the end of evil
by
Douglas Messerli
Felix
Jackson, Henry Myers, and Gertrude Purcell (screenplay, based on the novel by
Max Brand), George Marshall (director) Destry
Rides Again / 1939
The
western town of Bottleneck is a corrupt town, ruled over by saloon owner Kent
(Brian Donlevy), his lover, singer and swindler Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich), and
the tobacco-chewing mayor, Judge Slade (Samuel S. Hinds).
Forget the fact that the former New
Orleans-born “Frenchy” speaks with Dietrich’s heavy German accent and sings
songs such as “See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have” (with
wonderful lyrics
by Frank Loesser) that might be more at home in a cabaret skit, or that Kent’s
huge saloon is, as film critic Daniel Eagan describes it, “filled with more
customers than most frontier towns had as residents”; forget that one of the
regular gamblers is a henpecked Russian named Boris Callahan (Mischa Auer), or
that the Sheriff (Joe King) disappears “on vacation” immediately after his very
first scene. The evil trio is right out of the kind of two-reelers (including
episodes of The Perils of Pauline)
that director George Marshall had filmed in the past, and this is a 1939
feature that was intended, in part, to save Dietrich’s career: it wasn’t ever
intended to be “believable.”
And what a lark the mythical movie tale
truly is, although it begins with a serious swindle, wherein, by spilling
coffee over a winning gambler, Dietrich helps to make sure he loses, granting
Kent the rights to a farm through which all nearly all the cattleman and their
cows must cross. Kent plans to charge a fee for every head and make a fortune.
Drinks are on the house!
To replace Sherriff Keogh, the Mayor
appoints the town drunk, “Wash” Dimsdale (Charles Winninger), believing that by
simply threatening to withhold a shot of whiskey, they can control him.
What he doesn’t know is that Dimsdale used
to be the deputy for the noted gunman Destry, and when the drunk wakes up to
the fact that he has actually been named the new sheriff, he immediately goes
sober without a tremor, calling in Destry’s son, Thomas Jefferson Destry (James
Stewart) to be his assistant.
It takes nearly half the movie for
Destry’s coach to reach Bottleneck, and in the meantime Marshall and his
writers show off Dietrich’s singing and yodeling talents and create a number of
backstories, including the Claggett’s standoff with Kent and his gang and the strange
relationship between Callahan and Lily Belle (Una Merkel), his wife, who, after
Callahan loses his pants by gambling, has a down-and-out dirty cat fight with
Frenchy.
By the time the coach reaches this
isolated village, Destry has already won us over with this easy story-telling
and aphorisms, and Stewart waltzes into his genial role with all the ease of
his later character Elwood
P. Dowd in Harvey. Although he’s
evidently a master gun shooter, it turns the new deputy is also a pacifist (how
I wish he might have been married to the Quaker wife of the High Noon sheriff played by Gary
Cooper), and the townsfolk first glimpse of him is with a parasol and birdcage
as he helps visitor Janice Tyndall (Irene Hervey) alight [the accompanying
picture is of Andy Griffith in the 1959 Broadway musical version of the film].
At the saloon later that afternoon he even
has the temerity to order up a glass of milk! If you’ve seen that comic trope
before, this is where it all began.
Yet, hardly a day has passed and Destry
has out-talked and out-witted half of the town, promised real justice to the
Claggetts (having secretly called in a district judge instead of the local
mayor to hear their case), and peaked the romantic interest of Frenchy by half-complementing
her face: “I'll bet you've got kind of a lovely face under all that paint, huh?
Why don't you wipe it off someday and have a good look—and figure out how you
can live up to it.” As Frenchy’s black maid comments, “That man has
personality.”
Told to get out town, Destry blithely
responds:
Tom Destry Jr.: Oh, I think I'll stick around. Y'know,
I had a friend once used
to collect postage stamps. He
always said the one good
thing about a postage stamp:
it always sticks to one thing
'til it gets there, y'know?
I'm sorta like that too.
Of course, we all know it’s not going to
be quite that easy, and when, enlisting the help of Callahan, they track down Keogh’s
dead body, Kent and his gang threaten to endanger nearly all of the town’s
citizens. And we just know that Destry will be forced to put on his holster and
pop out those guns.
In the inevitable shootout with the bad
guys, Frenchy gets killed in the crossfire, dying in the
arms of her new
would-be lover. Yet order has been maintained, and the audience can go home
knowing that like Tombstone, Bottleneck has now been civilized—even if we wince
a little on our way with the knowledge that, without those gilded saloon hall
and its singing wonder, it will be an
awfully boring place.
What Marshall’s comic treatment of the
Western on the verge of World War II reveals— particularly by his so delaying
his “tonic”—is that good and civilized men and women really have very little to
do with the genre. The real excitement of Westerns has everything to do with the
evil geniuses and their lusty women as they plot their way to rake in the money
or just plain bollix up the plans of those who might desire equality and
fairness. High Noon’s Hadleyville
would never have been heard of if the evil gunman Frank Miller hadn’t been
determined to kill those good folk’s sheriff.
Destry may certainly be said to have
personality, but I fear, if he truly sticks to this community, he may end a bit
like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry sheriff, mostly fishing and whittling. This wonderful
film did, in fact, revert Dietrich’s “poison pill” reputation, and she went on
to perform in numerous films, whereas the far more romantic and ethereal Greta
Garbo, disappeared from the screen forever. The same year as Destry James Stewart went on to
Washington. Perhaps, given the predilections of our new national leaders, even
Westerns will suddenly come back into vogue, just as film musicals have.
Los Angeles,
January 16, 2017
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