Based on a novel by San Francisco author Oakley Hall (Downhill Racer, Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades) and directed by Edward Dmytryk (who was born in Canada and grew up in San Francisco, directed "Crossfire," "The Caine Mutiny," "The Young Lions," and was one of the "Hollywood Ten," but like Elia Kazan cooperated with the House Un-American Activities investigations of communists and ex-communists in Hollywood), I was expecting a less conventional western than "Warlock" (1959) turned out to be. It begins with the local rowdy cowboys riding into town (Warlock is the name of the town: no reason for the choice of name is included in the movie) and the citizenry not backing up the (deputy) sheriff (Walter Coy) who does not have Grace Kelly to take care of back-shooters sent by the vicious McQuown (Tom Drake).

The town's "solid citizens" then decide to recruit a gunslinger named Curt Blaisdell (Henry Fonda) who has made a career of killing troublemakers and travels with a limping faro dealer Tom Morgan
(a prematurely silver-haired Anthony Quinn) who plays Doc Holliday to Blaisdell's Wyatt Earp. There are several jokers in the deck of the basic Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday vs. the Clanton knockoff. Morgan's methods are considerably less upright than Blaisdell and Blaisdell is ignorant both of what Morgan does to protect him (in Warlock and elsewhere earlier, hinting at something like John Ford's later masterpiece "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance") and of the psychosexual complexities of Morgan's attachment and jealous possessiveness. (The motivation seems murky to me, but makes less sense without interpreting Morgan being in unrequited love with Blaisdell—as Messala for Ben Hur in a much-honored movie from the same year, or Iago for Othello.)

The second joker in the deck is Johnny Gannon, played by Richard Widmark, the top-billed star of the movie. He is one of the cowboys who shoot up Warlock periodically, but repulsed by the bullying, and eventually takes the deputy sheriff job (the official law; Blaisdell is locally paid (eight times as much) as Marshall) and has to act to expel both the gang he rode with (and his younger brother, played by Frank Gorshin, still rides with) and the killers (Morgan and Blaisdell) the town hired.

The inevitable confrontations are slowed down by romances (Widmark's with Dorothy Malone, Fonda's with Dolores Michaels, and Quinn's with his self-image as indispensable to Fonda), and there are some minor twists of the domesticator of the vanishing "wild West" versus the rowdies genre in addition to the complication of competing jurisdictions and mandates of the upholders of the law (like Italy with its two police forces).

Henry Fonda was mostly in his heroic (Young Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Roberts, Twelve Angry Men) mold, indeed somewhat reprising the Wyatt Earp role he played in John Ford's great "My Darling Clementine," but showed some of the unheroic clear-eyed cold-bloodedness that he would elaborate later on in There Was a Crooked Man and the late western masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in the West."

Anthony Quinn had a queer part that gets showy near the end but doesn't make much sense (possibly due to censorship rather than incoherent writing). I also don't understand how Morgan comes to own the local gambling saloon even before he and Blaisdell ride into town... It also seems he was Dorothy Malone's pimp somewhere in the past.

Dorothy Malone and Dolores Michaels have cardboard (clichéd) parts and do nothing memorable with the little they are given to enact. As Curly, DeForest Kelly manages to carve out a memorable part (that can't be explained without plot-spoiling).

Beyond Joseph MacDonald's* very strikingly photographed scenery (of the Moab, Utah area, including Arches National Park), the best reason to watch "Warlock" is to watch Richard Widmark emerge from what seems one of his bad guy parts (more like his gang members in "The Yellow Sky" and The Law and Jack Wade than in his early flamboyantly psychotic turns in Kiss of Death, No Way Out) into the hero, the Man of Honor Who Has To Do What He Has To Do and can't accept help (as Gary Cooper's lawman in "High Noon" would have been glad to). I suspect that Widmark's Johnny Gannon represented for Dmytryk the heroic turning on one's former pals that Brando's Terry Malloy does in Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront," but whatever one thinks of the politics (and the personal politics of betrayal), "On the Waterfront" is a great movie. "Warlock" is not. (I won't give away the hokiness of the ending of "Warlock.")

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MacDonald filmed Fonda in My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946); Widmark in The Street with No Name (1948), Yellow Sky (Wellman, 1949), Down to the Sea in Ships (Wellman, 1949), Panic in the Streets (Kazan, 1950), Pickup on South Street (Fuller, 1953), Broken Lance (Dmytryk, 1954) , and Alvarez Kelly (Dmytryk, 1966); Quinn in Viva Zapata! (Kazan, 1952).


P.S. Why doesn't the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences give Widmark one of the career consolation prize Oscars? There really is a substantial and very variegated body of Widmark screen work that deserves greater recognition!






Recommended:
Yes