Streaming currently on Apple TV, HBO Max, Amazon video - Rod Bishop unpacks the success of A MINECRAFT MOVIE (Jared Hess, USA, 2025)

Jack Black as Steve, 

Reviews for A Minecraft Movie were generally poor. Kevin Maher in The Sunday Times (UK) rose to new heights of amusing degradation by calling it “a garish, headache-inducing…lumpen splodge of commercial propaganda”. 

During the film’s 2025 cinema release, boisterous audiences yelled back dialogue at the screen and constantly used their phones to send clips to Tik Tok. They also threw buckets of popcorn over one another and even tried smuggling chickens into the cinemas for the ‘chicken jockey’ joke. 

Over Christmas, a relative asked how it fared at the box office. Now in his 30s, he called the Minecraft computer game and its cinema audience “another generation” - meaning Gen Z.

I’d barely taken any notice of A Minecraft Movie, but vaguely remembered it doing quite well at the box office. So, I looked it up.

Jack Black as Steve; Jason Momoa as Garrett; Sebastian Hansen as Henry

In 2025, it was the highest grossing film in the USA, the UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia, scooping up nearly $1 billion worldwide. 

Made on a budget of $US150 million, and allowing for exhibition and distribution costs, it’s probably earned close to a $500 million profit for Warner Bros.

I also knew nothing of the Minecraft computer game, the source material for the film. It turns out to be a “sandbox” game where players are free to creatively interact, usually without any predetermined goal or narrative plot. You build your own worlds.

The game has different player modes – survival and creative (the two most popular) and hardcore and spectator. Many players can interactively participate at the same time. 

Minecraft is built on digital cube constructions, and designed to be creative with virtually endless gaming possibilities. Update patches are regularly supplied and new content is available. The game constantly evolves, empowering some players to become creators, educators and influencers. 

A cube sheep

Released in 2011, it’s become the biggest selling computer game ever - over 350 million copies and 200 million active players, and is distributed free in China. The total sales revenue is somewhere between $10 billion and $12 billion. Or at least 10 times more than the gross box office of A Minecraft Movie. 

There’s not much in the film to help understand why Jack Black is an A-list celebrity for both his acting and his band Tenacious D (even if the band nicks a heap from The Who). 

Black gives a wacky, enthusiastic performance as Steve, serving as a sort of pseudo-narrator to introduce us to a magic portal and into two of Minecraft’s ‘worlds’ - the Otherworld and the Netherworld. 

The rest of the cast of ‘roundlings’ (real humans like Steve) go through the portal, learning to ‘mine’ and ‘craft’, as they join Steve in an action-packed, adventurous war between good and bad creatures, all played by pixilated cube constructions.

Unfortunately, Jack Black also keeps breaking into song, and in one of the film’s better running jokes, his singing causes other cast members to sigh and roll their eyes. 

Another joke has the pixilated cube villager Nitwit from the Otherworld escape into the ‘real world’ where he has a romantic dinner with the school vice principal Marlene (Jennifer Coolidge). A waitress comes to collect their plates: “Are you finished?” she asks. Marlene responds: “No, I think he’s Swedish”.

Dustin Rowles took his son and his son’s friends to a screening where:

“…the audience shouted back at the screen with the kind of full-throated roar usually reserved for ‘Oh, Brad!’ or ‘DAMMIT JANET!’ at Rocky Horror midnight shows.” 

Rowles thinks the film:

…is so aggressively ridiculous, it makes American economic policy look coherent by comparison…

…. So-bad-they’re-good-movies are a dying genre, but somehow … [the box office for] A Minecraft Movie suggests it may be the biggest and most successful example of the genre since Dude, Where’s My Car? What does that mean for the state of the movie industry? Probably nothing good…I’m choosing to take it as a win. Until the studios inevitably try to intentionally make [so-bad-they’re-good-movies] and ruin them forever.” 

IL CINEMA RITROVATO - Max Ophuls, Lewis Milestone, Francois Leterrier, Ciro Duran.

Max Ophuls began his feature film career directing a modest comedy called Die Verliebte Firma/The Company's in Love in 1932. Somewhat strikingly, but perhaps showing Max's self-confidence, it's a comedy about film-making with much satirical material about how movies get made. So many people wanted a ticket to it that Il Cinema Ritrovato wouldn't accept bookings and made most of those who wanted to see it queue up in the Last Minute Line. 

The leads were well-known actors of the day. The lead female Anny Ahlers (above right) had star all over her performance. She is substituted into the film within a film when the then star finally bickers and walks out once too often. When she is finally tracked down and brought into the production there are  a series of moments, which in later years Max would have directed in a series of fluid tracking shots from room to room as each of the principals attempts to get her alone, and each no doubt has quite nefarious purposes in doing so. Mordant jokes about the casting couch weren't common in 1932. 

There are only 67 minutes of the film remaining, with at least seven minutes or so not located. The Murnau Institute has managed to put it back together, including incorporating material with different aspect ratios. 

Still Il Cinema Ritrovato can have moments that set you back a bit. I doubt I have ever seen anything as mediocre as La Paga, a 61 minute film by Ciro Duran from Colombia/Venezuela chronicling the life of an exploited peasant in the Andes. The film had already screened at this year's Cannes Classics and it's described as "a pioneering work of Latin American social and political cinema". Worthy perhaps but that doesn't say much about filming itself - the staging, the acting, the longueurs, the heavy emphasis..Still as with almost everything screened here it got some sort of good reception.

It was followed by a Warner Bros movie of the first order, Lewis Milestone's film of the Norwegian WW2 resistance, Edge of Darkness (1943). Robert Rossen's script is a long and complicated story whereby all of the locals, bar fish factory owner/collaborator Kaspar Torgersen finally unite in common purpose. Errol Flynn speaks with his perfect mid-Pacific accent throughout. An Australian connection was added to by Judith Anderson as a stern resistance leader and with Orry-Kelly's costumes ...just saying.

Simone Signoret, Reginald Kernan, Le Mauvais Coups

Finally I had to wonder what possesses a seemingly rational company, in the case the French major Pathe, to restore a film like Francois Leterrier's Les Mauvais Coups/Naked Autumn from 1961. This is a film with several sequences where the two lead characters go out hunting to kill birds. OK. Not a solitary occurrence. You only need to recall La Regle du Jeu and its hunting scene. But this film contains one sequence where clearly a bird is wounded and is pursued by its hunter who keeps firing and finally gets the bird, which is still moving, and in full view clubs it to death. Things have moved on folks.

On YouTube - Glimpses of THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (David Butler, USA, 1943) especially Errol Flynn singing and dancing

Thank Your Lucky Stars was made by Warner Bros as a WW2 fundraiser, with a slim plot involving two theatre producers played by Edward Everett Horton and S Z Sakall. The stars donated their salaries to the Hollywood Canteen founded by John Garfield and Bette Davis who appear in this film. The female who gets most attention is Dinah Shore who does four utterly anodyne numbers of forgettable songs.

The writing is credited to Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, later the authors of the comic masterpiece The Court Jester. They give Eddie Cantor far more and far better jokes than he deserves. Needless to say it's a film that has its moments. 

The numbers were written by Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser and one of them, sung in the film by Bette Davis, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" was nominated for an Oscar, but lost. The best number features a slim and skinny legged Errol Flynn singing and dancing to a stage number set in an English tavern. Flynn enters and cadges drinks while singing and launches into "That's What You Jolly Well Get,''. His Australian accent occasionally pokes through.

And here's the Bette Davis number.

It appears that Warners has done a 4K restoration of the whole 2hour 7 minute show which you can find when you hunt round the channels

WARNER BROS TURNS 100 IN 2023 - David Hare welcomes some new Blu-ray editions especially MILDRED PIERCE (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1945)

Jack Carson, Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierce

 2023 marks the 100th anniversary of Warner Bros.  

And that event brings a massive flush of new 4K re-scan restorations throughout the year, among them Rio Bravo, North by Northwest and - hopefully The Searchers with color restored to original values.

And Criterion’s re-issue of their 2012 Blu-ray of Mildred Pierce is being toppled for the anniversary with this new 4K scan UHD disc.

Apart from noting the pre-eminence of Joan over Bette for snatching first place in the race to new media, my mind was cast back to the early days of DVD itself, to 2003 when Warner released a brand new “restoration” of Mildred by a then guru of the new digital media which committed every crime from the book of how not to digitize analog 35mm sources. Limitless sharpening to accentuate edge details in the image (high frequency noise), black boosting and tonal manipulation that gave the narrowest dynamic range possible (worse than VHS tape from digibeta ) and king hit with massive grain removal to render the image effectively into plastic, the very sort of plastic indeed that Joanie herself might have enforced on her own tyrannical household to protect the furniture in plastic covers from grubby, shat-upon Cristina. 

Or so might have Mildred to preserve her couches from Veda’s grubby paws (“that’s nice dear, what is it?” “It’s Chopin’s Valse Brillante. Mother. That means brilliant waltz.” “Yes dear.”)

Now all those digital crimes from 30 odd years ago are washed away with a new 4K from first gen elements. And Steiner’s big striding award-winning score in full blown lossles PCM mono.

I for one cannot wait.

On Blu-ray - David Hare enthuses over Errol Flynn's swashbuckling in THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN (Vincent Sherman, USA, 1948)

Mary Stuart, Errol Flynn, The Adventures of Don Juan

Errol Flynn's next-to-last swashbuckler, as Don Juan with Mary Stuart as Catherine. Below the female lead Viveca Lindfors as his compatriot, Queen Margaret of Spain. From the Warner Archive Blu-ray of The Adventures of Don Juan from 1948. 

Errol not only looks older but thinner here, although still beautiful. And despite a ten year gap from his heyday in pictures mostly directed by his loathed Curtiz and Walsh, he can still swash the buckle and do his own stunts more than convincingly. There are even moments between the relentless comedy when he looks again like an axiom of the cinema. 

 

At Errol's insistence producer Jerry Wald didn't engage Curtiz as Warners originally intended but gave him Vincent Sherman as a director more likely to allow far more license than usual for Errol to indulge in pretty broad comedy - for better or worse. Watching his facial tics here including the eye rolling, and big double takes to the camera, he also seems to be giving a backwards looking, semi-referential impersonation of his earlier persona. Despite this the Don Juan screenplay is, like the 1938 The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex set in that regent's age and the sequence of his (and Leporello’s, played by Alan Hale) first entrance to London is re-filmed literally shot for shot in replica of Curtiz' superb near-opening sequence of Essex triumphantly entering Madrid in his 1938 masterpiece. 

 

Viveca Lindfors

Curtiz also had the luxury of ace DoP Sol Polito who gave him a mind-bendingly beautiful sudden crane swerving to close up onto the first shot of Olivia de Havilland. Sherman now, and the screenplay for Don Juan simply keeps the parade going where it times out almost to the second in parallel with the ten-year prior narrative from the Elizabethan setting. Clearly we're now in a parallel world for Errol and the whole historical tradition in classical movies. 

 

Maybe it was Errol himself who wanted to recast the sometime somber drama of the Essex screenplay with a lighter comic view. Certainly the 1948 movie doesn't always play so well, nor reach as high as his earlier pictures although Lindfors gives her Margaret a degree of humanity that Bette Davis didn't appear to want to tarnish her character as Elizabeth from the earlier Maxwell Anderson-based screenplay.

 

So Don Juan may not be a peak Warners' escapade but it's worth it for the last dignified performance from Flynn. It’s another title of great interest from Sherman's own underrated work. And not least yet another peak three strip Technicolor title with costumes by Leah Rhodes (for the men) and Travilla (for the women.)

HOLLYWOOD'S MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION - Geoff Mayer examines the production of THE MALTESE FALCON (John Huston, 1941) and the Final (Missing) Scene

Editor's Note. This is a second extract from Geoff Mayer's new book Hollywood’s Melodramatic Imagination: Film Noir, the Western and Other Genres from the 1920s to the 1950s © 2022 Geoff Mayer . It is reprinted by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. mcfarlandbooks.com. The first extract  On GILDA and getting around the Production Code from the Chapter titled Film Noir, Virtue, the Abyss and Nothingness can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

************************

Production of The Maltese Falcon began on Monday June 9, 1941, with a budget of $381,000 and a filming period allocation of 36 days. While this was a tight schedule for a first time director, the budget and filming period indicates that it was not intended as a B film. Huston’s preparations were meticulous as he sketched out each scene before filming began and he also shot the script in sequence. Over three days and a long Saturday night in the middle of July, Huston filmed the final confrontation between Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor). On July 18, following the burning of the studio “ship,” the La Paloma, on the back lot and a brief scene between Spade and Casper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) on Stage 19, the picture officially closed. 

The film’s climax involved the five principal characters: Spade, O’Shaughnessy, Gutman, Wilmer, and Cairo. It was one of the last sequences to be filmed and it consumed almost 20 minutes of the film’s 100 minute running time. This began with them waiting for the arrival of the Maltese Falcon, the discovery that it is a fake and the final confrontation between Spade and O’Shaughnessy. It ends with Spade handing her over to Dundy and Polhaus. As producer Henry Blanke wrote to Hal Wallis, this consisted of one “solid sequence of thirty-five pages of script and every member of the cast is in it.” The climactic confrontation between Spade and Brigid involved eight pages of dialogue, three long days of filming as the actors repeated the scene again and again to match the change of camera angles. Finally, the film’s epilogue, with Brigid looking “like a sleepwalker” according to the screenplay directions“,…led off by the law.”This final scene took seven takes to satisfy the director.

"...Spade, O’Shaughnessy, Gutman, Wilmer (missing), and Cairo..."

 

After controlling the events for much of the film, Spade’s vulnerability is exposed in the final moments. His determination to survive, and not be a “sap,” becomes the deciding factor in his decision to turn Brigid in. There are, however, significant differences between the novel and Huston’s version. For example, Spade tells her in the novel that he is going to survive and that she is going to take the fall: “One of us has got to take it, after the talking those birds [Gutman and Cairo] will do. They’d hang me for sure. You’re likely to get a better break.” Huston omitted this passage. Similarly, after Brigid tells Spade in the novel that he should know whether he loves her or not, Spade replies:

“I don’t. It’s easy enough to be nuts about you.” He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. “But I don’t know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won’t. I’ve been through it before—when it lasted that long. Then what?”

 

Huston replaces Hammett’s pragmatic cynicism with the more romantic response from Spade: “Maybe I do [love you].”

 

Spade’s torment is evident in his appearance (loose tie, button undone) and body movements (head lowered, shoulders slumped, wide-eyed). After he tells her he “won’t play the sap for you,” she declares her love for him:

 

Brigid: Oh, How can you do this to me, Sam? Surely, Mr. Archer wasn’t as much to you as….

[Spade, distressed, walks away and slumps in a chair. He explains that when a man’s partner gets killed he’s supposed to do something about it. Also, because he is in the detective business, it is bad business to let the killer get away with it. Finally, he explains, he has no reason he can trust her. Staring into space, he continues]:

Spade: All those are on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won’t argue about that. But look at the number of them. What have we got on the other side? All we’ve got is that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.

Brigid: You know whether you love me or not.

Spade: Maybe I do. I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over, but that’ll pass.

[Spade stands up and pulls Brigid roughly towards him]

Spade: If all I’ve said doesn’t mean anything to you, then forget it, and we’ll make it just this. I won’t because all of me wants to, regardless of consequences and because you’ve counted on that with me, the same as you counted on that with all the others.

[Spade responds to Brigid’s kiss as the doorbell rings and Spade tells the police to come in].

 

Brigid enters the lift (above) with the police as Spade walks away. However, Huston’s script, in accordance with Hammett’s novel, contained a final scene. This takes place in Spade’s office where he tries to explain to his secretary, Effie (Lee Patrick) why he turned Brigid in. Effie, unconvinced, stands by the window, mouth twisted, eyes reproachable:

 

Effie: You did that Sam, to her?

Spade: She did kill Miles, Angel….

Effie: Don’t, please—don’t touch me.

 

A doorknob rattles in the corridor. Effie goes out to see, comes back, and announces Iva Archer. The story ends as Spade, with a shiver, prepares to reunite with his mistress, his dead partner’s wife.

 

Spade: Send her in.

[This effectively replicates the dialogue in Hammett’s novel]

Effie: “I know you’re right. But don’t touch me now—not now.”

Spade’s face became pale as his collar.

[The novel concludes with Effie]:

She said in a small flat voice: “Iva is here.”

Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly, “Yes,” he said, and shivered. “Well, send her in.”

 

Huston included Hammett’s epilogue in his shooting script but he never filmed it. In an Inter-Office Communication at Warner Brothers, dated July 19, 1941, unit manager on The Maltese Falcon Al Alleborn, wrote that filming was completed on the 34th shooting day, two days ahead of schedule with a budget outlay of $327,182, which was $54,000 under budget. In his memo Alleborn noted that yesterday, Friday, the Huston company had a 2:00 p.m. shooting call, having worked until 2:30 a.m. the night before on Stage 19. The first shot was undertaken at 3:35 p.m. and the filming completed at 2:00 a.m.with 14 camera set-ups and nearly 8 pages of dialogue completed. Alleborn declared that “the picture is finished, as stated above, but, at Blanke’s and Huston’s request we eliminated the ending, as written in the script, which takes place on Stage 3 in SPADE’S OFFICE. These gentlemen feel they can cut the picture without this ending, and if necessary they can always get BOGART. Their feeling, however, is that the picture will not need the ending written for SPADE’S OFFICE.”

 

Instead they returned a week later with additional filming to complete the revised ending which appears in the release print. This shows Brigid, Dundy (Barton MacLane) at her elbow, moving towards the door while Spade remains behind with Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond) and the fake statue. The actors were required to return to the studio to film a line added by script supervisor Meta Wilde, also known as Meta Carpenter Wilde. Later Huston claimed it was Bogart’s idea:

 

Polhaus: [picking up the statue] Um, [its] heavy. What is it?

Spade: The stuff that dreams are made of.

 

If they had filmed the final scene in Huston’s script, with Spade preparing to see his mistress, the film would be much different. By eliminating this scene, as Ann Sperber and Eric Lax point out:

The final note, rather than amorality, was of honor among detectives. Find your partner’s killer even if it means sending over your lover; be true to your code even if it means breaking your heart. Spade has done the Right Thing.

 

The decision to eliminate Hammett’s epilogue satisfied one of Joseph Breen’s initial objections to the film. In a memo dated May 27, 1941, he notified Jack Warner that Huston’s final script “could not be approved under the provisions of the Code because of several important objectionable details.”These included any indication of an “illicit sex affair” between Spade and Brigid and Spade and Iva, especially any scenes showing “physical contact between Iva and Spade,” any suggestion that Cairo is “a pansy,” especially any indication of “lavender perfume,” “high-pitched voice” and the deletion of scenes “21 and 115 where Cairo should not appear effeminate while rubbing the boy’s [Wilmer] temple,” the “fade-out of Spade and Brigid is unacceptable because of the definite indication of an illicit sex affair. There must be no indication that Brigid and Spade are spending the night together Spade’s apartment,” “Spade’s speech about the District Attorneys [sic] should be rewritten to get away from characterizing most District Attorneys as men who will do anything to further their careers. This is important,”“nothing suggestive in Spade’s eyeing of Brigid,”“no flavor of a previous sex affair [between Spade and Brigid],”and the “action of Spade putting his hand on Effie’s hip must not be offensive.” Breen’s last objection confirms that Hammett’s epilogue was included in the final draft submitted to the PCA.

Spade and Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr)

 

The reviews for Huston’s film were uniformly good. Variety applauded the film as “one of the best examples of actionful and suspenseful melodramatic story telling in cinematic form” in their October 1, 1941, review. The term “melodrama,” or “melodramatic,” is used three times in the review and it noted that it is a remake of the 1931 film with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels. The review concluded by noting that the film “is an A attraction in its class, and will hit biz of the same kind in all bookings.” However, Warners did not treat the film as an A attraction, as producer Henry Blanke complained to Hal Wallis:

I should think that the company after … discovering what they had in their possession would go a little after this picture but … it “sneaks in”—and in spite all this makes a success.

Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), Cairo (Peter Lorre)

 

The failure by the studio to promote the film also mystified Bosley Crowther in his October 4 review in The New York Times. Crowther began his review by pointing out that “Warners have been strangely bashful about their mystery film ‘The Maltese Falcon.’” Crowther, normally a hostile critic of genre films, described the film as “supremely hardboiled” although he viewed the film as “a combination of American ruggedness with the suavity of the English crime school—a blend of mind and muscle—plus a slight touch of pathos.” On October 13, author, film critic and art historian Richard Griffith, in a review titled “‘Maltese Falcon’ Rated Top ‘Number’ in New York” wrote that although the “biting performances of Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez made the 1931 film memorable,” the “new version is the best because it is the most cynical, depraved and brilliantly melodramatic. There isn’t an honest motive among the entire cast—which is why we accept the characters as real people.” Hammett, particularly, enjoyed Griffith’s response as he sent a copy of the review to his wife. Long time Los Angeles Times film critic Philip K. Scheuer also celebrated the film as the “finest detective-mystery movie ever turned out by a Hollywood studio” and he noted that “you’ve never seen a detective like Sam Spade. … In private practice, not above a shady deal or two.”Despite a lack of advertising, the film fared well at the box office, grossing $967,000 domestically and $805,000 internationally.

On Blu-ray - David Hare rhapsodises over Kay Francis in MARY STEVENS, M.D. (Lloyd Bacon, USA, 1933)

The sublime Kay Francis (above) wearing her early working class doctor's gown, designed of course by Warners' Orry-Kelly, who gives her another half dozen knockout gowns all accentuating her preternaturally small bosom and perfect neck and chest. She's even given a butch short haircut for her first internship scenes in this terrific Lloyd Bacon pre-code First National/Warner programmer from 1933, Mary Stevens, M.D.

One of seven highly desirable Blu-ray releases from the Archive line for this month of November.

The movie itself is a high paced action packed eye opener at 71 minutes and a surpassing turn of semi-stock characters include go-to Warner bad guy, here cum good guy, Lyle Talbot (who ended his career doing Ed Wood parts in Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster). DoP Sid Hickox (the GREAT Sid Hickox) lights him like Gable and almost makes him look sexy.

But nobody from any of the five (or is it now six?) sexes can match Kay Francis.

It's hard to believe she had just bounced from her previous Paramount glamour period, finishing with no less a masterpiece than Lubitsch’s 1932 Trouble in Paradise, only to land happily in the lap of Warner's Depression Era working class survive and beat-the-bastards cycle of crowd stirrers (Warner must have single-handedly won the election for FDR in 1933).

Kay is never less than compelling in the part, with best gal pal support from two terrific actors of the era, Glenda Farrell, and an all too rare part from the legendary Thelma Todd who shines in this picture, as though nothing had ever gone wrong with her terrible life.

And to wrap it all up, a totally breathtaking, mouth watering, eye-burning transfer from an original Nitrate neg, presumably deposited with the Library of Congress back when such a transfer as here looks like it was printed yesterday, still retaining every grain of silver gelatin and vibrating with that dusky pearlescent glow only 35mm Nitrate could deliver.

I would place this gem's transfer at the very top of the list of O-Neg nitrate titles delivered in either 1080p or 4K 2160p. It beggars me to even wonder how a 2160/4K UHD transfer could be any better than this.

Streaming and on DVD - Tom Ryan files a postscript to his study of Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott WESTBOUND (USA, 1959)

 

The Ranown Cycle, Postscript  

“I think Randy might have ended up with most of the leading ladies [in the Ranown cycle], if they were available. Because if you don’t have that going for you, you’re a pretty stuffy guy. I thought the Scott character, before the pictures we made with him, was a pretty stuffy guy.” 

                                                                                    (Budd Boetticher, 1969) (1)

 

Westbound was shot in September/October, 1957, between the filming of Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone. It was made for Warner Bros., which, 18 months earlier, had distributed the first film in the Ranown cycle, Seven Men from Now. 

 

Randolph Scott, apparently, wasn’t all that interested in making Westbound.  But, according to Robert Nott (2), his contract with Warners was hanging over his head. He’d extensively expanded his repertoire of Westerns under the company’s logo during the 1950s and now it required one final film from him. Director Budd Boetticher offered his services after the actor came to him for advice. 

 

Aside from Scott and Boetticher, though, neither Ranown nor any of the other key personnel who’d worked on the Ranown cycle were involved. Likewise, the Lone Pine locations that were central to the look of most of the other films were gone, replaced by the Warner Ranch at Calabasas in California. Still, numerous overviews include Westbound as part of the cycle.(3)

 

Indeed, the timing of the film’s production and release might suggest that it belongs with the other Ranown films. It was shot during the same time period that they were in production. Then, having sat on Warners’ shelves until March, 1959, it was released a month after the opening of Ride Lonesome (and almost a year before Comanche Station). 

 

Add to that the incongruity to which I alluded in the first of my essays about the Ranown cycle: if it’s called the Ranown cycle, shouldn’t all the films that are included in it have been made by Ranown Pictures Corp.? Seven Men from Now wasn’t, yet it’s generally seen as part of the cycle. So why not Westbound?

A not especially radical proposal to sort out the confusion: perhaps the whole idea of the Ranown cycle should be abandoned and the sequence of films simply re-labelled the Boetticher-Scott cycle, for the director-actor partnership is the single recurring factor for all of the films in the unofficial cycle. Thus redefined, the cycle could then include Westbound, even if it is, as is generally agreed, inferior to the other half dozen films Boetticher made with Scott, especially those written by Burt Kennedy and produced by Harry Joe Brown. 

Budd Boetticher

 

                                                            ***

 

To Westbound. It might not belong in the same class as the films in the category which I’ll now refer to as “the so-called Ranown cycle” (4), but it is of interest: in particular, for the way the discord driving its tale of a divided town is effectively a displacement of the hostilities underpinning the Civil War raging elsewhere. 

 

The scars that the war left on the American landscape – and on its cultural mindset – is a recurring feature of the entire Western genre, including earlier Scott films, such as To the Last Man (1933), The Texans (1938), Virginia City (1940) and Belle Starr (1941). The actor also frequently played characters from the South who’d found themselves displaced after the surrender of General Lee, as in Santa Fe (1951), Hangman’s Knot (1952), The Man Behind the Gun (1952), The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953) and Thunder Over the Plains (1952). 

 

Anyone interested in studying the ramifications of that war (1861 – 1865), where Americans took up arms against each other and more than 750,000 died, might find it useful to reflect on the various ways in which the Western grapples with it. Almost everywhere that cowboys roam, there’s evidence either of the national tensions that preceded the conflict on battlefields around the country or of the legacy that it left in its wake. 

 

In the form, for example, of renegade soldiers, who had, in the name of their cause (or simply because they’d been enabled by the lawlessness all around), taken it upon themselves to execute innocent civilians, fellow Americans. Long before such perpetrators were known as “domestic terrorists”. Or of the divisive differences between ordinary folks that not only led to the war but have also persisted through to the present day.

 

Randolph Scott

Westbound is set in 1864. Scott plays John Hayes, a captain in the Union army who used to be the line superintendent for the Overland Stage business. Under instruction from his superiors (in the scene pictured above), he’s returned to his post with the company. His task is to ensure the delivery of gold bullion from California, which is to be used by the Union to buy guns, ammunition and equipment. The opening scroll explains the importance of that mission to both sides: the war has arrived at a stalemate, gold is “the lifeblood of both armies”, and it has become vital for the Confederate forces to prevent its delivery to their enemy.

 

After being assigned to the Overland job, Hayes goes to Julesberg, in Colorado Territory, where he used to live before the war took him away. Once leaning towards the North, the locals’ sympathies have now shifted Southwards, and Hayes’s arrival, alongside Corporal Rod Miller (Michael Dante), a young soldier who’s lost his arm in the war, causes the simmering hostilities to boil over. 

Karen Steele, Michael Dante

Whereas most of the townspeople simply give them the cold shoulder, Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan), an old friend of Hayes who appears to be the owner of the Palace Hotel, the town saloon, is actively plotting to sabotage the efforts to get the stage to run on time. He explains to the cold-blooded Mace (Michael Pate), his hired enforcer, that their methods can include anything “short of bloodshed”. 

 

But Mace operates according to his own agenda which makes Putnam something of a man caught in the middle, torn between his commitment to the Confederate cause and his antipathy to Mace’s methods. The enforcer’s crimes include cold-blooded murder (the shooting of Corporal Miller) and an attack on a stagecoach, which leads to the death of all the passengers on board, including a young girl and several other innocent civilians.

 

Michael Pate (centre)

Written by Berne Giler (Guns of Diablo, Midas Run) and based on a story he wrote with Albert Shelby Le Vino (a veteran from the silent era), Westbound makes the workings of personal conscience its key issue, even if it never develops that as fully as it might have. Almost every scene pivots on a character making a choice and many of them are crucial pointers to personal moralities. 

This is clear in the case of Putnam. In part, his hostility towards Hayes stems from his misplaced jealousy about the former relationship between his wife, Norma (Virginia Mayo), and his old friend. And he’s clearly implicated in Mace’s villainy. But just as he’s made sympathetic by his idealism, so too are several of Mace’s henchmen in their expressed disapproval of their boss’s proposed attack on the doomed stagecoach. “What about the little girl?” one of them asks. They have a choice to make. And, along similar lines, the townspeople’s sympathies for the South lead them to vacillate about which side they should be on while Mace and his men do their dirty work unimpeded. 

 

Only Hayes and Mace remain uncomplicated, Hayes as morally righteous as Mace is evil incarnate. The latter explains to Putnam that he couldn’t care less about the Civil War and is just waiting for an opportunity to wreak havoc and turn the situation to his own advantage (he’s a variation on a carpetbagger). 

Unfortunately, none of the characters’ quandaries or relationships is given anything more than a perfunctory treatment, perhaps because of the production circumstances under which the film was made (in a rush, Warner Bros. attempting to cash in on the Boetticher-Scott partnership). And the film’s running time, a scant 72 minutes, suggests that any hope the studio might have had for the production was abandoned in the editing room. 

 

The result is that potentially interesting dramatic material is nipped in the bud. For example, like The Bounty Hunter, made four years earlier, and Decision at Sundown, Westbound echoes High Noon’s concern with the townspeople’s choices regarding whom they should support. But far too little is made of this and their eventual decision to side with Hayes seems to be simply laying some groundwork for their involvement in the final shoot-out in the streets of Julesberg rather than a result borne of conscientious thought about the principles at stake.

Virginia Mayo, Karen Steele

The two women in the film, Norma and Miller’s wife, Jeannie (Karen Steele), both end up as widows. Hayes remains properly aloof from Norma throughout, and is fatherly towards the Millers as he takes responsibility for their marriage by encouraging the disabled soldier not to seek pity but to make his own way in the world. He even provides him and Jeannie with work they can do together, running a stagecoach station after Mace and his gang’s rampage has led to the departure of Overland employees from the territory.

 

However, after Miller’s death – although not until the film’s closing scene – Jeannie emerges as a potential love interest for Hayes. After he has packed Norma into a stagecoach on her way back east, he turns to a now-interested Jeannie and tells her that, since she’s still in charge of an Overland station, “I’ll drop in on you from time to time, if you don’t mind.” “I don’t mind,” she replies as he rides off into the landscape. One might say, given the discomfort of Scott’s characters when confronted with the possibility of a romantic relationship, the relative safety of the landscape.

 

Boetticher’s film looks handsome, cinematographer John Peverell Marley’s impressive compositions using the outdoor locations to good effect to give a sense of the geography of the action and the characters’ relationships to each other in it. But David Buttolph’s score is, as Nott observes, “overly jaunty” (5) and seems to make a mockery of the melancholy aspects of the material in which decent Americans are pitted against other decent Americans and exploited by the villains amongst them.

 

For his part, Scott was looking his years – he was approaching 60 when the film was shot – and he simply seems to be going through the motions here. It’s not that he’s not up to the task: he’s carrying an iconic history with him. It’s just that he’s done everything that’s required of him here many times before and the strain is starting to show, especially given the pace at which the film was reportedly shot. Fortunately, there were still good times ahead.

 

(1)       Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event, Signet, USA, 1969,            p. 58

(2)       Robert Nott, The Films of Randolph Scott, McFarland & Company, Inc., North Carolina, 2004, p. 210

(3)       Click on, for example, to an enthusiast's blog, this IMDb page & Emmanuel Levy’s entry on his website

(4)       For commentary on the films of “the Ranown cycle”, click on 

Seven Men from Now

&

The Tall T

&

Decision at Sundown

&

          Buchanan Rides Alone

      &

Ride Lonesome

      &

Comanche Station

(5)       Nott, op. cit., p. 210