Western Union (1941)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 4:3 | Cover | 01:31:24 | 6,90 Gb
Audio: English, French - AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps (each) | Subs: French
Genre: Western
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | PAL 4:3 | Cover | 01:31:24 | 6,90 Gb
Audio: English, French - AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps (each) | Subs: French
Genre: Western
Director: Fritz Lang
Stars: Robert Young, Randolph Scott, Dean Jagger
Vance Shaw gives up outlawing and goes to work for the telegraph company; his brother Jack Slade leads outlaws trying to prevent the company connecting the line between Omaha and Salt Lake City. Lots of Indian fighting and gunplay.
Although I consider Fritz Lang a great master of cinema, I know that, like other masters, he had difficulties doing what he wanted to do in Hollywood (after spurning the offer to head movie production in Germany when the Nazis came to power). Although Lang's German movies were not all that expressionist, Lang's films about criminals (one in France, and many more in America) build on the expressionist heritage or use expressionist idioms.
Lang also directed three westerns. His first movie in color, "The Return of Frank James", I saw as a child on tv with commercials, and therefore cannot vouch for (though its color cinematography has been lauded by others). I am ambivalent about Rancho Notorious (1950), in part because the producers insisted on shooting it all in the studio, and in part because Lang and la Dietrich were at odds to such an extent that both just wanted to get her scenes over with. My expectations of a celebration of laying Western Union lines between Omaha and Salt Lake City, based on a novel by Zane Grey and starring Robert Young, were not high, making it easier to be pleasantly surprised by the quite entertaining 1941 movie that Lang directed.
Lang was fascinated with technology (consider the telephone switchboards in Blue Gardenia, not to mention most of "Metropolis") , and "the singing wire" was a major innovation for the American West ca. 1860-61, the time in which the movie was set. Indeed, characters discussing the departure of the convalescent advance man, Ed Creighton (Dean Jagger with hair!) do not believe there is such a thing, still less that it is coming their way.
Even more Langian is the fleeing bank robber, Vance Shaw (Randolph Scott), who saves Creighton at the start of the movie. The single most pervasive leitmotif in Fritz Lang's movies, going back to Destiny is struggling against Fate (usually unsuccessfully, but the struggle was the thing, the noble thing for Lang). Often this involved men who had committed crimes trying to "go straight." In this, Vance is in the company of Henry Fonda's Frank James and his Eddie Taylor in You Only Live Once, as well as characters in "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse," Liliom, and "Moonfleet" (and more, I'm sure, some female as Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat). Vance attempts to deserve the trust Creighton places in him, but is bedeviled by the gang of men with whom he grew up in Missouri — a gang claiming to be acting out of conviction, as guerrillas for the Confederacy against the Union's project of improving communication between east and west. War provides an excuse for the sadism and self-interest of Jack Slade (Barton MacLane) and Vance's other former partners in crime as for raiders who stayed closer to home in Ang Lee's sadly underappreciated Ride with the Devil).
The Confederate raiders get Sioux drunk and masquerade as Indian raiders. Vance and Creighton accept some depredations, but Jack Slade is determined to prevent the whole Western Union project and there has to be an ultimate confrontation (one that surprises many expectations built up in the genre).
Randolph Scott made a career (already underway before "Western Union") of playing strong, silent men trying unsuccessfully to avoid trouble, but rising to the occasion when push came to shove (especially in a series of 1950s westerns directed by Budd Boetticher, such as Comanche Station). These characters often appealed to the women thrown into the confrontations, in this case Sue Creighton (Virginia Gilmore, later Yul Brynner's wife), Ed's sister, a telegraph operator who is comically wooed by Vance and by the flamboyant easterner (Harvard graduate) Richard Blake, played with obvious delight by Robert Young—before he became the sage authority figure I grew up with in "Father Knows Best" and others grew up with when he was "Marcus Welby, M.D." As in "The Canterville Ghost" and "Three Comrades," Young played a brash young man unintimidated by anything, including what a wiser man would at least have paused before (unnecessarily) challenging.
While Randolph Scott's character is struggling against fate and his background of being part of a gang of thugs, Robert Young's is enjoying the challenges of trail-blazing. Eventually, Blake steps up to serious challenges and acquits himself well, but mixed in with the epic of new technology movie, the battling destiny movie, and the comic relief (which I haven't gotten to yet), there is also a romantic comedy rivalry movie (Scott and Young vying for Gilmore) that shows that Lang had a light touch (something of "the Lubitsch touch"? or fellow émigré Billy Wilder at his less sardonic? Randolph Scott had recently shown he could play in such a triangle with his offscreen room-mate Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in the screwball comedy "My Favorite Wife" the year before.
In addition to the romantic comedy, the 95 minutes of "Western Union" also includes some very broad (though not quite slapstick) comedy: indeed, a bit too much of it for my taste, including the drunken Indians, the electrified Indians, John Carradine in a rare comedy turn as the physician for the crew, and the cook (Slim Summerville) who does not want to be anywhere near danger, even for an extra dollar a day. Summerville and Carradine are funny, but to me "comic relief" does not take up such a large share of the proceedings. I also don't find drunkenness funny, Native American or other. Lang tried not to condescend to the Sioux, but did not entirely succeed. He did cast two real Native American chiefs. Moreover, the Sioux are portrayed as being considerably less savage than Jack Slade's gang, and Vance succeeds in maintaining peace with the Sioux, while failing to establish a workable détente with the Missouri raiders who pretend to be Indians preying on the telegraph project. And there is some recognition that the land through which Western Union wants to string telegraph wires belongs to the Native Americans (a perspective that was very rare in Hollywood movies made before 1950).
Still, there is a whole lot going on with several compelling dramas overlapping. There are serious issues of loyalty and the place of women along with the romantic comedy and the portrayal of a very competent technocrat (Jagger's Creighton) going about a complex and very difficult task.
Although the plains that are supposed to be just outside Omaha look like much further west (Utah, I think), the scenic locations were gorgeously photographed by Edward Cronjager (Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef) and Allen M. Davey (Cover Girl), cinematographers who, between them, were nominated for ten Oscars between 1940 and 1945, and were among the first masters of Technicolor. (Not enough of the movie was shot on location; there are some obvious back-projections, but I assume minimizing the location shooting was not Lang's choice.)
Rounding 4.5 up to 5 stars may deny the pleasure of being surprised by the many excellences on display in "Western Union." It is not perfect and I'd hesitate to classify it as "great," but it is very, very good, including in at least one way (light romantic comedy) that is particularly surprising in a Lang movie. Making masterpieces is what masters do, so I probably should not have been surprised that "Western Union" is a superbly crafted movie with some deadly serious themes, and having watched Arthur Kennedy in "Rancho Notorious" and Dana Andrews in some 1950s Lang movies, I should not have been surprised that he figure out how to use Robert Young in a western.
Special Features:
- Presentation by Patrick Brion (09:17, in French only)
- Photogallery
All Credits goes to Original uploader.
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