Desperado Waiting for a Train

Hffing and puffing to resuscitate a long-moribund genre, James Mangold manages to imbue a 50-year-old western with the semblance of life. Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma isn’t as startling a resurrection job as his Johnny Cash biopic, but it does send a saddlebag full of western tropes skittering into the 21st century.

The original 3:10 to Yuma—newly remastered for DVD in conjunction with the remake—was an “adult” western, shot in black-and-white with a pair of second-tier stars, Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, as the charismatic outlaw and the beleaguered cattle rancher reincarnated in the remake by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. Suspense trumped violence and chin music rivaled fisticuffs (much of the movie was confined to a single hotel room) as the rancher, not altogether willingly, assumed responsibility for ensuring that the outlaw boarded the train to the federal pen at Yuma.

The original 3:10 to Yuma—newly remastered for DVD in conjunction with the remake—was an “adult” western, shot in black-and-white with a pair of second-tier stars, Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, as the charismatic outlaw and the beleaguered cattle rancher reincarnated in the remake by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. Suspense trumped violence and chin music rivaled fisticuffs (much of the movie was confined to a single hotel room) as the rancher, not altogether willingly, assumed responsibility for ensuring that the outlaw boarded the train to the federal pen at Yuma.

Based on a story by Elmore Leonard, 3:10 to Yuma had an obvious kinship to High Noon, which appeared five years earlier. In both, a lone citizen is pitted against an insouciant criminal (and his gang), as well as confounded by a social order too craven to defend itself: the various moral issues are subsumed in the 11th Commandment that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. If 3:10 to Yuma lacked High Noon’s stripped-down drama, it strove for additional psychological complexity in contrasting two American types: the stolid working-stiff everyman and the charming hipster sociopath. In one of its most resonant bits, Yumajuxtaposes Heflin’s dutiful marriage with Ford’s passionate seduction of a lonely barmaid.

Mangold sticks close to Delmer Daves’ 1957 version but, given an extra half-hour in which to play, opens up the original scenario to include a run-in with hostile Apaches and an interlude involving the construction of the train tracks. The railroad, as personified by corporate official Dallas Roberts, is the real villain, indifferent to anything other than property value. “Notice he didn’t mention all the lives I’ve taken,” Crowe remarks when he is first arrested and Roberts recites the litany of his crimes. Crowe’s second-in-command (vividly played by Ben Foster) may be a sadistic nut job, but Crowe is a courtly gent with the soul of an artist. (Also the chops, as evinced by his post-coital sketch of the barmaid’s naked back.) When a captor insults his mother, he chalks his vengeance up to chivalry: “Even bad men love their mamas.”

Back in the day, America used the western to ponder certain things—among them the nature of right and wrong and the basis of the social contract. Mangold’s movie is certainly louder in its ruminations than Daves’. Like, how does a man get to be a man? The key conflict isn’t even between Bale and Crowe, but between the ineffectual rancher—who is not only hobbled by debt, but also by a leg wound suffered as a Union infantryman—and his 14-year-old son (Logan Lerman). All it takes is one look at Dad’s floppy hat, compared to Crowe’s stiff-brimmed derby, to grasp the depth of the son’s shame.

Based on a story by Elmore Leonard, 3:10 to Yuma had an obvious kinship to High Noon, which appeared five years earlier. In both, a lone citizen is pitted against an insouciant criminal (and his gang), as well as confounded by a social order too craven to defend itself: the various moral issues are subsumed in the 11th Commandment that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. If 3:10 to Yuma lacked High Noon’s stripped-down drama, it strove for additional psychological complexity in contrasting two American types: the stolid working-stiff everyman and the charming hipster sociopath. In one of its most resonant bits, Yumajuxtaposes Heflin’s dutiful marriage with Ford’s passionate seduction of a lonely barmaid.

Mangold sticks close to Delmer Daves’ 1957 version but, given an extra half-hour in which to play, opens up the original scenario to include a run-in with hostile Apaches and an interlude involving the construction of the train tracks. The railroad, as personified by corporate official Dallas Roberts, is the real villain, indifferent to anything other than property value. “Notice he didn’t mention all the lives I’ve taken,” Crowe remarks when he is first arrested and Roberts recites the litany of his crimes. Crowe’s second-in-command (vividly played by Ben Foster) may be a sadistic nut job, but Crowe is a courtly gent with the soul of an artist. (Also the chops, as evinced by his post-coital sketch of the barmaid’s naked back.) When a captor insults his mother, he chalks his vengeance up to chivalry: “Even bad men love their mamas.”