Dodge City (Blu-ray Review)

6 Jul, 2015 By: Mike Clark

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Warner
Western
$19.98 Blu-ray
Not rated.
Stars Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Alan Hale, Bruce Cabot, Ann Sheridan.

When it’s Bruce Cabot and Victor Jory playing for the same slimy team, it’s time for the good guys to unite — and especially when they have the honest branch of the local power brokers (a choice few of them with stogies and hooch in their railroad club cars) behind them. And predictably, it’s what happens in this easy-to-take boilerplate Western (though with some of the sturdiest production values then around) from the most celebrated movie year of them all. Matter of fact, Blu-ray fanciers can also obtain this early slice of three-strip Technicolor in Warner’s new five-title boxed set devoted to that same 1939 (The Golden Year Collection, $69.95), which further includes format premieres of Dark Victory, Ninotchka, the beloved Charles Laughton take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (an especially beautiful recent restoration on this one) plus the long available Gone With the Wind as a formidable 222-minute throw-in, and a documentary on some of the year’s most renowned movies (my own top three, for the record, would be Young Mr. Lincoln, Only Angels Have Wings and probably The Wizard of Oz).

Copywriters used to talk about Maureen O’Hara, Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl as having been “Queens of Technicolor” in the 1940s and ’50s, but if you’re looking at matters in a purely historical context, maybe a word should be put in for Olivia de Havilland, who by the time of GWTW’s premiere late in ’39 had already appeared in Gold Is Where You Find It, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and this portrait of post-Civil War Missouri mayhem. Someone must have liked her skin tones the way and Errol Flynn certainly did — both as a real-life romancer who was apparently unable to close the deal and the actress’s frequent co-star, dating all the way back to his career-maker Captain Blood (which had a not dissimilar effect on de Havilland’s own professional standing). The two of them strike amorous sparks in this movie as well, though not for a while because accompanying de Havilland’s character on a wagon train is her hot-headed drunk of a brother (William Lundigan) — the kind of prince who likes to fire pistols for fun around itchy cattle that are prone to stampede. Lundigan dies early in the narrative when a few dozen agitated cows do a kind of Nicholas Brothers routine on his prone frame, and she finds a way to blame trail boss Flynn.

Even when I was a kid, I thought this movie was pretty soulless, yet a good cast, fast pacing and a gorgeous exterior goes a long way toward making the journey fun to dip into it every once in a while. Warner knew how to cast these things to type even in the smaller roles, so here we have Ann Sheridan as a dance-house girl; Boys Town sobbing machine Bobs Watson turning on his nasal hose again; Guinn “Big Boy” Williams as an occasional jailbird who ends up being a sheriff’s deputy; and two of filmdom’s ubiquitous “Henry’s” of the period: O’Neill and Travers (absent Henry Stephenson must have been on vacation). As mentioned, Cabot and Jory are ringleaders in a band of heavies, though Ward Bond shows up late as a not-very-bright colleague from the town’s central saloon. Jory was also memorable around the same time in GWTW and 1938’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (as Injun Joe), though no one that I know of ever tried to call him the “King of Technicolor.” This was probably a good thing.

The movie’s oft-excerpted saloon fight — one of the longest in any Western — is about as elaborate as a Busby Berkeley production number, and just about anything you’ve ever seen in any such donnybrook (bursting beer barrels, broken glass, swinging chandeliers, bad guys burst second-floor railings as someone hits the pavement) happens here — not with genuine art (as with Berkeley) but certainly with energy. Michael Curtiz was efficient at turning out high-scale “product” at his home studio (I have 69 Curtiz movies in my collection, and he’s not even one of my favorites), and Dodge City is prototypical.

The Technicolor is a joy here, and there’s a shot of Flynn and de Havilland courting under a tree against the wide open spaces that is pretty much the moving image equivalent of those great still photos in coffee table books that celebrate vintage color cinematography. Come to think, I think I might have even seen this very shot in one or another of them (de Havilland’s colorful blouse sticks in the memory). So first and foremost, this is one beautiful-looking movie and proof that it doesn’t take a bona fide classic to provide a Blu-ray kick. It’s so clean and pristine that one gets a feeling that even the horses and cattle here utilize indoor plumbing or at least yearn for the privilege.
 

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