Pair-Led Westerns
Kenneth E. Hall
Critical attention has been paid to numerous stars of Western films: John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Randolph Scott, Clint Eastwood, and many others. Less frequently highlighted is the importance of the pairing of actors in Westerns. These pairs include Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy, John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, and James Garner and Sidney Poitier. In some cases the pairs are allies, and in others they are adversaries. Thus not every case to be presented here falls into the “buddy film” category. Of more importance is the meld of two acting styles and personalities, as well as actor filmographies, in the formation of the films under consideration. Although the pairing of Lancaster and Douglas in Westerns (and in another genre, the thriller) is most often cited, other teamings are at least equally significant, like Stewart and Kennedy.
The most familiar paired casting of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas was the John Sturges version of the Earp-Clanton confrontation, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1956). The two were also cast, most notably, in the John Frankenheimer political thriller Seven Days in May (1963), in which they were not allies but, at least from the perspective of Colonel Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas), reluctant adversaries. The Sturges film initiated the team part of their respective careers, and the pairing became part of the background of the Hollywood scene from the period. The supposed symbiosis between the two was perhaps overstated, as Lancaster biographer Kate Buford comments regarding the offscreen contacts between the two actors: “When their children were young the two families got together quite often socially, but the myth of a great personal affinity maintained over decades was largely a creation of Douglas and the Hollywood publicity machine” (Buford 165–66). Regardless of the exaggerations about their offscreen friendship, the two did achieve effective performances when paired onscreen, os that evaluation of their excellent screen teaming in Seven Days in May is unavoidably influenced by the success of their work on the earlier Sturges Western.i
The first film in which both actors appeared was I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1947), essentially a crime film with some noir trappings. Douglas plays Noll “Dink” Turner, a bar owner who has become “legitimate” at least to appearances after having betrayed his friend and bootlegging partner Frankie Madison (Burt Lancaster) fourteen years previously. Released from prison, Frankie has returned to claim his promised half of the business, only to learn that Noll has expanded and renamed the bar so that Frankie’s claim amounts to about $2900.00. Since Frankie continues to cause trouble, Noll tries to eliminate him and events spiral out of control. Eventually Noll is killed by the police and Frankie leaves with Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott), former paramour of Noll, to start a new life away from his criminal past. Here Douglas plays a role similar to his later (and better) appearance in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), and Lancaster is the young, brash, not too smart character of his early films.
By the time they made Gunfight at the O. K. Corral (1956), both actors had a considerable resumé and their screen images had hardened. Although Lancaster could act in several modes, he had acquired the mask of hard-nosed authority which can be seen later (to negative effect) in Seven Days in May, while Douglas had acquired, or perfected, a mercurial quirkiness on screen which he used to great effect as Doc Holliday. Simon Petch comments on Lancaster’s work in Gunfight at the O. K. Corral, highlighting the moral seriousness of the performance as well as its ambivalence: “Burt Lancaster plays Wyatt Earp as a conscientious officer of the law, subtly aware that this status, symbolised by his gun and his badge, alienates him from the community he serves” (Petch 94).ii
The stolidity and uprightness of the Lancaster Earp contrast with the negativity and fatalism displayed in Kirk Douglas’s interpretation of Doc Holliday.iii Although Douglas’s muscular physique does not convey the tubercular emaciation so prominent in what may be the most accurate screen portrayal of the dentist, by Dennis Quaid in Wyatt Earp (Lawrence Kasdan, 1994), Douglas effectively conveys the world-weariness and bitterness of the character. With a mercurial savagery which perhaps only Kirk Douglas could achieve, Holliday fills the screen as a counterpoint to Earp:
The real relationship of the film [Gunfight at the O. K. Corral] is that between Wyatt and Doc.iv They exist at stylistic poles. Wyatt is all simple integrity, slow and deliberate in his movements, dressed plainly; Doc is all urban corruption, flashily attired, quirky and often manic in his movements, frequently drunk, and subject to outbursts of coughing or violence. (Luhr 28)
Other teamings featuring one of the two actors elicit varied aspects of their respective screen presences. When paired with an actor whose role is more serious or intense, both actors could open up their performances to display comic, heroic, or ironically villainous aspects. Douglas did this when teamed with John Wayne in the adventure yarn The War Wagon (Burt Kennedy, 1967). A false sense of menace is established early in the film, as Lomax (Douglas) seems determined to kill Taw Jackson (Wayne) for an old grievance. Soon enough this determination becomes less and less menacing, as Lomax postpones his vengeance several times, even saving Taw’s life on the pretext that Taw will pay him for not killing him. Both men ally themselves with a crew of capable misfits in a scheme to rob the War Wagon, an armored transport carrying gold for Frank Pierce (Bruce Cabot), the man who stole Taw’s ranch. The comic-adventure proceedings allow Douglas to indulge in mock outrage and to make frightening threats in his patented energetic, scene-stealing manner. The style adopted by Douglas descends from his exuberant work for Hawks and King Vidor in The Big Sky (1952) and Man without a Star (1955). Wayne settles into his late-career style which grew especially from his appearance for Hawks in Rio Bravo (1959).
During his long career in Hollywood, John Wayne teamed with numerous actors. After he began to receive top billing, he was most notably paired with Walter Brennan, Robert Mitchum, William Holden, James Stewart, and Jeffrey Hunter, although the supporting cast for a number of his films included Ward Bond, Bruce Cabot, and Ben Johnson.
Among Wayne’s best-remembered films are Rio Bravo (1959) and its first remake, El Dorado (1966), both directed by Howard Hawks. In the first film, Wayne, as Sheriff John T. Chance, is teamed with Dean Martin, Walter Brennan, and Ricky Nelson as defenders of law and order in the town of Rio Bravo, whose stability is menaced by a rancher named Nathan Burdette (John Russell). While Martin and Nelson turn in creditable performances (particularly Martin), Brennan (“the loyal but enfeebled sidekick” [Haskell 39]) nearly steals the show from Wayne as the crusty and voluble Stumpy, whose job is to maintain the jail premises. The Wayne-Brennan relationship not only recalls their more dramatic pairing (because less comic) in Hawks’s Red River (1948) but also the repeated pairings, on less equal footing, between Wayne and Victor McLaglen, who made a career playing Irishmen in films directed by John Ford (for the Westerns with Ford, see Morgan).
The first remake of Rio Bravo inserts Robert Mitchum into the Dean Martin role and features James Caan and Arthur Hunnicutt in the Nelson and Brennan roles. As Molly Haskell comments, “The later westerns of RIO BRAVO trilogy—EL DORADO (1967) and RIO LOBO (19 70)—show Wayne aging and edging toward the periphery of the action” (Haskell 39). Despite some diminishing of his energies, represented in El Dorado by a gunshot wound which causes episodes of crippling pain, the Wayne character Cole Thornton is dynamically teamed with Sheriff J. P. Harrah, played with great verve by the inimitable Robert Mitchum. Following Hawks’s direction, Mitchum changed his method of playing Harrah from the angst-ridden style employed by Martin as Dude “to a broad comic style, mugging and doing pratfalls that had cast and crew in stitches” (Server 396).v
The paired billing of Wayne with William Holden in The Horse Soldiers (1959) and with James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) displays a similarity of professional conflict. In both cases, a man of action (a cavalryman, a rancher) is placed into a tense relationship with a man of peaceful profession—a doctor, a lawyer. In keeping with Ford’s general tendency to achieve a resolution, however troubled, between the opposing poles he has established, both pairs of men come to an understanding of each other’s value.
William Holden is nicely cast as the Union surgeon Maj. Henry Kendall in The Horse Soldiers, a fictionalized account of Col. Benjamin Grierson’s celebrated 1863 raid through Mississippi.vi Assigned to the raid led by Col. John Marlowe (John Wayne), Kendall receives a very unfriendly welcome from Marlowe, who has a longstanding hatred of doctors. Eventually the viewer learns that this hatred stems from the failure of doctors to save his wife from a suspected malignant tumor. Kendall spends much of the film (and the raid) trying not only to do his job but also to educate the Colonel and his troops concerning the value of his profession. Holden brings to his role as Kendall his experience in playing outsider characters and his stubbornly ironic demeanor, qualities perhaps best displayed in his terrific, Oscar-winning performance as the cynical Sgt. Sefton in Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, 1953). Suspected by his fellow prisoners of informing on them about escape attempts to gain favor and rewards from the Germans, Sefton is shunned by his fellows and adopts a cooly defiant posture which hides his actual interest in finding the real informer. Although the situation is quite different in the Ford film, Kendall’s demeanor towards the suspicious and dismissive Colonel Marlowe seems to owe more than a little to his role for Wilder. So two strong personalities clash in the story of a raid in which all must cooperate if the enterprise is to succeed. In the end it does, and Marlowe and Kendall have come to respect, perhaps even to like each other. Kendall displays not only dedication to his profession but considerable courage, given the state of Civil War prison camps, in remaining behind to treat wounded soldiers—Union and Confederate—while Marlowe and the troop make their escape from the pursuing Confederates.
The personality clash in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is more complex and ambiguous, befitting the ambivalent nature of the narrative in one of Ford’s most important films. Although nominally on the same side in the battle between civilization and savagery, Tom Doniphon the rancher (Wayne) and Ransom Stoddard the lawyer (Stewart) are in fact on two sides at once, or at least Doniphon is, since he shares a kinship with the savage Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). As Yawn and Beatty note, “a parallel between Valance and Doniphon” exists: “Both men are frontiersmen, and, accordingly, they live by the basic rule of frontier life: ‘Out here [says Doniphon to Stoddard] a man settles his own problems’” (Yawn and Beatty 11).vii Thus in the film, from the perspective of the cast, Wayne and Stewart are paired, but so are Wayne and Marvin, as well as Marvin and Stewart. Or one might say that Valance is the pivot point between Doniphon and Stoddard. Such complexity of role reflects the ambivalence of the film, in which “civilization” is not an unalloyed benefit:
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the ascendancy of civilization is achieved, but at a prohibitive cost. Civilization (metaphorically) kills Tom Doniphon and, with it, kills the spirit of the West. (Yawn, et al. 14)
So the multivalent nexus between Doniphon, Valance, and Stoddard produces a multidimensional image of acting styles. Wayne’s patented slow-walked self-assuredness and bemused reaction to apparent stupidity confronts Marvin’s aggressive, mugging viciousness and Stewart’s not so innocent defensiveness to create a rich picture of the characters portrayed by these three accomplished actors.viii
The long career of James Stewart shifted after World War II from his earlier image as “Boyish, ingratiating, endearing” (Horton, “Mann and Stewart” 40) to a more complex image weathered by the war (he served with distinction, reaching the rank of brigadier general). Two directors contributed strongly to the shift: Alfred Hitchcock, starring the actor in important works including Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958); and Anthony Mann in a series of Westerns “now acknowledged as a turning point in the development of the Hollywood Western genre” (Miller and Mules 1). Two of these Westerns featured the pairing of Stewart and Arthur Kennedy: Bend of the River (1952) and The Man from Laramie (1955). Robert Horton states that “It took Anthony Mann to isolate the driven, sour loner glimpsed in George Bailey [the Stewart character in It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)]” (Horton, “Mann and Stewart” 40). ix Although less famous than the acclaimed Stewart, Arthur Kennedy was a fine actor with an impressive list of credits, and in the Mann Westerns he shone as an enigmatic, troubled character. As Horton notes, “he always found a way to make cynicism poignant” (Horton, “Mann and Stewart” 46).
The pairing is less complex in Bend of the River than in The Man from Laramie, principally because the latter film weaves several strands of family, romantic, and psychological nuance into the relationship between the Stewart and Kennedy characters.x In Bend of the River, Cole (Kennedy) is clearly presented as the “evil self” of Glyn (Stewart) (Miller, et al. 10). The two men have a similar background, as Civil War “border raiders”—on the Missouri border, whether Confederate or Yankee is not clear—and, as we discover, both have survived lynchings (for a summary of these identifiers, see Miller, et al. 9–10). In response to an interview question about the pairing of Stewart and Kennedy in The Man from Laramie, Mann elaborated on his casting approach:
I always try to construct my films on an opposition of characters. By stressing the things two characters have in common and then by having them come into conflict, the story becomes stronger and you get a greater intensity. The audience gets into the intrigue and becomes more involved in what you want to show them. (Missiaen 18)
In both films, the Stewart and Kennedy characters display common features, but in Bend of the River they are so similar as to be virtual mirror-images. Although both have a disreputable and even criminal past, only Glyn grows morally to the point of facing that past and asking to be forgiven for it through his help for the settlers when Cole betrays them. The authority or father figure to whom he finally appeals, successfully, is Jeremy Baile (Jay C. Flippen), the leader of the homesteader families who want to set up a “New World” for themselves.xi
In The Man from Laramie, the Stewart-Kennedy mirroring is complicated by the presence of a thoroughly objectionable character, Dave (Alex Nicol), the hopelessly spoiled son of ranch owner Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp). While Will Lockhart (Stewart) and Vic Hansbro (Kennedy) share both positive and negative qualities,xii Dave has been invested with such negativity as to form an evil shadow of both Will and Vic, a vindictive, self-centered, and unrestrained imago that must be destroyed before Will and Vic can embark upon their final reckoning. Similar triangular relationships between the male leads operate in the Mann-Stewart collaborations The Far Country and The Naked Spur.
A triangle of male personalities also undergirds the narrative in Blood on the Moon (Robert Wise, 1948). In this film the dynamics differ from the Mann narratives, because the paired lead characters, Jim Garry (Robert Mitchum) and Tate Riling (Robert Preston), though still mirror-images, are balanced by a third important male character who does not display the viciousness and depravity of a character like Dave Waggoman. This character is Kris Barden (Walter Brennan), who in turn is balanced by ranch owner John Lufton (Tom Tully)—both are father-figures with considerable attractive qualities. As in Bend of the River, Jim and Tate once ran together presumably on the wrong side of the law, but Jim has decided to leave that past behind. The relationship between Jim and Tate is more starkly drawn than in the Mann film, as Tate openly tries to coerce Jim into joining his illegal scheme.
As in the Mann films, the lead characters are played by actors with a strong screen presence: Robert Mitchum and Robert Preston. The supporting cast is also strong: Walter Brennan, Tom Tully, Barbara Bel Geddes, and Phyllis Thaxter. The contrast between the Mitchum and the Preston screen personas is instructive, in fact, ironic given the narrative of the film. Jim, Mitchum’s character, at times seems aloof, wearily detached, and even somewhat passive, as befits Mitchum’s well-known screen pose of indifference and casual disregard of events. Robert Preston’s character Tate appears to fit in well enough, at least in the first parts of the film, with the rather earnest, neighborly, straightforward, backslapping persona often adopted by Preston on screen. Both surfaces belie the truth of events and of the men’s reaction to or instigation of them.
One clear example of Jim Garry’s seeming indifference to reversals of fortune occurs in the first scenes of the film, when he loses much of his gear and his horse due to a small stampede. Despite his disgust, he seems almost to shrug off the incident as just another roll of the dice, or at least to play his cards close to the vest, soon taking some assistance and temporary shelter from John Lufton, owner of the cattle. Not a voluble personality like Tate (fitting of course both the screen images of both actors), he is closemouthed and even somewhat petulant when interrogated by Lufton as to his reason for riding through the area. As the narrative progresses, the conflict between rancher Lufton and the homesteaders, including Kris Barden and led—actually manipulated—by Tate is sharpened into a personal confrontation between Tate and Jim. Tate had summoned Jim to help with the homesteaders’ fight against Lufton, but Tate had not revealed to Jim the true goal of his aid to the homesteaders. Tate has made a deal with a corrupt Indian agent to force Lufton into selling his cattle in order to share in the profits. After Jim learns the truth, he tells Tate dismissively that “I’ve seen dogs wouldn’t claim you for a son, Tate.” Mitchum’s offhand manner makes the insult even more galling, and a violent fight ensues. Eventually all is resolved with the death of Tate, the arrest of the Indian agent, and the reconciliation of the warring parties as well as the personal reconciliation of Jim with the Luftons.
This Western, filmed early in Mitchum’s career, demonstrates (as will El Dorado) the importance of teaming him with a strong actor like Preston or Wayne because of the tendency of the deceptively standoffish and casual Mitchum to dominate the performances of other cast members. A positive illustration of this fact in another genre is the felicitous pairing of Mitchum with the fine German actor Curt Jurgens in The Enemy Below (Dick Powell, 1957) (Powell).xiii The two enemies find common cause in their dedication to duty and their desire for the war, with its costly losses, to end.
Like any war, undeclared or not, the Indian wars of the nineteenth century were costly and dispiriting, especially to the tribes who were dispossessed of their lands and who lost many members in the scattered conflicts with the whites. As was the case with many films in the 1960s, Duel at Diablo (Ralph Nelson, 1966) cast a skeptical eye at the motives for armed conflicts, focusing especially on the topic of racism and miscegenation. In this case the paired actors are James Garner and Sidney Poitier, both of whom have often played quirky characters, sometimes in supporting rather than lead roles. As in Hour of the Gun (John Sturges, 1967), in which he played a hard-bitten, ruthless Wyatt Earp, Garner was cast against type, with his usual bonhomie (exemplified in his starring roles in the television series Maverick and The Rockford Files) replaced by a tough, saddle-weary demeanor. Sidney Poitier, who had by the time of the film become an important African-American star, was cast as Tolley, a former Buffalo Soldier, now “a horse-wrangler” contracted by the military (Mask 199–200).
Racial prejudice is a prominent feature of the film, but it concerns Anglo-Native American relations rather than a focus on African-Americans. Poitier fit in quite well with the lack of overt emphasis on his race, as Arthur Knight observes:
. . . in contrast to his African American predecessors and peers but again more like his white peers, Poitier played [in the 1960s] a variety of roles, including several, most pointedly in The Bedford Incident, A [The] Slender Thread, and Duel at Diablo, in which race went unmentioned and unnoticed [except as noted above regarding Native Americans] in the worlds represented in the films. And most often Poitier’s characters inhabit worlds presented as ordinarily (though not unproblematically) multiracial, rather than as all-black, which had been the commonplace Hollywood framework for previous potential black stars. (Knight 164)
So in this rather unusual Western the white and the black stars line up to defend a white woman, Ellen Grange (Bibi Andersson) against both the racism of her husband Willard (Dennis Weaver), who blames her for staying with the Indians and, as it turns out, for having a child by one of them, and the cruelty and violence of the child’s father. The wife and child are freed at the end of the film from such threats, the surviving Tolley and Jess Remsberg (Garner), unlike some of the paired roles discussed here, having cooperated to resolve the difficulties.
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Endnotes
i At least one critic expresses doubt as to the efficacy of their team efforts. (Cicero 151–52) Philip Kemp remarks of Lancaster: “And the teaming for which he’s best remembered—with Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O. K. Corral (1956), Seven Days in May . . . and several more—though entertaining and generally good box office, produced some of his least interesting work. . . . Lancaster and Douglas are too similar as actors (all those teeth) to strike more than superficial sparks” (Kemp 38). Simon Petch notes humorously of Gunfight at the O. K. Corral that “I once saw the film billed, at a revival house in Oxford, as an ‘All-Tooth Performance’” (Petch 101).
ii Lancaster displays a similar set of qualities, with somewhat more bonhomie, in the Robert Wise submarine drama Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), in which he engages in a conflict of command with his superior, played by Clark Gable. For Gable, see Bret.
iii For a judicious summary of the Holliday persona in history and in film legend, see Petch 100–01.
iv Simon Petch observes that . . . the Holliday-Earp friendship was mythologised well before Hollywood got to it. Bat Masterson, who knew both men in Dodge City, said: “Damon did not more than Pythias than Holliday did for Wyatt Earp” [Masterson 6]. (Petch 100) - The story of the two loyal friends is related by Cicero in his De Officiis, translated as On Moral Obligation (Cicero 151–52) (Cicero reference cited in The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica).
v Server provides an amusing and informative account of the making of the film (393–401).
vi For the historical raid, see Dinges. Neil Longley York discusses the historical raid and its image in “popular memory,” including the Ford film. See also my article, “Commandos on the Frontier.”
vii
In her perceptive article on
“the outlaw-knight,” Cynthia Nazarian establishes a more
detailed comparison:
Doniphon and Valance both exhibit the
central characteristics of the medieval knight: they are armed and
appear mounted on horseback, both follow a specific code of violence
and justice, they have servants/followers and wealth, and both hold
the power of life and death over others around them. Doniphon
further acts as a protector of the weak in his initial encounter
with Ransom Stoddard, and his service to his lady, Hallie, embodies
courtly service. (Nazarian 230n18) - Within their chivalric
profession, “They are thanes, knights—feudal (Doniphon, who owns
a small ranch) vs. errant (Liberty Valance, who lives ‘where I
hang my hat’)” (Nazarian 217).
viii Wayne did not merely “play himself” (as if that were an easy thing to do onscreen). He worked hard at his craft, as Robert Horton explains, noting that “. . . Wayne sought out advice about acting and applied it with the diligence of a monk” (Horton, “John Wayne: The Acting Craft” 59). According to Wayne, “his affects—the rolling gait, the stop-start vocal rhythms, the eyebrows jumping up in surprise . . . —were carefully developed” (Horton, “John Wayne: The Acting Craft” 59).
ix Mann commented about Stewart’s intensity: “Within himself he has something much more burning and exciting than when you meet him personally” (Wicking and Pattison 49). Asked by interviewer Paul Lindenschmid about the “tough” characters Stewart played for Mann, Stewart responded that he saw characters like Lin McLintock in Winchester ‘73 as “vulnerable” (Stewart).
x For the Western hero in Mann’s films, see Pye.
xi For the New World reference, see Miller, et al. 5.
xii Pye observes that . . . the villain can become a projection of forces within but repressed by the hero. Central relationships in Mann’s films seem recurrently of this kind, a second man created as a more or less clear version of the hero, linked by blood and/or background . . . and sometimes given parallels in personality—the relaxed and humorous as well as ruthless and violent aspects of the hero’s character (Bend of the River, The Far Country, The Man from Laramie . . . (Pye 170) Will and Vic fit this classification, but the added presence of the vicious Dave sets up a triangular structure not as apparent in some of Mann’s other films.
xiii The contest between the two strong-willed, courageous, and ethical submarine commanders may have inspired the excellent Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror,” in which the Enterprise engages in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with a Romulan ship (McEveety). Richard C. Keenan compares the Powell film with the Robert Wise film Run Silent, Run Deep in his study of Wise’s films (Keenan 92–95). Keenan briefly discusses Blood on the Moon (38–41).
