Reviews: 3:10 to Yuma
Westerns will never die as an American art form because of what they say about the classic American themes of forging into the unexplored, building civil society out of chaos and grappling with wildness both external and internal. But it turns out that last weekend's opening of James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma was the first wide release of a "traditionally gunslinging Western" since 2003, according to Box Office Mojo. So it's both heartening and dismaying to see Mangold remake Delmer Daves's fine 1957 film.
The original is a deeply psychological work based on an Elmore Leonard story and steeped in the social order and film style of its era. Shot in stark blacks and whites, it raises the question of an average farming man's responsibility in serving justice and maintaining order. Dan Evans (Van Heflin) grudgingly agrees to deliver captured outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) onto a train as his fellow criminals look out for their boss. Along with the social pressure to help out in a region with few lawmen, there's a countervailing theme of class conflict as the struggling Evans is pursuing Wade for a promised $200 from a stagecoach tycoon.
But that's essentially all that's going on in Daves's Yuma, a film that takes dead aim at its subject matter. It's a talky movie that keeps moving thanks to well drawn-out suspense. A large chunk of its 92-minute running time is taken up by a battle of wills between the two men in a small hotel room. For almost the whole film, there are just a handful of shots fired.
As a movie of its time, the 1957 Yuma has its flaws. The screenplay is a bit stilted at times, its characters look suspiciously well scrubbed, and it doesn't reflect the ethnic diversity of the late 19th century Arizona territory. But after all, at its heart it's a stylized picture. Its abundant energy radiates from Ford's subtle, complicated performance. His Wade is not far from being a pillar of frontier society but has a chilling streak of pure self-interest just beneath the surface. The way the story plays out between him and Evans says something about how men may really have survived in the bleak world of the Old West.
The remake by Mangold, an excellent director of actors who made the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and the 1995 indie gem Heavy, gives us more things to look at but less to think about. Mangold opens with Evans (Christian Bale) being woken in the night by debt-collectors burning his barn, and the action rarely lets up from that point. The new film, 25 minutes longer, is as crowded and noisy as the original was empty and silent.
It's a good artistic strategy to adopt a different tone and style in a remake, but after abandoning the single-minded focus of the 1957 film, Mangold fails to deliver anything nearly as eloquent. What we get is repeated catharsis rather than growing suspense, and in place of Daves's abiding Hollywood hope there's a grimness that feels no less artificial.
Mangold's Yuma isn't a truly dark Western like The Wild Bunch or Unforgiven. Its characters may be desperate and its towns and camps lawless and dirty, but it just builds up to more death, not an overriding sense of doom. There are more references to the Bible in this version, in one example of more accurate historical detail, but it's nothing more than a detail. Characters torture and kill either gratuitously, justifiably, or both, but mostly in the service of spectacle. Self-interest and revenge dominate, while the quest for justice and order fades into the background. It's Grand Theft Stagecoach, with the doggedly sane Evans cast in with an unlikely number of sadistic weirdos.
Despite a screenplay that gives him less to work with than his predecessor had in the role of Evans, Bale gives a stronger performance. It's excellent naturalistic acting, where Heflin's was a workmanlike Hollywood turn. But Russell Crowe is no match for Glenn Ford. His brash, snickering performance is entertaining but lacks the subtle menace beneath Ford's soft-spoken charm.
Mangold and company do inject some physical realism left out 50 years ago. Faces are dirty and sunburned, towns are half filled with tents, and bits of dialog give an historical context that was missing in the earlier film. But their attempts to go beyond the white-male-centric storytelling of the original leave a bitter taste: We get a silent Mexican sharpshooter, Indians who kill for pleasure, startled Chinese railroad workers who just try to get out of the fighters' way, and one black man killed in a shootout. (The portrayal of the Chinese is also historically inaccurate. There would have been no children and scarcely any women in their railroad camp. And a foreman there says the Chinese are lazy and he'd rather have "negroes" on his crew. After the Chinese had started working on the railroads, bosses and foremen no longer thought they were lazy, and white males in the late 19th Century West overwhelmingly opposed the introduction of African-American labor.)
Maybe every generation gets the Westerns it deserves. The 1957 Yuma captured the mood of a post-World War II, Cold War nation that policed the world. After Zapruder, Vietnam, and Taxi Driver, that approach could only play as anachronism. But if it takes a bloodbath to evoke our own time, we would be better served by one that had more to say.
The original is a deeply psychological work based on an Elmore Leonard story and steeped in the social order and film style of its era. Shot in stark blacks and whites, it raises the question of an average farming man's responsibility in serving justice and maintaining order. Dan Evans (Van Heflin) grudgingly agrees to deliver captured outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) onto a train as his fellow criminals look out for their boss. Along with the social pressure to help out in a region with few lawmen, there's a countervailing theme of class conflict as the struggling Evans is pursuing Wade for a promised $200 from a stagecoach tycoon.
But that's essentially all that's going on in Daves's Yuma, a film that takes dead aim at its subject matter. It's a talky movie that keeps moving thanks to well drawn-out suspense. A large chunk of its 92-minute running time is taken up by a battle of wills between the two men in a small hotel room. For almost the whole film, there are just a handful of shots fired.
As a movie of its time, the 1957 Yuma has its flaws. The screenplay is a bit stilted at times, its characters look suspiciously well scrubbed, and it doesn't reflect the ethnic diversity of the late 19th century Arizona territory. But after all, at its heart it's a stylized picture. Its abundant energy radiates from Ford's subtle, complicated performance. His Wade is not far from being a pillar of frontier society but has a chilling streak of pure self-interest just beneath the surface. The way the story plays out between him and Evans says something about how men may really have survived in the bleak world of the Old West.
The remake by Mangold, an excellent director of actors who made the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and the 1995 indie gem Heavy, gives us more things to look at but less to think about. Mangold opens with Evans (Christian Bale) being woken in the night by debt-collectors burning his barn, and the action rarely lets up from that point. The new film, 25 minutes longer, is as crowded and noisy as the original was empty and silent.
It's a good artistic strategy to adopt a different tone and style in a remake, but after abandoning the single-minded focus of the 1957 film, Mangold fails to deliver anything nearly as eloquent. What we get is repeated catharsis rather than growing suspense, and in place of Daves's abiding Hollywood hope there's a grimness that feels no less artificial.
Mangold's Yuma isn't a truly dark Western like The Wild Bunch or Unforgiven. Its characters may be desperate and its towns and camps lawless and dirty, but it just builds up to more death, not an overriding sense of doom. There are more references to the Bible in this version, in one example of more accurate historical detail, but it's nothing more than a detail. Characters torture and kill either gratuitously, justifiably, or both, but mostly in the service of spectacle. Self-interest and revenge dominate, while the quest for justice and order fades into the background. It's Grand Theft Stagecoach, with the doggedly sane Evans cast in with an unlikely number of sadistic weirdos.
Despite a screenplay that gives him less to work with than his predecessor had in the role of Evans, Bale gives a stronger performance. It's excellent naturalistic acting, where Heflin's was a workmanlike Hollywood turn. But Russell Crowe is no match for Glenn Ford. His brash, snickering performance is entertaining but lacks the subtle menace beneath Ford's soft-spoken charm.
Mangold and company do inject some physical realism left out 50 years ago. Faces are dirty and sunburned, towns are half filled with tents, and bits of dialog give an historical context that was missing in the earlier film. But their attempts to go beyond the white-male-centric storytelling of the original leave a bitter taste: We get a silent Mexican sharpshooter, Indians who kill for pleasure, startled Chinese railroad workers who just try to get out of the fighters' way, and one black man killed in a shootout. (The portrayal of the Chinese is also historically inaccurate. There would have been no children and scarcely any women in their railroad camp. And a foreman there says the Chinese are lazy and he'd rather have "negroes" on his crew. After the Chinese had started working on the railroads, bosses and foremen no longer thought they were lazy, and white males in the late 19th Century West overwhelmingly opposed the introduction of African-American labor.)
Maybe every generation gets the Westerns it deserves. The 1957 Yuma captured the mood of a post-World War II, Cold War nation that policed the world. After Zapruder, Vietnam, and Taxi Driver, that approach could only play as anachronism. But if it takes a bloodbath to evoke our own time, we would be better served by one that had more to say.
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