3:10 to Yuma
3:10 to Yuma
(1957), dir. Delmer Daves, starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin
3:10 to Yuma (2007), dir. James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale
This isn't a review (if it were, I'd say that the original is probably the better movie, but I enjoyed the remake more), but a post I'm making because I want to talk about storytelling.
The basic story behind 3:10 to Yuma poses a hell of a challenge to a director and actors, because it requires two trajectories:
(1) obvious and fairly easy, Dan Evans has to go from frustrated, desperate, and frankly pathetic failing rancher to the guy who has the balls to get Ben Wade on the 3:10 to Yuma.
(2) more subtle and much more difficult, Ben Wade, without changing his fundamental nature, has to come to like and admire Dan Evans so much that he gives him a piece of his loyalty.
Essentially, Ben Wade puts himself on the 3:10 to Yuma, and the fundamental task of any version of this movie is to make that piece of quixotism believable.
What frustrates me about the remake is that it panics. Right at the end, it clearly goes, oh shit what if they don't GET it? and makes Dan Evans play True Confessions, both with the story of how he lost his leg and with the reason he's out here ranching in Arizona when he sucks at it. This is a clumsy and painfully obvious maneuver, and it isn't necessary, because Russell Crowe has handled it. Russell Crowe has shown us, every step of the way, why Ben Wade has ended up loyal to Dan Evans. And what Crowe hasn't handled on his own has been taken care of by the chemistry between him and Christian Bale. By the end of the remake, I believe that Wade and Evans are angry, violent, semi-hostile, but genuine friends. I believe that Crowe's Wade, charming sociopath that he is, would (brutally, efficiently) turn on his own men in answer to Charlie Prince gunning down Dan Evans. I believe in his loyalty to Evans. I don't need explanations, and neither does Ben Wade.
(My problem with the original is that it spends too long meandering around in set-up, back and forth between Bisbee and Evans' ranch, in the flat cinematics of its day, so the half of the movie before we get to the hotel room is uninteresting. The remake, at least, is fun to watch all the way through. I've never pretended to be high brow.)
In general, the remake is a lot more nervous about its story than the original, and it clutters it up with everything it can think of: Pinkerton men and Apaches and the Chinese railroad workers and extra characters (the dreadful and doomed Tucker, the substitution of Alan Tudyk's charming veterinarian for the town drunk, the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son*). It also works a lot harder to make its "good" characters sympathetic, just as its "bad" characters are unsalvageably beyond the pale. The original, which is much in the same mold as High Noon , is much more cynical--much less worried about whether we like any of these people. Weirdly, the remake is doing everything it can to avoid the exact thing that is iconic about 3:10 to Yuma: the two adversaries trapped in a hotel room, waiting for a train, poking at each other's sore spots to pass the time, Wade, like Satan in the Garden, trying to tempt Evans to fall, and somehow being tempted into falling himself.
(You can also do all kinds of homosocial readings here--Evans/Wade/Prince is totally a Sedgwickian homosocial triangle except that Wade is also a man, which makes it even MORE homosocial--and the word "love" could be brought into play also, although I'm reluctant to do so, both because it brings all kinds of connotations with it and because I'm not sure I want to imply that Wade and Prince--given how carefully the movie shows us, over and over, that they kill gleefully and without remorse, that they are BAD MEN--are capable of love.)
The original hits this Sartre-esque hurdle head on, and Ford and Heflin do a pretty damn good job. Their problem, really, is that you have to believe Wade's conversion takes place essentially in this hour in this hotel room, and that's just hard to swallow. In terms of plausibility, the remake, by stretching out the journey from Bisbee to Contention and having Evans and Wade rescue each other back and forth, does provide better set up. But the original is focused in a way the remake is not (and it's such a pity the remake is not, because if any two actors could handle focused, it's Crowe and Bale); it uses the claustrophobia of that hotel room, and it uses its willingness to let Dan Evans be a not-completely-sympathetic character--and it uses Ford's Ben Wade, lying on that bed like a lion on a rock, patting his prey with one paw to watch it quiver and jump--to generate tension that the remake just can't. And it sidesteps the obvious emotional notes that the remake jumps on with both feet (Doc Potter's obvious death, every time Charlie Prince reinforces what we already know about Ben Wade's gang, every idiotic and unnecessary thing the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son does, especially Dan Evans' death scene), right up to the end, when it suddenly resolves all its minor notes into a thundering major chord: Wade asks for, receives, and is worthy of Evans' trust; the rain comes.
This is, of course, exactly opposite the remake, which chooses the very end to go from its cheerful, comic book violence, action movie ethos into cruel irony: Evans succeeds and is gunned down by Charlie Prince. Charlie Prince succeeds and is gunned down by Ben Wade (Crowe and Foster play that moment perfectly), the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son has his tragic, too-late realization of his love for his father, blah blah questionable redemption blah, and we end the movie knowing it was all utterly pointless, because Wade's just going to escape again anyway. That's true in the original as well, but in the original, Evans is still alive, he's earned his $200, and the rain has come.
Okay, so this kind of ended up being a review anyway. But I'm really more interested in the way the shared underpinnings of the story bloomed in such different ways, even while Wade and Evans (and Prince) remained essentially the same in the middle of it. And I'm interested in the difficulty in telling the story of that crucial arc, the change in Ben Wade, which isn't a change from bad to good--
I like the way that gets rejected in the remake:
and Wade's reaction to Evans' death is exactly the reaction that it should be for a very bad man who has come to be loyal to someone unexpected, not the reaction of a man with goodness in him.
--but a shift in loyalty from Prince to Evans. In 1957 Westerns aren't interested in interiority; Ford's Wade may or may not understand his own motives--he just acts on them. Crowe's Wade understands himself perfectly, and neither condemns nor forgives. He knows why, but he will never tell. He's what makes the remake interesting as opposed to merely fun to watch--Will's both right and wrong. Wade does save them from the Apaches; he is capable of good. But he's also the man who murders Tucker with a fork.
One of the things I talked about in my dissertation was the way that revenge tragedies make the audience complicit in revenge: the revenger is the protagonist; we're rooting for him to succeed, and in the upside down morality of the play, we rejoice when he does. Except that revenge tragedies are cruel; they turn themselves rightside up again, and we realize that we are rejoicing in murder. The remake manages exactly the same thing, because the audience, being able to read the genre conventions, knows that Tucker, like Potter, is doomed. He's going to die. And he's so brilliantly hateful (thank you, Kevin Durand) that we want him to die, in the way that we can want characters in books and movies to die because they aren't real.
But then the camera shows us what Wade did to Tucker with that fork, and we are reminded that inside the secondary world of the movie, Tucker is real, and his death is real, and Wade really murdered him with a two-pronged fork while the rest of them slept.
And Wade is not sorry.
Charlie Prince is the embodiment of the paradox, because he's charismatic and funny and he burns people alive. Every time he's on screen, pretty much, the same thing is happening: he charms us and he murders, sometimes in the same breath. And that's the thing, much much more so than the original, that the remake puts Evans against. Evans, who is dead-pan solemn and joyless and burning up inside with the need to save his ranch (the ranch being symbolic, of course, just as the brooch is). The original's Evans is much more of an Everyman caught in a hellacious trap by his own (somewhat unexpected) moral strength; the remake's Evans is a man trapped in the Slough of Despond grasping desperately for his last chance to make it to the Celestial City (I am NOT going to map this movie onto Pilgrim's Progress, I swear to God I am not, even though Potter is clearly Faithful). Bale's Evans carries that kind of allegorical charge (possibly just due to the fact that Bale only has one intensity setting, which is eleven), and I suppose, if you want to switch gears entirely, you can argue that the movie is really about Will (who is the first character we meet, after all) choosing between Wade (BAD) and Evans (GOOD), which--oh dear--does make that damn final scene made a little more sense.
Never mind that. I say the movie is about Wade and Evans, and about a bad man coming to give his loyalty to a good man. I think the original movie holds out the possibility of hope that Wade might reform (the rain comes); the remake does not.
---
*Unrelated to the rest of this, I just want to bitch for a moment about the way that Alice is supplanted by Will in the remake. Alice Evans in the original has a lot more to say and a lot more agency, and in a movie with only two women in it (and the other one is really only there to be a sort of inadvertent Delilah and trap Wade with her Feminine Wiles), that seems kind of important. The idiotic and unnecessary teenage son, who is having the bildungsroman of idiotic and unnecessary teenage sons since the dawn of time (and Jesus Christ the Mary Sue-ism: he gets the drop on Ben Wade and either outbluffs him or genuinely has the balls to shoot him dead? For real?), honestly never feels important to me. And Alice still does.
3:10 to Yuma (2007), dir. James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale
This isn't a review (if it were, I'd say that the original is probably the better movie, but I enjoyed the remake more), but a post I'm making because I want to talk about storytelling.
The basic story behind 3:10 to Yuma poses a hell of a challenge to a director and actors, because it requires two trajectories:
(1) obvious and fairly easy, Dan Evans has to go from frustrated, desperate, and frankly pathetic failing rancher to the guy who has the balls to get Ben Wade on the 3:10 to Yuma.
(2) more subtle and much more difficult, Ben Wade, without changing his fundamental nature, has to come to like and admire Dan Evans so much that he gives him a piece of his loyalty.
Essentially, Ben Wade puts himself on the 3:10 to Yuma, and the fundamental task of any version of this movie is to make that piece of quixotism believable.
What frustrates me about the remake is that it panics. Right at the end, it clearly goes, oh shit what if they don't GET it? and makes Dan Evans play True Confessions, both with the story of how he lost his leg and with the reason he's out here ranching in Arizona when he sucks at it. This is a clumsy and painfully obvious maneuver, and it isn't necessary, because Russell Crowe has handled it. Russell Crowe has shown us, every step of the way, why Ben Wade has ended up loyal to Dan Evans. And what Crowe hasn't handled on his own has been taken care of by the chemistry between him and Christian Bale. By the end of the remake, I believe that Wade and Evans are angry, violent, semi-hostile, but genuine friends. I believe that Crowe's Wade, charming sociopath that he is, would (brutally, efficiently) turn on his own men in answer to Charlie Prince gunning down Dan Evans. I believe in his loyalty to Evans. I don't need explanations, and neither does Ben Wade.
(My problem with the original is that it spends too long meandering around in set-up, back and forth between Bisbee and Evans' ranch, in the flat cinematics of its day, so the half of the movie before we get to the hotel room is uninteresting. The remake, at least, is fun to watch all the way through. I've never pretended to be high brow.)
In general, the remake is a lot more nervous about its story than the original, and it clutters it up with everything it can think of: Pinkerton men and Apaches and the Chinese railroad workers and extra characters (the dreadful and doomed Tucker, the substitution of Alan Tudyk's charming veterinarian for the town drunk, the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son*). It also works a lot harder to make its "good" characters sympathetic, just as its "bad" characters are unsalvageably beyond the pale. The original, which is much in the same mold as High Noon , is much more cynical--much less worried about whether we like any of these people. Weirdly, the remake is doing everything it can to avoid the exact thing that is iconic about 3:10 to Yuma: the two adversaries trapped in a hotel room, waiting for a train, poking at each other's sore spots to pass the time, Wade, like Satan in the Garden, trying to tempt Evans to fall, and somehow being tempted into falling himself.
(You can also do all kinds of homosocial readings here--Evans/Wade/Prince is totally a Sedgwickian homosocial triangle except that Wade is also a man, which makes it even MORE homosocial--and the word "love" could be brought into play also, although I'm reluctant to do so, both because it brings all kinds of connotations with it and because I'm not sure I want to imply that Wade and Prince--given how carefully the movie shows us, over and over, that they kill gleefully and without remorse, that they are BAD MEN--are capable of love.)
The original hits this Sartre-esque hurdle head on, and Ford and Heflin do a pretty damn good job. Their problem, really, is that you have to believe Wade's conversion takes place essentially in this hour in this hotel room, and that's just hard to swallow. In terms of plausibility, the remake, by stretching out the journey from Bisbee to Contention and having Evans and Wade rescue each other back and forth, does provide better set up. But the original is focused in a way the remake is not (and it's such a pity the remake is not, because if any two actors could handle focused, it's Crowe and Bale); it uses the claustrophobia of that hotel room, and it uses its willingness to let Dan Evans be a not-completely-sympathetic character--and it uses Ford's Ben Wade, lying on that bed like a lion on a rock, patting his prey with one paw to watch it quiver and jump--to generate tension that the remake just can't. And it sidesteps the obvious emotional notes that the remake jumps on with both feet (Doc Potter's obvious death, every time Charlie Prince reinforces what we already know about Ben Wade's gang, every idiotic and unnecessary thing the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son does, especially Dan Evans' death scene), right up to the end, when it suddenly resolves all its minor notes into a thundering major chord: Wade asks for, receives, and is worthy of Evans' trust; the rain comes.
This is, of course, exactly opposite the remake, which chooses the very end to go from its cheerful, comic book violence, action movie ethos into cruel irony: Evans succeeds and is gunned down by Charlie Prince. Charlie Prince succeeds and is gunned down by Ben Wade (Crowe and Foster play that moment perfectly), the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son has his tragic, too-late realization of his love for his father, blah blah questionable redemption blah, and we end the movie knowing it was all utterly pointless, because Wade's just going to escape again anyway. That's true in the original as well, but in the original, Evans is still alive, he's earned his $200, and the rain has come.
Okay, so this kind of ended up being a review anyway. But I'm really more interested in the way the shared underpinnings of the story bloomed in such different ways, even while Wade and Evans (and Prince) remained essentially the same in the middle of it. And I'm interested in the difficulty in telling the story of that crucial arc, the change in Ben Wade, which isn't a change from bad to good--
I like the way that gets rejected in the remake:
WADE: They're gonna kill you and your father, William. They're gonna laugh while they do it. I think you know that.
WILL: Call 'em off.
WADE: Why should I?
WILL: Because you're not all bad.
WADE: Yes, I am.
WILL: You saved us from those Indians.
WADE: I saved myself.
WILL: You got us through the tunnels. You helped us get away.
WADE: If I had a gun in them tunnels, I would have used it on you.
WILL: I don't believe you.
WADE: Kid, I wouldn't last five minutes leading an outfit like that if I wasn't as rotten as hell.
and Wade's reaction to Evans' death is exactly the reaction that it should be for a very bad man who has come to be loyal to someone unexpected, not the reaction of a man with goodness in him.
--but a shift in loyalty from Prince to Evans. In 1957 Westerns aren't interested in interiority; Ford's Wade may or may not understand his own motives--he just acts on them. Crowe's Wade understands himself perfectly, and neither condemns nor forgives. He knows why, but he will never tell. He's what makes the remake interesting as opposed to merely fun to watch--Will's both right and wrong. Wade does save them from the Apaches; he is capable of good. But he's also the man who murders Tucker with a fork.
One of the things I talked about in my dissertation was the way that revenge tragedies make the audience complicit in revenge: the revenger is the protagonist; we're rooting for him to succeed, and in the upside down morality of the play, we rejoice when he does. Except that revenge tragedies are cruel; they turn themselves rightside up again, and we realize that we are rejoicing in murder. The remake manages exactly the same thing, because the audience, being able to read the genre conventions, knows that Tucker, like Potter, is doomed. He's going to die. And he's so brilliantly hateful (thank you, Kevin Durand) that we want him to die, in the way that we can want characters in books and movies to die because they aren't real.
But then the camera shows us what Wade did to Tucker with that fork, and we are reminded that inside the secondary world of the movie, Tucker is real, and his death is real, and Wade really murdered him with a two-pronged fork while the rest of them slept.
And Wade is not sorry.
Charlie Prince is the embodiment of the paradox, because he's charismatic and funny and he burns people alive. Every time he's on screen, pretty much, the same thing is happening: he charms us and he murders, sometimes in the same breath. And that's the thing, much much more so than the original, that the remake puts Evans against. Evans, who is dead-pan solemn and joyless and burning up inside with the need to save his ranch (the ranch being symbolic, of course, just as the brooch is). The original's Evans is much more of an Everyman caught in a hellacious trap by his own (somewhat unexpected) moral strength; the remake's Evans is a man trapped in the Slough of Despond grasping desperately for his last chance to make it to the Celestial City (I am NOT going to map this movie onto Pilgrim's Progress, I swear to God I am not, even though Potter is clearly Faithful). Bale's Evans carries that kind of allegorical charge (possibly just due to the fact that Bale only has one intensity setting, which is eleven), and I suppose, if you want to switch gears entirely, you can argue that the movie is really about Will (who is the first character we meet, after all) choosing between Wade (BAD) and Evans (GOOD), which--oh dear--does make that damn final scene made a little more sense.
Never mind that. I say the movie is about Wade and Evans, and about a bad man coming to give his loyalty to a good man. I think the original movie holds out the possibility of hope that Wade might reform (the rain comes); the remake does not.
---
*Unrelated to the rest of this, I just want to bitch for a moment about the way that Alice is supplanted by Will in the remake. Alice Evans in the original has a lot more to say and a lot more agency, and in a movie with only two women in it (and the other one is really only there to be a sort of inadvertent Delilah and trap Wade with her Feminine Wiles), that seems kind of important. The idiotic and unnecessary teenage son, who is having the bildungsroman of idiotic and unnecessary teenage sons since the dawn of time (and Jesus Christ the Mary Sue-ism: he gets the drop on Ben Wade and either outbluffs him or genuinely has the balls to shoot him dead? For real?), honestly never feels important to me. And Alice still does.
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