O. Henry's Full House

O. Henry's Full House (Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Henry King, Henry Koster, Jean Negulesco, 1952) One of those rare American experiments with an anthology movie, in the fashion of European films of the type, this one featuring five separate segments (each with its own writer-director team) fashioning films based on the work of one author, in this case, America's master of irony, O. Henry (and I suppose it's merely coincidence that three of the directors are named Henry), the psuedonym of William Sidney Porter, bank embezzler, writer of amusing stories dripping with irony and creator of "The Cisco Kid."

Because of the styles of the five directors, the episodes couldn't be more different from each other, veering from light comedy, farce, drama, and tragedy. Each director has a specific way of telling their tales, but the collection is introduced by John Steinbeck, the same year that he was to have published his "magnum opus," "East of Eden." Steinbeck's presence isn't really needed (and he confessed to being uncomfortable in front of the camera), but it does provide some bridging for the stories to come: 

The Cop and the Anthem (Henry Koster): it is the Holiday season and a vagrant named Soapy (Charles Laughton) has a scheme that he pulls off every Holiday: he will get himself arrested, and as a judge is unavailable to try him, he will take advantage of the hospitality of the local jail, where he will get three square meals a day for three months and even a Christmas dinner. His pal Horace (David Wayne) tries to convince him to use the Salvation Army, but Soapy refuses, but finds his efforts to get arrested thwarted. The segment also includes an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe, playing the most cinema-scrubbed of prostitutes.

The Clarion Call (Henry Hathaway): A thief, Johnny Kernan (Richard Widmark, in full, effusive tough-guy stance) kills during the robbery of a prominent man. An investigator of the scene, Barney Wood (Dale Robertson), finds a clue on the scene that he thinks belongs to his childhood friend Kernan, and he confronts Johnny, who tells him that he can't arrest him, as Wood still owes him $1000 from a card game. Wood can't possibly arrest him when he's in his debt. 

The Last Leaf (Jean Negulesco): Joanne Goodwin (Anne Baxter) has been dumped by her lover and, in her grief, she has walked a long evening in the snow, making her susceptible to pnuemonia. Her sister (Jean Peters) thinks that she has lost the will to live—her sister notices her staring out the window, at the tree outside of it. In her delirium, Joanne says she will die when the last leaf falls from the tree.he entreats a struggling artist (Gregory Ratoff) living upstairs to help by selling his paintings.

The Ransom of Red Chief (Howard Hawks): Two ne'er-do-well con-men (Oscar Levant and Fred Allen) kidnap the child (Lee Aaker) of a prominent man, only to find that the kid is more than they bargained for.

The Gift of the Magi (Henry King): O Henry's most popular—and most copied—short story. As Christmas approaches, a newly married, but poor, couple (Jeanne Crain and Farley Granger) struggle to come up with presents for each other.

It's interesting—the best director (Hawks) has the worst results. Possibly because Levant and Allen aren't the most compatible of comedy duo's, both men's personas is a bit more snide than the two hapless kidnappers are meant to be, so it feels like they're slightly hampered by the material required of them, and any sympathy one might feel for them feels wasted. Negulesco's is the most artful, but also the slightest. Laughton's segment is the most amusing, and the Widmark segment is charged by his over-the-top performance, not unlike his debut performance, the psychopathic killer Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death.

Like most anthologies, O Henry's Full House is a mixed bag, but interesting to see so many prominent actors and directors doing something a bit out of their usual realm.

Jesse James/The Return of Frank James

Jesse James (Henry King, 1939) Despite its popularity when it was first released,* and its subsequent help in gilding the legend of Jesse James—racist, Confederate guerilla, bushwhacker, bank and train-robber...and psychopath—if any movie deserves to be in the hypothetical Movie Hall of Shame, it might be this one. Nunnally Johnson's history of outlaws Jesse James and his brother, Frank, bankrolled somewhat hesitantly by Darryl F. Zanuck, is more full of holes than the Northfield, Minnesota First National Bank, painting them as Robin Hood-like heroes who only robbed banks and trains to avenge the murder of their Mother (Jane Darwell).

As if money had nothing to do with it.

In the film, the bank (represented by Brian Donlevy) is trying to move Mrs. Samuels** off her land for lease to the railroad, but she won't budge, leading the bank agents to remove her in the most subtle of ways, by fire-bombing her house (and yes) killing her—this after an altercation with Frank James (Henry Fonda), resulting in the brothers, Jesse (Tyrone Power) and Frank going on the lam. Once they hear of their mother's death, the two James boys (no other siblings are mentioned) seek revenge for their mother's murder by robbing the symbols that killed their Mother, the banks and the railroads.

Which, of course, isn't true. The truth is that she died at the age of 86 of a heart attack (on a train, ironically), and is credited with writing Jesse's epitaph (seemingly a very tough thing to do from beyond the grave) and, while alive, made a pretty good living giving tours of Jesse's birth-house to yokels who wanted to believe fiction rather than the ugly truth.

But, she dies in the movie, and that's what turns Frank and Jesse into thieves and terrorists, rather than as Confederate separatists who would disfigure Union sympathizers they came across. Why, the movie even gives them a "colored" friend named Pinkie (Ernest Whitman), when the truth is a bit less white-washed (Jesse was known to have black acquaintances—if they supported him with food, money, or a hastily acquired transportation). As William Wellman said of studio sabotage with his intended "warts-and-all" film of Buffalo Bill: "It made me want to vomit." That one, as well as the white-washed Custer picture They Died With Their Boots On (starring Errol Flynn), and Jesse James are three of the more artfully fictionalized legends of American history.

But, the idea was never to be "true" to the story of Jesse James, any more than the dime novels and subsequent museums and festivals in Missouri dedicated to his memory (and for taking a buck from the unsuspecting), are meant to be true. But "if the legend becomes fact, print the legend."***

But, it looks great in Technicolor (the version I saw, anyway), and Tyrone Power makes a photogenic Jesse—to the point where cinematographers George Barnes and W. Howard Greene give him the spotlight rather than ingenue Nancy Kelly (playing his wife "Zee"—no mention is made that they were cousins). Henry Fonda gets the best lines as older brother Frank

Jesse James is notable for one thing, historically: after this film, movies began to have the now-familiar credit "No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture" as audiences raised a hue and cry for one scene in particular in which a horse died after being pushed off a cliff, and movie filming began to be monitored by the American Humane Association.****

The Return of Frank James (Fritz Lang, 1940) With the death of Jesse in that first film, there couldn't really be a sequel but as it was 20th Century Fox's big hit in that year, one was rushed to production with Henry Fonda and most of the surviving cast returning for the story of Frank James coming out of hiding to find Robert Ford (Carradine, again), the man who shot his brother in the back in his own house. 

 

Frank has been living as a farmer—his occupation before the events of the first film that "inspired" his life of crime. But, when he hears that the cowardly Ford brothers are not being convicted of Jesse's murder (due to the influence of some powerful businessmen), Frank decides to take matters into his own hands. Things are further complicated when the James' farm hand Pinky is about to be hung for being an accomplice to the James gang.

With the son of a slain James gang member, Clem (Jackie Cooper), Frank starts to go after the Fords, all the while pitching the story that Frank is still dead and that he saw him slain with his own eyes (a story that is part of the legend of both Frank and Jesse). But the local newspaper (run by Henry Hull, who was also in the previous film) sends a reporter (Gene Tierney in her film debut) to interview "the man who saw Frank James die" and she becomes suspicious.

Where the first film's director Henry King keeps things bright and in focus to keep the Technicolor popping in the original Jesse James, the director of The Return of Frank James is the German ex-patriate Fritz Lang, as unlikely a director for a Western yarn given his dark, fantastical films in his own country (M, Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse). But one immediately sees a change of tone between the two films despite the same level of flim-flummery in the script. If Lang couldn't do anything about the story, he did at least bring a more practiced eye to Return with an expressive use of shadows, which was just as impressive in Technicolor as it was in his black and white films.

Lang's direction and the presences of Fonda and Tierney make Return the better of the two films, as popular as the first was. And one might argue that a movie true to history is rarer than hen's teeth. Beyond the ones mentioned, there's Braveheart and Gladiator, Pearl Harbor and Shakespeare in Love, Amadeus and Krakatoa, East of Java (it was west of it, actually).  In fact, the history of history in movies is filled with the facts of lies as frequently as thunder is placed simultaneously with lightning and why viewing any movie, even one "based on actual events," should be served with popcorn generously dashed with grains of salt.

Jesse James and Frank James

* In 1939, one could argue the movies' "best" year, it was the fourth highest grossing film after (get this) Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Fifth, by the way, was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

** Her real name was Zerelda Elizabeth Cole James Simms Samuel.  No "s." They couldn't even get that right.

*** A line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (said by a newspaperman) and could be said to be John Ford's mantra for the history portion of his early career. In his later career, legend became less of a concern than casting aside myth. 

**** That footage was re-used in the sequel and the 1957 Nicholas Ray film The True Story of Jesse James.

The Gunfighter

The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950) Westerns started to take a slight bend in the trail with this one, an original story by Andre de Toth and William Bower* (it was offered to John Wayne, who wanted to play it, but was offered too little salary for it to accept, so the screenwriters shopped it to Darryl F. Zanuck, who snapped it up for 20th Century Fox). Instead of big skies and empty plains and Indian fights, The Gunfighter explored the concept of being the storied "fastest gun in the West." Being quick on the draw is good and all, but the downside is you have to keep proving it. That's the problem with being king of the hill—there's nowhere to go but down.

For gunfighter Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck), every shot that kills has to be justified, witnesses verified, and, unfortunately, every town has the opportunity for killing, as his reputation unfailingly precedes him through any swinging saloon door, and inside, there's some punk full of himself and whatever swill the barman serves who thinks he's tough because he can shoot a bottle off a fence. Every town has one...until Ringo comes to town. 

Jimmy Ringo has a way of ridding the town of morons. Whatever benefit to the town's gene pool Ringo provides doesn't settle with him, though. He has to remember the faces of the idiots he kills. He carries the stigma of being a man to avoid, as he does the reputation of being "the fastest gun..."

So he keeps riding, because if he stays in place too long, trouble will catch up to him, or challenge him, only to wind up dead on the floor. To the onlookers, it's self-defense and that's how Ringo has to play it, but it happens with such regularity, he knows even if he had no choice, he's the one to blame.

Any lawman doesn't like him in their town, even the ones like Marshall Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell, a favorite character actor) who have history with him, may even like him, but know that his very presence will invite trouble and upset the peaceful status quo they're trying to maintain. So, Ringo is just as likely to be greeted with "When ya leavin'?" as a "Hello," or a hand going for its holster, opposed to a handshake.

Ringo arrives at Strett's town of Cayenne, fresh from killing another dumb kid (Richard Jaeckel) who wouldn't let it be, and several lengths ahead of the kid's three brothers who want revenge for the idiot's death. Ringo disarms them and sends their horses fleeing, in the hopes they might be discouraged from following him the rest of the way, but they're so hell-bent, they follow him on foot, and he arrives at the Cayenne saloon, thirsty, hungry and bone-tired, while the bar-keep (Karl Malden) goes out of his way to make the celebrity comfortable, while a regular goes to get the Marshall. Their meeting is cordial but serious and Strett discourages Ringo from setting in place too long. But, Ringo won't leave until he takes one more chance that might end the running—he wants to see the town's teacher, Peggy Walsh (Helen Westcott), who's gone into hiding and changed her name to avoid being found out by the man from her past—him. And, most of all, she doesn't want Ringo to meet her son—his son—who has skipped school with the other boys to hang around downtown for a glimpse of the fastest gun in the west.

The Gunfighter is probably more influential than some might think—in two short years, High Noon would be released, another Western involving the enclosed fishbowl of a small Western town and the pressure of time. There were no cattle stampedes or Indian attacks or runaway stagecoaches, just a man at war with himself by being at war with others. It might be a great thing to be "the fastest gun" but that accomplishment has a quick shelf-life before things turn sour and the acclaim rings hollow, especially as time progresses—as far as one knows there's only one way to not be "the fastest gun" and that's by being the second fastest.  

And those men are usually dead.

But, if Ringo can convince his wife and kid that he's changed his ways and that he's ready to settle now...well, that just might be a way out of it, too. But, she's reluctant...and those three brothers are on the way.

It's not the wide open spaces that set the stage for The Gunfighter, it's the closed interiors of the psyche and the self. Instead of focusing on the spectacle of building a Nation, it's about the painful process of deconstructing, not about the road ahead, but the one already traveled. It ushered in a decade of films re-appraising the Western and how changing a country can change the ones doing the changing.

* Once it got to Fox and Zanuck, three other writers worked on the screenplay—William Sellers, Nunnally Johnson, and...Roger Corman (yeah, that Roger Corman).