Delmer Daves (1904-77), one of Hollywood’s most accomplished directors of Westerns, is seldom mentioned in the same breath as such tough-guy auteurs as John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway, and William Wellman, or the more urbane Howard Hawks. More appreciated in France than here, Daves more readily fits in a group with Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, as well as the underrated Gordon Douglas.
Daves did his finest work as a maker of a psychological Westerns that, like Mann’s in particular, harnessed dramatic scenery to reflect inner states of mind. Much has been made of Ford’s evolving attitude to Native Americans, from racist to sympathetic. However, Daves’s humane depiction of the Apaches in “Broken Arrow” (1950) and of Comanche ways, espoused by Richard Widmark’s renegade in “The Last Wagon” (1956), was far more progressive. The Irish-American grandson of pioneers, Daves had lived among the Navajo and Hopi as a teen.
It’s a good moment for Daves. The Criterion Collection’s release next Tuesday of “Jubal” (1956) and “3:10 to Yuma” (1957) coincides with the screening at New York’s Anthology Film Archives of “Pride of the Marines” (1945), “The Red House” (1947), “Broken Arrow,” “The Last Wagon,” and “Cowboy” (1958). These five films were curated by the critics Nick Pinkerton and Nicolas Rapold for the mini-retrospective “Overdue: Delmer Daves” (May 10-16), an excellent primer of the director’s work.
It could have easily been expanded to include the Bogart-and-Bacall film noir “Dark Passage” (1947); “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954), Daves’s perverse sequel to Henry Koster’s “The Robe” (1953); the Modoc War Western “Drum Beat” (1954); and “The Hanging Tree” (1959), Daves’s spatially complex last Western, which shares an Oedipal theme with André Gide’s “La Symphonie Pastorale” (and Jean Delannoy’s 1946 adaptation).
Daves was an impeccable metteur-en-scène. His use of high crane shots that looked down on men swarming across hostile terrains, or isolated individuals in threatened space, was exemplary. There’s a troubling poetry in his work that has been neglected because, unlike Ford, he focused on everyday struggles and dangers, eschewing the mythic. The controlled luridness in his work — especially in “The Hanging Tree” — radiates emotional turmoil, and he was an expressive user of color. Check out his dangerous sunsets.
Mann’s most frequent Western star was James Stewart; Boetticher’s was Randolph Scott. Daves directed Stewart as a pro-Indian pacifist in the groundbreaking “Broken Arrow” but found his masculine archetype in Glenn Ford, who starred in “Jubal,” “3:10 to Yuma,” and “Cowboy.” The latter, extrapolated from Frank Harris’s memoirs (and suitably bowdlerized), grippingly depicts the exchange of values between a ruthless cattleman (played by Ford) and a civilized hotel clerk (Jack Lemmon as Harris) who joins him on a drive.
There’s a frank eroticism in Daves’s movies that John Ford approached only in “The Quiet Man” (1952). In “The Red House,” Edward G. Robinson’s farmer has unconsciously transferred his thwarted desire for his dead love to her daughter, his ward; the rustic film noir unfolds in a labyrinthine haunted wood, a symbol for Robinson’s psyche, that turns it into a demented fairy tale.
In “Pride of the Marine,” the palpable unspoken physical attraction between the brusque welder John Garfield and the ladylike Eleanor Parker grows into a love that enables them to transcend his emasculating self-pity when he returns blind from combat in Guadalcanal (the tense foxhole scenes in the movie are as good as anything filmed by Samuel Fuller).
Whereas Glenn Ford’s characters had been manipulated by Rita Hayworth’s in “Gilda” and Gloria Grahame’s in “Human Desire,” Daves made the stolid-looking actor the object of desire for Valerie French in “Jubal” and Felicia Farr in “3:10 to Yuma”; his outlaw’s seduction of Farr’s saloon girl-turned-bartender and their post-coital idyll was uncommonly adult for a 1950s Western. (Ford’s son and biographer Peter Ford talks about his father in an interview on Criterion’s “3:10” disc.)
Farr’s pioneer similarly gives herself to Widmark’s virile Comanche Todd in “The Last Wagon,” in which the younger folk’s dialogue is laced with boldly humorous sexual metaphors. Far from lewd, the candor was refreshing, an admission of desires and the need to fulfill them that, beyond Howard Hughes and Hawks’s “The Outlaw” (1943) and King Vidor’s “Duel in the Sun” (1946), few Westerns had allowed. Daves made adult movies that were robust, sexy, politically engaged, and didn’t flinch from exploring neuroses.