Review
THE VIOLENT MEN
Directed by Rudolph Mate
Columbia, 1954
Review
LUST FOR GOLD
Directed by S. Sylvan Simon
Columbia, 1949
It’s not often I get surprised by unknown westerns. After almost a decade of working at a video store I started to figure that if there was an old duster I had never heard of, it must not be any good.
Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of westerns out there I haven’t seen, but long to (anyone out there got a copy of Silver Lode they wanna lend me?). But after suffering through lost "classics" like Terror in a Texas Town (no, Sterling Hayden keeping the peace in a frontier town armed with a whaling harpoon is not a good idea), I usually don’t get too excited about forgotten westerns. That’s why The Violent Men and Lust For Gold are such welcome treats. They may not be as good as High Noon, but for film fans who love the old western archetypes and simplicity of frontier gunslinging, these two films go pretty far.
As film studios move into the digital age, they are digging through their vaults to find old material that they can repackage and sell to a new DVD generation. Both The Violent Men and Lust for Gold come courtesy of your friends at Columbia pictures, and feature a rough, tough Glenn Ford out to get what’s his.
In The Violent Men, he plays John Parrish, a stubborn landowner who refuses to give up his property to Lee Wilkison, a crooked wheelchair-bound tycoon played by Edward G. Robinson. With his gold-digging wife Martha (Barbara Stanwyck), and bullish henchman Cole (Brian Keith), Lee has bought up half the valley around his huge estate and won’t relax until he owns the rest.
It’s a classic western setup where small-town pushovers rally round a guy who won’t lie down, and together they take on the corrupt and wicked. This time, though, much of the fun comes from watching Stanwyck and Robinson go head to head. The two starred in the classic noir Double Indemnity, but had few scenes together. Here, they take each other apart with a violence reserved for only the most wicked ’50s movie couples. Sure, it’s fun to watch Ford rally the troops and ambush the evil posse (even if it is in one of the most horribly photographed day-for-night sequences ever), but The Violent Men proves to be as much about character as it is about revenge, and for that it is a lot more fresh than you would imagine for a film that is more than 50 years old.
Lust For Gold is more ambitious but less successful. Putting all its faith in a based-on-a-true-story premise, the film tells of three generations of treasure hunters in Arizona looking for the mythical gold buried somewhere on Superstition Mountain. Part whodunit, part whereisit, Lust For Gold is too fragmented to be a total success, but watching Ford play the selfish gold-happy lout Jacob "Dutch" Walz at the height of the gold rush is a great deal of fun. That accounts for about one-half of the film and the rest pales in comparison, but the shrugging pseudo-gag ending makes up for a waning third act.
This Stampede if you don’t feel like watching the old Clint Eastwood standards and if that copy of Django has already been rented, Lust For Gold and The Violent Men will make for a fun evening on the range, especially if you are looking for something new… er, old… you know what I mean. |
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