Delmer Daves and his westerns

It’s a curious experience - seeing Drumbeat again after a lifetime - and it’s reassuring to find it still recognisable as one of the films that then made going to the movies the most enjoyable part of my life, even if it still doesn't quite go the distance to make it great. 

When I watched this on its first run, I was already on Delmer Daves' case. I’d admired his 1947 Dark Passage and 1950 Broken Arrow, totally different but among the most distinctive work of their day and found a few of his sharp scripts spread through TV viewing - The Petrified Forest, Unexpected Uncle, Professor Beware. This one was a return to form after his uneasy shift from Warners to Zanuck’s Fox. 

Daves would go on to continue his string of superior  westerns and I’d get to meet him in London, when he introduced a screening of The Three Ten To Yuma at the London School of Film Technique. Like all their visiting firemen, he looked round the room at the forty wannabe (mainly Afro Asian) faces at the show and identified, saying he wished he could find a way to help them on their way. Unlike the others, he then had a flash of inspiration and suggested anyone interested should call him at the studio and they could come out and watch him shooting The Battle of Villa Fiorita. He got one taker...

  Delmer Daves

I got to travel on the channel ferry on the way out with him and the way back with Oswald Morris. I saw them have six handlers manipulate a ton of Panavision camera in place to get the shunting locomotive Del saw in the middle distance building up steam, in the time it took to cover the twenty yards between there and our position. I still rate that as one of  my all time best days.

I borrowed Daves' own Sixteen Millimeter copies of  his Warner films, that had been used in a Paris Cinematheque retrospective. Christopher Wicking (later to write Absolute Beginners) was getting married the same day as my screening and wanted to postpone the ceremony so he could come but his wife had already invited her relatives ... now I am getting nostalgic. 

To get back to Drumbeat, this was considered a milestone movie because Alan Ladd had made it initiating his own Jaguar Productions, using Warners personnel and handing it to them for distribution. Ladd and Daves had co-produced the film. There was much wailing about stars taking over productions and disrupting the business model. This had of course been happening for some time, notably on the westerns with Randolph Scott and James Stewart working with with Anthony Mann.

As it turned out, Daves cherished the time he had spent living with the Indians as a young man. Drumbeat was the point where he embraced the cycle of fifties A feature westerns, which was one of the major incentives to watch the movies of the day. It came as a disappointment to me to find that he, Anthony Mann and John Sturges hadn’t formed a little club of co-conspirators. Their contact had been casual.  “A few good lunches” Mann observed. They weren’t like the later Sergios - Leone, Corbucci and Solima bonding in their time as assistants.

At Fox, Zanuck’s new recruits, like Daves, Richard Sale and Robert Wise, discovered that he earmarked all his big pictures for the veterans he had been working with since the thirties. Del used to get tongue tied going into Henry King’s office and facing a photo of Lillian Gish in The White Sister. Him directing Broken Arrow had been a lucky accident. Zanuck ran it up for John Ford, who said “I’m going to take out all that love crap.”  Zanuck came back “I like all that love crap. I’ll give it to Del.” In some measure, we owe one of the all time most enjoyable cycles of films to his producer pulling a stroppy director back into line.

Drumbeat was still early in the days of the anamorphic pro -cess and a full screen title proclaims “Cinemascope” followed by “Warnercolor”, which was actually the old Agfacolor patents seized as war reparations to produce Eastmancolor and handled by the Warner house laboratory. Drumbeat was one of the films that took full advantage of the then new combination and is full of the great western panoramas that the cycle featured, here filmed by ex De Mille cameraman Pev Marley.

Opening titles proclaim that the events and people shown are actual and only part fictionalised for dramatic effect. The Modoc wars and Indian Fighter Johnny MacKay did exist. Canby, here played by Warner Anderson, was the war’s only Serving General to be killed in action. A close examination of the film reveals that the story has been twisted out of conventional shape to accommodate the facts.

Drumbeat - Anthony Caruso, Marisa Pavan, Richard Gaines, Warner Anderson, Ladd and Frank Ferguson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We don’t hear about the treaty placing the Modocs in the same space as traditional enemies and their progressive dispossession. That’s another picture.

Drumbeat - Charles Bronson

We kick off with Ladd’s MacKay presenting himself to sentry James Griffiths at the White House gates to see President Grant and told to stroll right in and announce himself, another detail lifted from the historical record. Hayden Rorke’s Grant wants Indian Wars veteran
MacKay to take over the Peace Process, something that Makay is allowed to appear ambivalent about, his family having been massacred by Indians. His background is in killing Indians but he knows personally some of the Modoc leaders, especially bloodthirsty Captain Jack, in which character we find a young, virile Charles Bronson, emerged from his bit parts under his real name, Charles Buchinsky, in the movies where he accused Andre De Toth of having hired him for his muscular build and needing to be constantly re-assured that he was there because of his acting skills - a pattern that would persist through Bronson’s career.

The stage coach trip west gives us a better look at Grant family friend, winning young Audrey Dalton, who gets a nice scene, in which we can hear Daves, where she outlines her ambition to be a frontier woman. This runs to an Indian attack setting us up for the exposition proper where the tribal Modocs walk the same desert town streets as the settlers, in front of Elisha Cook’s General Store, with it’s telegraph wire connection. Then star-prospect Peter Hansen has his bit where, as the only bachelor officer at the post, he wants Ladd to convey his interest to Dalton.

All this is played in width-of-screen panoramas, where the makers are showing their awareness of the new image dimensions. The sentry braves firing rifles from the bluff peaks to signal the arrival of Ladd’s parlay group and the newcomers breaking out of the circle of whooping hostiles to complete their mission, are particularly nice. Victor Young is in best form, his score telling us what we should think about the on screen action.

Rapidly we become aware of an approach that wouldn’t fly with today’s ethnic sensibilities. The Indians are murdering savages who have broken the treaty that gave them money and new lands better than the ones they were occupying. The settlers are faintly racist land grabbers and full on antagonistic over Indian attacks. In the rising, even the ones that were on meal sharing terms with the Indians are wiped off. Rather than the familiar white renegade outrage that provokes Indian violence in The Covered Wagon or Canyon Passage, it’s Bronson coveting the soldiers’ medals. The nearest we are going to get to this again is Robert Mulligan’s late cycle 1968 The Stalking Moon, where they go into some detail on why Gregory Peck has got to do what a man’s got to do. Of course there is a white profiteer with a good line in selling Winchesters to the hostiles and the “Good Indians” represented touchingly by Anthony Caruso and Marisa Pavan.

The redskins are an impressive line up of make up tanned Latins in this film. The only authentic Native American in sight is Bronson, who had Modoc blood, and Daves gets him under the skin of Captain Jack, where impressively we sympathise though he’s the movie’s bad guy. This was the film where I began to watch Bronson seriously.

Ladd, who was the moving force behind the film, is out acted on all sides. His romantic passages with Dalton are dead weight. He was a better 1947 Whispering Smith or Jim Bowie in Gordon Douglas’ 1952 The Iron Mistress and of course he was coming off Shane. This one does have it’s smart scenes like the preacher, the military and the negotiators confronting the fact that they will probably be killed in the false faith parlay that they can’t see any way to avoid.

Well, enough with all this scene setting. It’s time to get on with the business of the film with the Indians taking down those waves of blue belly cavalry kicking up dust in the sun against the red rock ranges. The action is rousingly staged on a large scale.

The film’s failure is, and always was, its inability to follow the scenes of wheeling lines of skirmishers repelled trying to take the pueblo fortress in the mountain with a hundred caves that lead to the center of the earth. The victory by attrition is rushed. Ladd (who appears to be doing his own stunts) going mano a mano with Bronson rolling down the white water cascade is pretty good (it’s the bit I remembered most clearly) but it’s an anti climax after those. 

Drumbeat is still good viewing and a marker in the parade of superior entertainment this cycle of westerns represents.

There’s again more. Del Daves loved making his westerns (Three Ten to Yuma, Cowboy, Jubal, The Hanging Tree, even The Badlanders that brought him and a fading Alan Ladd back together) and quite a few of us career movie-goers of the day loved watching them. However Jack Warner, his old boss, called him to say he was in a bind. He’d paid out a million dollars for the rights on Sloan Wilson’s best seller “A Summer Place” and a succession of writers including Wilson himself had failed to reduce it to a workable script. He appealed to Del, who delivered something suitably filmable. Warner decided that it was logical that Del should direct and sure enough he turned out a handsome block buster. 

The film made more money than all his westerns together and forever after, as its writer-director, Delmer Daves made soapy weepers of diminishing interest. This cost us however many other superior westerns and left Del, who was aware of the process, with a decline and fall. One of my colleagues was outraged that a fellow critic referred to Villa Fiorita as “maron glacé” but the guy wasn’t far off.

Hollywood could show case talent on an unparalleled scale but it could also fritter it away. It was disturbing to watch this happening.

The Bounty DVD of Drumbeat is passable. It can be manipulated into its correct proportions but the colour, which was one of it’s major assets, is washed out.

Barrie Pattison 2022.