Carter, Master Detective, and 1937 My Dear Miss Aldrich.

GLENN FORD...Ben Wade (b. Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford, May 1, 1916 Sainte-Christine-d'Auvergne, Portneuf, Québec, Canada—d. August 30, 2006, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California) appeared in 109 films and TV shows, including 1991 “Final Verdict” (TV movie), 1991 Raw Nerve, 1990 Border Shootout, 1980 Day of Resurrection, 1979 The

Visitor, 1978 Superman, 1976-1977 “Once an Eagle” (TV mini-series, 7 episodes), 1976 Midway, 1975 “The Family Holvak” (TV series, 10 episodes), 1971-1972 “Cade's County” (TV series, 24 episodes), 1966 Is Paris Burning?, 1965 The Money Trap, 1964 Fate Is the Hunter, 1964 Advance to the Rear, 1963 The Courtship of Eddie's Father, 1962 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1961 Pocketful of Miracles, 1958 Cowboy, 1957 Don't Go Near the Water, 1957 3:10 to Yuma, 1956 The Teahouse of the August Moon, 1956 The Fastest Gun Alive, 1956 Jubal, 1955 Blackboard Jungle, 1954 Human Desire, 1953 The Big Heat, 1951 The Redhead and the Cowboy, 1946 Gilda, 1942 The Adventures of Martin Eden, 1940 Men Without Souls, and 1940 Convicted Woman. VAN HEFLIN...Dan Evans (b. Emmett Evan Heflin Jr., December 13, 1910, Walters, Oklahoma—d. July 23, 1971, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California) won the 1943 Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Johnny Eager (1941). He appeared in 66 films and TV movies, including 1971 “The Last Child” (TV movie), 1970 “Neither Are We Enemies” (TV movie), 1970 Airport, 1969 The Big Bounce, 1967 The Man Outside, 1966 Stagecoach, 1965 Once a Thief, 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1960 Under Ten Flags, 1959 They Came to Cordura, 1958 Tempest, 1958 Gunman's Walk, 1957

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3:10 to Yuma, 1956 Patterns, 1955 Battle Cry, 1953 Shane, 1952 My Son John, 1951 Tomahawk, 1949 Madame Bovary, 1947 Green Dolphin Street, 1947 Possessed, 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1941 Johnny Eager, 1940 Santa Fe Trail, and 1937 The Outcasts of Poker Flat. FELICIA FARR...Emmy (b. Olive Dines, October 4, 1932, Westchester County, New York) appeared in 41 films and TV shows, including 1986 That's Life!, 1975 “Harry O” (TV series), 1973 Charley Varrick, 1971 Kotch, 1967 The Venetian Affair, 1964 Kiss Me, Stupid, 1964 “Burke's Law” (TV series), 1964 “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” (TV series), 1963 “Bonanza” (TV series), 1962 Ben Casey (TV series), 1960 “Naked City” (TV series), 1960 “Zane Grey Theater” (TV series), 1957 3:10 to Yuma, 1956 “The Ford Television Theatre” (TV series), 1956 Reprisal!, 1956 Jubal, and 1955 Big House, U.S.A. RICHARD JAECKEL...Charlie Prince (b. Richard Hanley Jaeckel, October 10, 1926, Long Beach, Long Island, New York—d. June 14, 1997, Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California) appeared in 187 films and TV shows, among them1989-1994 “Baywatch” (TV series, 29 episodes), 1991 “China Beach” (TV series), 1990 Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection, 1989 Ghetto Blaster, 1987 “Murder, She Wrote” (TV series), 1985-1987 “Spenser: For Hire” (TV series, 47 episodes), 1985 “The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission” (TV movie), 1984 Starman, 1984 The Fix, 1983 “At Ease” (TV series, 14 episodes), 1982 Airplane II: The Sequel, 1982 Cold River, 1982 “King's Crossing” (TV series), 1981 ...All the Marbles, 1976-1981 “Little House on the Prairie” (TV series), 1980 “Reward” (TV movie), 1979 “Salvage 1” (TV series, 13 episodes), 1977 Twilight's Last Gleaming, 1976 “Baretta” (TV series), 1976 “Joe Forrester” (TV series), 1975 “Ellery Queen” (TV series), 1975 The Kill, 1975 “Cannon” (TV series), 1975 The Drowning Pool, 1963-1975 “Gunsmoke” (TV series), 1973 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, 1972 Ulzana's Raid, 1970 Sometimes a Great Notion, 1970 Chisum, 1967 The Dirty Dozen, 1962 “Have Gun - Will Travel” (TV series), 1960 “The Untouchables” (TV series), 1959 “Naked City” (TV series), 1958 The Naked and the Dead, 1958 Cowboy, 1957 3:10 to Yuma, 1957 “Playhouse 90” (TV series), 1952 Come Back, Little Sheba, 1952 Hoodlum Empire, 1952 My Son John, 1950 The Gunfighter, 1949 Sands of Iwo Jima, 1949 Battleground, and 1943 Guadalcanal Diary. From World Film Directors Volume I. Editor John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Company, N&Y, 1987 Delmer (Lawrence) Daves, American director, scenarist, actor, and producer, was born in San Francisco, the son of Arthur Lawrence Daves, a businessman, and the former Nan Funge. Daves’ grandfather had emigrated from Ireland during the American Civil War, in which he fought for the Union. After the war he made two wagon treks with the Mormons and at their invitation settled in Salt Lake City. There he went into the freight wagon business, transporting army supplies from Utah and Colorado to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also rode with the Pony Express and had his heel shot away by the Ute Indians. Daves’ grandmother was born in California in 1854, two months after her mother had crossed by covered wagon.

The family’s intimate involvement with Western history continued into Delmer Daves’ generation—before he was a year old he and his parents were evacuated from San Francisco by refugee train after the great earthquake of 1905. The family settled in Los Angeles, where Daves made his movie debut at the age of ten in a movie starring the future director Robert Z. Leonard. Occasional bit parts followed during his years at Los Angeles public schools and at Polytechnic High School, but at that period Daves planned a career in civil engineering. By the time he left the Polytechnic he had changed his mind, and went north to Stanford University to study law. Daves worked his way through Stanford as a draftsman (for the city of Palo Alto), illustrator, and poster designer, and as a teacher of drawing and lettering. He also somehow found time to act in many student productions and to serve as director and business manager of the drama society and manager of the glee club. In his graduate year he was a much-praised Macbeth. By the time he left Stanford in 1926 or 1927 he had a degree in law but very little interest in it. He took a three-month vacation,

wandering among the Hopi and Navajo Indians of the South-West, and then joined the Pasadena Playhouse, along with fellow alumnus Lloyd Nolan. Soon afterwards, deciding that his heart was after all in the movies, he left his friend behind and joined the director James Cruze as an assistant property boy. A husky young man, six feet two inches tall, Daves made himself exceptionally useful around the old Metropolitan lot. He first attracted notice by helping out the ailing property man by lifting a piano singlehanded, and soon showed such various talents as a bit-part actor, stuntman, poster designer and deviser of special effects that Cruze began to take an interest in him. When Daves said that his ambition was to direct, Cruze started him on his way by letting him help out in the cutting room under Mildred Johnson. In 1928, when Cruze went to MGM, he took Daves along with him. Daves was promoted to technical director on the college movie The Duke Steps Out (1929) because he (unlike Cruze) had actually been to college. The same film brought him his first important acting assignment. Dissatisfied with the puny physique of the actor cast as campus boxing champion (and as Joan Crawford’s temporary boyfriend), Cruze gave the role to Daves. Daves also had Cruze to thank for his first assignment as scenarist. Campus movies were then very much in vogue, and the MGM director Sam Wood wanted to make the first college

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talkie. Cruze sent his young protégé to Wood, who asked him for a story idea. Daves had no idea how to submit his material and handed Wood a twenty-page scenario scribbled in pencil on yellow paper. The director read it anyway, and liked it so well that he put Daves on the payroll of the MGM script department. So This Is College (1930), which introduced Robert Montgomery and Elliott Nugent, was a hit, and Daves subsequently worked on the scripts of Harry Pollard’s shipmates (1931) and George Hill’s Clear All Wires(1932). Daves also acted in So This Is College and Shipmates but thereafter confined himself to writing—reportedly at the earnest request of Ward Bond, who complained that Daves always got the roles that would otherwise have been his. In 1933 Daves quit MGM and took a vacation—a bicycle tour of Europe. He returned to Hollywood the following year and joined Warner Brothers, working as a scenarist or coscenarist of a string of Dick Powell musicals directed by Lloyd Bacon, Frank Borzage, and Mervyn Le Roy, and also on Archie Mayo’s excellent thriller The Petrified Forest (1936). After that Daves turned free-lance, earning credits on two more Dick Powell vehicles and on an assortment of other movies, including Leo McCarey’s comedy drama Love Affair (1939) and Borzage’s Stage Door Canteen (1943) None of these pictures was particularly distinguished, but Daves was enjoying life—he worked nine months a year, traveled for the other three, and (until he married the actress Mary Lou Lender in 1938) was a much sought-after Hollywood bachelor. When the chance to direct came his way in 1943, he was far from eager to accept the challenge. The opportunity presented itself when Daves went back to Warner Brothers to write (in collaboration with Albert Maltz) a submarine drama called Destination Tokyo. The film was to be made with the cooperation of the navy, and in the interests of authenticity, the writers were asked to spend some time in a submarine at sea. By the time the scenario was completed, Jack Warner realized that Daves knew more about submarine warfare than anyone else on the lot, and asked him to direct the picture. Daves demurred, pointing out that as a writer he didn’t get ulcers, but Warner and the producer Jerry Wald finally prevailed. Destination Tokyo (1943) stars Cary Grant as commander of the submarine Copperfin, struggling to cope not only with the hazards of war, but with the presence on board of a womanizing troublemaker (John Garfield). The result was praised for some well-handled moments of tension and a generally “firm control of character and situation,” but some reviewers thought it too long (at 135 minutes) and marred by sentimentality and intrusive patriotic rhetoric. James Agee wrote that it “combines a good deal of fairly exciting submarine warfare with at least as much human interest, which I found neither very human nor…very interesting.” Others were more impressed, however, and the picture did well enough at the box office to establish Daves in his new role as a director.

There is a good deal of sentimentality also in The Very Thought of You (1944), in which Eleanor Parker’s wartime marriage to Dennis Morgan, stifled by her possessive family, is rescued by the arrival of a baby. However, in his two-part article about Daves in Films and Filming (April and May 1963), Richard Whitehall wrote that this movie’s “long searching look: at the American family was refreshingly free from the clichés of the genre: “Daves portrays the family as a trap from which the young should endeavor to escape….The idea of the family as an octopus with tenacious tentacles strangling the initiative of the young is a recurrent theme in the early Daves films.” Hollywood Canteen (1944), a star-stuffed wartime musical, was followed by The Pride of the Marines (1945), written by Albert Maltz. It tells the story of Al Schmid (John Garfield), a young Philadelphian who joins the Marines, fights heroically at Guadalcanal, is blinded by a grenade, and then has to fight even more bravely to come to terms with his disability. As in Destination Tokyo, there is a certain amount of

embarrassing rhetoric about the American way of life, but there are also some pointed attacks on racial and religious bigotry (involving Schmid’s Jewish buddy, played by Dane Clark). The movie received a good deal of praise, especially for the family scenes at the beginning and the action sequences. William R. Meyer wrote that Daves had “use the technique of double printing with a sixty percent positive

and forty percent negative image to evoke the horror of a grenade exploding in Schmid’s face,” and called the night battle “agonizingly real.” James Agee remained relatively unmoved, finding the picture “long-drawn-out and never inspired, but very respectably honest and dogged, thanks considerably, it appears to Albert Maltz’s script.” Daves wrote The Red House himself, introducing in his murderous farmer (Edward G. Robinson) a figure that has recurred in his films—one whose consuming egocentricity makes him a force for evil and destruction. This “powerful mood-piece” was followed by Dark Passage (1947), also scripted by Daves. It stars Humphrey Bogart as Vincent Parry, a San Quentin lifer wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. He escapes, and, aided by Irene (Lauren Bacall), a San Francisco socialite who believes in him, undergoes plastic surgery to alter his appearance. After trying but failing to bring the real killer to justice, Parry escapes with Irene to South America. The first part of the film—until Parry emerges from the surgeon’s bandages looking like Bogart—was shot “subjectively” with a hand-held camera (a captured German Arriflex). William R. Meyer called Daves’ script “a winding, often hysterical narrative, offering weak motivations,” but admired the supporting performances of Clifton Young (a blackmailer), Tom D’Andrea (a taxi driver), and Agnes Moorehead. For Richard Whitehall, however, this was a “minor masterpiece” reminiscent of early Fritz Lang, and “one of the most extraordinary American films of the late forties,”

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distinguished by “meticulous observation of background detail” and of minor characters: “All the people Parry meets, whether friend or enemy, are beautifully realized, and the whole work has an exhilarating compactness and freedom.” To the Victor (1948)…Task Force (1949)…and the banal comedy A Kiss in the Dark (1949), were Daves’ last films as a contract director for Warner Brothers. Moving on to Twentieth-Century-Fox, Daves made his first Western. Broken Arrow (1950), adapted by Michael Blankfort from Elliott Arnold’s novel Blood Brother. Sickened by the United States’ pointless and bloody war with the Apaches, the liberal ex-soldier Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) takes his life in his hands and opens peace negotiations with the chief Cochise (Jeff Chandler). The attempt is at least temporarily successful, and when the treaty is broken, it is not by the Indians. In the interim, Jeffords is briefly and idyllically married to the Apache maiden Sonseeahray (Debra Paget). Broken Arrow was one of the first Westerns to show the American Indian in a sympathetic light and to portray love between an Indian and a white. Drawing on his own family connections with the Southwest and his wanderings as a young man among the Indians of that region, Daves made a film in which his respect for the Apaches shines through, as Richard Whitehall wrote, “in his sympathetic treatment of Cochise and his understanding and poetic treatment of Indian ceremonials and customs, particularly the wedding ceremony with its beautiful marriage poem” and in “the lovely low-angled shots as Tom Jeffords and Sonseearay enter their marriage wickiup….Although it is not a great Western, it is one of the loveliest, with its beautiful color photography by Ernest Palmer.” The picture brought Chandler an Oscar nomination for his performance and Daves a Directors Guild Prize. It was a commercial success and ushered in an era of “adult” and “socially significant” Westerns. William K. Everson has written that Broken Arrow, “while it may have been prompted by the controversial but commercially successful race problem…films of the 1940s managed the rare movie trick of making a social comment without overloading the scales. The side issues of Broken Arrow were rapidly commercialized to the hilt…[and] its controlled documentary qualities were also copied shamelessly by many lesser Westerns. But the original film was good enough to survive even this subsequent exploitation; it was and is a warm, poignant, and often poetic film.” A succession of bad or mediocre studio assignments followed….It was not until 1954 that Daves was able to make a more personal movie, the Warner Brothers Western Drum Beat, scripted by the director and based on contemporary accounts of the United Sates’ war with the Modoc Indians of the California-Oregon border in the 1870s.

Up to a point Drum Beat reverses the argument of Broken Arrow, taking the point of view of the white settlers. …The drift of the film is not against the Modocs as a whole—they are shown to be generally peaceable and honorable—but against the appeasement of a treacherous renegade. Some commentators saw analogies between events in the film and the Cold War, though Daves said that he had not intended this connection…. A less reflective but more exciting film followed, The Last Wagon (1956)—a “revenge Western” that becomes a “journey Western” as an embittered loner (Richard Widmark) leads the survivors of an Apache raid back to civilization. And 3:10 to Yuma (1957) has been classified as yet another species of the genre—a “chamber Western,” in which much of the action takes place indoors. Holed up together in a hotel room are Ben Wade (Glenn Ford), a much-feared outlaw, and a decent farmer named Dan Evans (Van Heflin) who has undertaken to deliver

Wade to Yuma Penitentiary and who knows that Wade’s gang is gathering outside. Evans accepts the assignment because it will earn him the money to save his farm, but he gradually comes to realize that he is fighting also for such imponderables as peace and decency. He pursues his apparently suicidal but morally correct course out of an almost fatalistic sense of necessity, and in this resembles the heroes of

other “adult” Westerns of the 1950s. like High Noon, The Gunfighter, and Budd Boetticher’s “Renown” cycle. 3:10 to Yuma was shot by Charles Laughton Jr. in black and white, red filters being used in the outdoor sequences to intensify the impression of a parched and hostile terrain. It was much admired for its photography, its “wonderfully visual use of shadows for dramatic effect,” and its adroit balance of action, irony, and allegory. Cowboy (1958), based on Frank Harris’ account of his disillusioning experiences as a young easterner in the Old West, was a more ambitious but less satisfying film, shot by Lawton in color and cinemascope and starring Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford. Daves made two more Westerns after that—Badlanders (1958), a translation to Arizona of W.R. Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle, and The Hanging Tree (1959) with Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, and Karl Malden. The ulcers that Daves regarded as the director’s lot finally got him during the filming of the latter, and the shooting was completed from his sketches by Karl Malden. None of Daves’ later pictures was of much merit. Most of them were rather turgid romances that he wrote and produced as well as directed. He made his last picture in 1965 and, until his death twelve years later, went on trying to generate new projects through his Diamond D Production Company….Daves was described as “one of the happiest men in Hollywood” and “one of the best-liked directors,” open and easy-going. … Richard Whitehall called Daves “the documentarist of the Western film” and wrote that “few directors have caught so exactly the flavour of bleak, wooden constructions and sterile

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dust of the shack-town of the desert or have tried to set their characters so firmly as part of a working community.

Kent Jones: 3:10 to Yuma: Curious Distances (Criterion Notes): Many of Delmer Daves’s films are beloved today, but to say that he remains a misunderstood and insufficiently appreciated figure in the history of American movies is a rank understatement. Daves was at once a true artist, a western specialist, and a Hollywood pro whose work was respected by insiders but received little in the way of official recognition. Unlike, say, Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray or Anthony Mann, directors whose careers afford rough parallels to that of Daves, he was not reclaimed by auteurism, the strain of film criticism that originated in France as the “politique des auteurs” and flowered here in the United States as the “auteur theory.” In fact, Daves could be counted as one of its casualties.

In the grand reconsiderations of our national cinema that were written between the 1950s and 1970s, Daves was tagged as a nature lover, a Hollywood naïf, a purveyor of the conventional. In large part, this was due to the fact that he simply did not fit the auteurist mold of the subversive maverick injecting notes of unease, distress, and irrationality into otherwise conformist narratives, under the eyes of nervous studio heads and watchful censors. He was drawn to the bonds between people rather than the divisions, to friendship and love rather than discord and ven-geance. He was very good at dramatizing destructive urges and behaviors, embodied by secondary characters who shadow the paths of his honorable protagonists, and no filmmaker had a richer feeling for the aching loneliness of western life. Nonetheless, there is a consistent and coherent sense throughout Daves’s films of the world as essentially and innately benevolent; he was one of the only American filmmakers outside of the avant-garde to work with a genuinely transcendentalist spirit and outlook, no matter that it was filtered through the commercial demands of Hollywood moviemaking. This places his perspective as far from the glad-handing optimism of truly conformist film-making as darker sensibilities like those of Ray, Mann, or Hawks.

A comparison between Daves and Hawks is particularly illuminating. Daves was a filmmaker of grand rhetorical gestures; Hawks was not. Daves was passionately interested in landscape and history, Hawks in neither. Daves was a fundamentally openhearted artist of the natural world; Hawks’s sensibility was sleek, sophisticated, and urban, whatever the

setting. It’s interesting to consider their dissimilarities in light of the frequently repeated story that Hawks said he made Rio Bravo (1959) as a corrective to both Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma (1957). Daves’s film, in many ways patterned after High Noon (ticking-clock western suspense within a compact time frame, a brooding and endlessly repeated theme song, stark black-and-white imagery), features a protagonist who is almost overcome by inner conflicts. For Hawks, such a hero was unthinkable. His best movies, including Rio Bravo, feature aristocratic circles of the confident and able, from which the self-doubting are barred. Even Dean Martin’s recovering alcoholic deputy in that film is innately skilled—he just doesn’t think he is. For that reason, Hawks’s film, which also features a captured criminal whose friends are coming to get him, is not a suspense story at all but, as many have pointed out, a relaxed and endlessly digressive interval spent with a group of pals.

In auteurist lore, 3:10 to Yuma has always come out on the losing end of this comparison—Rio Bravo is bravely, idiosyncratically “pragmatic,” while the Daves film is merely, and fashionably, “psychological.” But that is to understand the matter only as Hawks did. He watched Daves’s film, recognized nothing but the antitheses of his own predilections, and reacted accordingly. But to see 3:10 to Yuma only as Hawks did is hardly to see it at all. It amounts to much more than a “psychological western,” and more even than a “suspense classic,” as it has been validated by official film culture. It is, as Bertrand Tavernier has written, a “magnificent parable of liberty”—as well as a moving depiction of a marriage at a crossroads, a fascinating study in ambiguity, and one of the most visually striking of all westerns. On many levels, 3:10 to Yuma stands alone in the genre and, I think, in American cinema.

An extremely terse 1953 Elmore Leonard story provided the basis for the film. A deputy sheriff brings a prisoner to a hotel room in Contention City, Arizona, where they remain until it’s time to walk through a gauntlet of the prisoner’s armed gang to the 3:10 train bound for the federal prison in Yuma. The question of why the deputy risks his life for the paltry sum of $150 a month goes unanswered. Leonard himself was initially disappointed that it did not remain so in the film version. This would have been a tall order: the mystery of the deputy’s motivation is made possible by the intense narrative compression of the story and would have been difficult to sustain throughout a feature-length running time. (In the intervening years, Leonard has reversed his opinion of the Daves film and now considers it one of the best adaptations of his writing, along with Budd Boetticher’s 1957 The Tall T.)

“Three-Ten to Yuma” was adapted by Halsted Welles, who had a long career in radio drama and television but died with only five film credits to his name, including Daves’s 1959 The Hanging Tree and Phil Karlson’s 1967 Civil War western A Time for Killing. Welles and Daves (who, having worked as a screenwriter before he began directing, always did a “director’s polish” on scripts for his pictures, even when he wasn’t credited with writing them) made some interesting choices based on the sparse information provided by Leonard, not only filling out the characters but actually deepening them. In the story, the prisoner complains that it’s going to rain and asks the deputy to close the window in the hotel room. In the film, the question of rain

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becomes a key dramatic element. There’s a drought, and the hero, now a rancher named Dan Evans, is desperate for cash, which is why he agrees to risk his life by guarding the prisoner, Ben Wade—it is also why Wade never stops attempting to bribe Evans with increasingly large sums. Thus, in the film, Wade asks Evans to open the window because it’s so hot outside. In the story, the deputy refers to his wife and children, but in the film, we come face-to-face with Evans’s family, and so does Wade. In the story, there is a flash of kinship between guard and prisoner, which is expanded and compellingly complicated in the film—giving rise to the enigma of Wade’s generosity at the final, crucial moment. Welles and Daves also made a fascinating and little-remarked change that renders the entire question of Wade’s moral character more complex. In the story, a member of the prisoner’s gang has shot and killed a stagecoach driver during a holdup. At the very beginning of the film, we witness that holdup, as do Evans and his sons. When the driver pulls a gun on the gang member who is taking the money from th e strongbox, Wade shoots his own man (presumably reckoning that he’s a goner anyway), then the driver, and then gets back to business.

Daves originally offered the role of Evans to Glenn Ford, who chose instead to play Wade, supposedly because he had been advised as a young man by John Barrymore to never turn down the part of the villain. Daves responded with the equally unorthodox casting of Van Heflin as Evans. Heflin was an interesting actor, a soft and often genuinely unappealing presence who specialized in characters either gnawed by doubt and guilt or haunted by the specter of humiliation. Ford, on the other hand, radiates ease, confidence, and charisma as Wade. Not only does the casting up the ante of the cat-and-mouse, war-of-nerves exchanges between Wade and Evans but it also immediately points the film in a more surprising direction.

Daves took a lean western tale and fashioned out of it a spiritual suspense story about a trio—a husband, a wife, and their improbable observer. The film plants seeds of doubt between Dan and his wife, Alice (Leora Dana)—he imagines that she is questioning his manhood and his ability to provide, and that she has been charmed by Wade. We in turn study Alice’s face for signs of apprehension and disquiet, and sense that the two of them have been down this road before; we can see their exhaustion, that it is close to the edge of desperation. We can also see that Wade is visibly moved by Alice, and we wonder when and in what form this sentiment will manifest itself.

The core of 3:10 to Yuma is a marriage, not an idealized marriage but something like an actual one, with its wearinesses and projections of fear, its longings and its renewals. Heflin’s Evans is often mindlessly grouped with his beleaguered rancher in Shane (1953) or his man-with-a-dishonorable-past in Act of Violence (1948), but this is a different kind of character, a nuanced creation shuttling between fatigue, rattled stoicism, and bursts of nervous upset, and Heflin’s finest moments are his quietly barbed exchanges with Dana. She is on-screen for a

relatively brief period, perhaps only a third of the movie, but her early moments with Heflin and the scene in which she and her family share their dinner table with Ford set the tone for the film. Her character amounts to much more than a mirror of her husband’s insecurities or his moral bedrock—these are genuine one-to-one transactions in which the shifting emotions passing across their open and visibly careworn faces have been as attentively cultivated and integrated into the texture of the images and the action as in a late Bergman movie.

And then there’s Wade, the privileged witness to this couple’s most intimate emotions. The term “morally ambiguous” has been employed a little too often over the past two decades, but it certainly fits this charming outlaw who shoots down two men, including one of his own, and doesn’t even stop for a breath; who is prone to romantic reveries and expressions of tenderness; who shifts in the blink of an eye from the affable to

the mercenary and back again. Ford and Daves had already found a common wavelength in Jubal (1956), and they created something even more refined and surprising here with Wade, a remorse-less murderer with a capacity for awe. Critic David Thomson has complained that the film suffers from Ford’s “inability to be nasty,” but that is pretty much the point: goodness and mercy often arrive

unannounced in this film, and come as a surprise even to those who bestow them.

3:10 to Yuma is not just a penetrating character study but a vision anchored by Daves’s understanding, as a westerner himself, of life in the West, as well as his sharp graphic sense. He shot the film in Arizona in winter, in Elgin, Willcox, Texas Canyon, and Old Tucson—a movie studio built outside Tucson and used as a setting for many westerns—and farther north in Sedona. “On 3:10 to Yuma, the moment the sun rose and broke the horizon, I’d be aiming right at it,” he explained to writer Christopher Wicking in a 1969 interview. “We got beautiful long, long shadows. It’s not possible to get that effect in the summer.” Daves wanted deep, rich blacks in the images, to reflect his own memories of drought condi-tions in the region, an effect heightened by the unusual use of red filters (his cameraman, Charles “Buddy” Lawton Jr., had pursued similar high-contrast black-and-white imagery with Orson Welles in 1947’s The Lady from Shanghai), and he had to go to Columbia head Harry Cohn to make his case. The result is a western that looks like no other, the texture of its images alternately stark and lustrous, enhancing the loneliness of houses, animals, and human figures against the endlessly flat earth and wide-open skies.

This loneliness, felt inside and out, is the emotional corner-stone of the film. It is behind the lovely interlude in which Wade and Felicia Farr’s Contention City barmaid, Emmy, talk each other into bed for a stolen hour, and speak after the fact as if they were already each other’s distant memories. It is behind the curious distances between people, the sense of lives lived at a remove from those of others. And it informs the beauty and

Daves—3:10 TO YUMA—8

power of those remarkably expressive high-angle boom shots for which Daves became known, and which are a particular characteristic of this film’s signature.

Daves considered himself a pioneer of the boom, and he designed his own special rig. “Other booms always had to be on an angle,” he told Wicking, “but our boom goes straight up in the air like a telephone pole, and you can figuratively shoot all around.” Daves used the boom in many of his films for the “poetic image,” but in 3:10 to Yuma, it becomes a vitally important creative instrument—to paraphrase critic Fred Camper on Robert Mulligan, it allows Daves to emotionalize space. “I’m

doing it by instinct half the time, slowly, slowly, but now soaring,” Daves explained. “If you do it that way, you do it according to feeling.” At one moment, the boom is akin to a silent benediction on the characters, carrying their hopes aloft; at another, it is used to underscore the force of a pack of riders cutting through limitless spaces; and in the final scene, the boom takes the camera soaring with Alice’s joy. It’s an appropriate ending for a film in which the spiritual education of the three principal characters is not a by-product or a subtext but at once its central motor, its force, and its final destination. By the time it reaches its end, Daves’s film has nowhere to go but up.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2013 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXVII:

October 1 Kon Ichikawa Fires on the Plain 1959 October 8 Peter Bogdanovich The Last Picture Show 1971

October 15 Sidney Lumet Network 1976 October 22 Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian Death Row 1979

October 29 Jim Jarmusch Dead Man 1995 November 5 Pedro Almodóvar Talk to Her 2002

November 12 Charlie Kaufman Synecdoche, New York 2008 November 19 Wim Wenders Pina 2011

November 26 Baz Luhrmann The Great Gatsby 2013 The online PDF files of these handouts have color images

CONTACTS:

...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu …email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu

...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com ...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com

....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo

with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News

Delmer Daves and Peter Fonda, Sun Valley, 1976. Photo by BJ