I'm afraid it'll have to wait until I get the TT disc - it's been too long since I last saw it to trust my memory - but in the meantime some thoughts on Warlock:
“Trouble and death follow you. Warlock’s had enough of both.”
The big-screen western was in dire financial straits in the 1950s as it fought a losing battle against wall-to-wall Western series on TV, yet the decade still managed to see filmmakers rising to the challenge with some of the best westerns ever made. 1959’s
Warlock may just fall short of the top tier, but it’s still a remarkably mature and eloquent drama that doesn’t always go where you expect it to.
Warlock is a small town that’s lost its nerve – they can’t hold guns but they sure can hold meetings - thanks to a vicious local rancher and his gang who treat the townsfolk as targets and regularly run off its lawmen. So they decide to sidestep the regular law that’s too far away to protect them and hire a ‘sort of’ Marshal who operates just a little to the side of the law in the form of Henry Fonda’s calm and collected professional gun, already the subject of dime novels that have helped turn him into a lucrative “attraction” in any town as people come in from miles around in the hope they’ll see him kill someone. He’s not a thug but an intelligent man who knows exactly what to expect, both from the lawbreakers and the townsfolk. He’s been through the same situation enough to have his own speech prepared and to sound like he’s used it many times before:
“People generally begin to resent me, I don’t mind it when it happens. It’s part of the job. It will happen. I came here as your salvation at a very high wage. I establish order and ride roughshod over offenders. At first you’re pleased because there’s a good deal less trouble. Then a very strange thing happens. You begin to feel I’m too powerful. You begin to fear me. Not me, but what I am. When that happens, we shall have had full satisfaction from one another. It’ll be time for me to leave.”
But this time he doesn’t want to leave. He even falls in love with Dolores Michael and starts to think about settling down, hoping the town has grown up enough not to need him anymore. At first Richard Widmark’s gang member whose uncomfortable conscience makes him change sides and become a deputy seems to offer a way out even if the fledgling lawman is clearly outmatched and outgunned, but Fonda’s close – very close – friend Anthony Quinn (“He’s the only one, man or woman, who looked at me and didn’t see a cripple”) can’t accept the possibility of his partner losing his power and leaving him. To complicate matters further, old flame Dorothy Malone arrives in town trying to provoke a showdown that will see Fonda killed to get back at Quinn because the best way to hurt him is to destroy the only person he ever cared about. And as if that weren’t enough of a problem for Widmark and Fonda, Tom Drake’s backshooting, hand-stabbing rancher, worse than he ought to be and getting worse all the time, is determined to play dirty to take back the town…
Civilisation may be stalking Warlock, but there are enough buried secrets and sexual undercurrents in the town for it to be twinned with Peyton Place and for Freud and Jung to open branch offices. Yet it also works handsomely as a traditional adult Western where the lines between good guys and bad guys are both blurred and in constant motion: bad men do good things and good men do stupid ones, and people can change for the better or the worse. The film even shifts main character as it progresses, Fonda’s town tamer dominating the first third of the film while top-billed Widmark remains literally on the sidelines, saying or doing little beyond giving that look of discomfort that was the trademark of his heroes as he gradually works his way from social pariah to potential saviour of the town as he slowly but steadily takes centre-stage. The leads are particularly well cast, Fonda and Quinn’s Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday-like relationship grabbing most of the best scenes but Widmark making a big impression with the less showy role. And there’s a strikingly effective bit of casting against type with Tom Drake, the boy next door from Meet Me in St. Louis, cast as an utterly convincing sadistic and amoral villain who rules by terror. But then it’s a pretty impressive cast all round, with the supporting roles filled with familiar faces like DeForrest Kelley, Frank Gorshin (perfectly cast as Widmark’s brother), Whit Bissell, Regis Toomey, Wallace Ford, Richard Arlen, L.Q. Jones and Joe Turkel.
Director Edward Dmytryk’s work would soon slide into mediocrity in the Sixties, but here, thanks to Robert Alan Arthur’s strong script that gives the characters strong dialogue to chew on but not too much of it to give the plot indigestion, he’s at the top of his game, managing to be understated without losing sight of the drama and doing a good job with the few action sequences. Best of all it’s both an impressive psychological ‘thinking man’s western’ and a solid traditional Western drama, stealing a head start on all those end of an era 60s Westerns about men who have to learn to change or die as the creeping progress of civilisation starts to render them obsolete while still working as a class oater.
Hopefully the TT disc will include the original trailer, introduced, as was increasingly common at the time, by its star, with Fonda appealing to audiences to see the film on the big screen (the trailer for Cowboy put a comic spin on the same TV is no place to watch a Western pitch).
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