DVR Diary: ONE FOOT IN HELL (1960)

Shane should have turned Alan Ladd's career around,but while it's now his best known role, it didn't reverse his long-term decline. Immediately afterward he was still making self-evident A pictures like Delmer Daves's Drum Beat. But by the end of the Fifties his pictures were little better than Bs, and the man himself was in clear physical decline. In 1960 his face looks bloated and uncomfortable, and in this particular picture a certain bitterness comes through because his part requires it. In a script co-written by future TV mogul Aaron Spelling, Ladd plays a wronged man who turns stone cold evil -- who becomes an anti-Shane. It's the "one bad day" theory of character development; Mitch Garrett (Ladd) comes to town with a sick wife going into labor. There is room at the inn, but Mitch has to use his last ready cash to pay in advance. He finds a doctor who prescribes some crucial medicine, but the druggist demands $1.87 up front. A desperate Mitch pulls a gun, grabs the stuff and runs for the hotel, but the druggist cries thief and gets the sheriff to intercept our man. Mitch convinces them to let the doctor straighten things out, but by the time they return to the hotel Mrs. Mitch has died. The conscience-stricken townspeople think the best thing to do for Mitch is give him a job. The sheriff goes so far as to make him a deputy, and within a few years Mitch is a solid citizen. We learn soon enough that Mitch is nursing a long-term grudge. He means to ruin the town by robbing the main bank at the time the cattle drive comes to town. Gradually he recruits a team, redeeming a drunken cartoonist and fellow ex-Confederate, Dan Keats (Don Murray), while drawing more sinister men into his orbit. They are all expendable men; Mitch expects to lead a posse and exterminate his partners before taking the money and running, but he doesn't expect Dan to grow a conscience or fall in love with a saloon girl (Dolores Michaels) who's also part of the master plan....

Ladd is the whole show here, and the drama of watching One Foot in Hell is waiting for him to crack. Its small triumph is that he doesn't. He never seeks to vindicate himself beyond muttering grimly about that $1.87. There's no soul-baring speech, no displays of obsessive grief after his first despair over the wife's death. Frankly, after seeing Ladd emote then you'll be glad he doesn't bother later. But his cold performance is the right approach to a character who, arguably like the actor about his career, doesn't give a damn about anything anymore. It brings Ladd almost back full-circle to his star-making mostly emotionless performance in This Gun For Hire, and it's one of his most badass performances precisely because he's so cold, or numb. It still isn't a very good film, but at the tail end of a great era for "adult" westerns James B. Clark's film is one of the darkest. Clark is competent enough, but the film's most spectacular or alarming moment is most likely a second-unit achievement: a storefront explodes just as a herd of cattle is moving up the street. Animals clearly were harmed during this production, but deplorable as that is, it highlight's the picture's take-no-prisoners approach. One Foot was Ladd's penultimate starring role in Hollywood, and if his public was abandoning him, this was him abandoning them, and there's something almost tragically heroic about it.

DRUM BEAT (1954)

Among fans of 1950s Westerns, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher have their multitudes of champions, so I always like to say a word for Delmer Daves. If not their peer, Daves was definitely the third master to emerge during the genre's golden decade. Like Mann and Boetticher, Daves's western work was chronologically specific to the decade, spanning from Broken Arrow in 1950 through The Hanging Tree in 1959 before he switched to romance pictures like A Summer Place. Often his own writer, Daves was arguably more of an auteur than his peers in terms of creative control, and his name meant enough to be placed above the title of his big-budget Cinemascope western, a star vehicle for an Alan Ladd fresh from Shane and a kind of perverse do-over of Broken Arrow. But while that film established an archetype of a noble Indian in Jeff Chandler's Cochise, Drum Beat gives us Charles Bronson as an intransigent monster who predictably steals the film from Ladd and captured Daves's imagination in a way that muddies whatever message the director meant his movie to have.

"The phrase or slogan of 'peaceful co-existence' is fastening on the public mind in a drum-beat sort of way, beginning softly, slowly, and increasing in tempp and force....The slogan needs exact definition. 'Peaceful co-existence,' conceivably, could become peace-at-a-price -- any price!

The Milwaukee Sentinel, Nov. 18 1954.

The metaphor is just a coincidence -- the sort of thing you get when you search for "Drum Beat" circa November 1954 on the Google News Archive -- but it gives you an idea of the political environment in which Drum Beat was released, with the Cold War still going strong despite Joe McCarthy's fall from grace. Daves had made a film about a peacemaker. In 1872, Johnny MacKay (Ladd) has been summoned to Washington by President Grant. In an interestingly awkward scene, a guard outside the White House invites McKay to stroll right into the Executive Mansion. In the lobby, an old man notes his gun and knife and asks if he means to shoot the President. The oldster goes on to joke about Grant's smoking and drinking before identifying himself as the President's father. Grant himself ushers McKay into a lavish sitting room, where he commissions MacKay to negotiate peace with the Modoc tribe in the Lost River valley. There's already a treaty, but war chief Captain Jack (Bronson) refuses to acknowledge it. MacKay will have to deal with Jack despite the skepticism of a pacifist minister who champions Indian rights. Jack calls himself a captain because he collects pieces of army uniforms and decorates himself with medals plundered off military victims. Not all Modocs agree with him, while some are even more extreme than he, but he bullies and blusters his way to power. He also seems to have some white settlers under his control, having provided them with Indian wives. There's an air of appeasement in the valley that might make 1954 viewers see Captain Jack as a stand-in for the Commies, and his success as an insurgent against incompetent army attacks also makes him a kind of prophecy of the Vietcong and other guerrilla foes of America. But the message of the movie seems to be that we should never stop trying to negotiate peace with hardcases like Jack, no matter how risky it becomes -- and in Jack's case, it's very risky for an erstwhile Indian fighter like Johnny MacKay, who upholds the President's policy despite demands for violent reprisal from hothead whites, one of whom (Robert Keith) starts a war with a vengeance shooting of the Modoc who murdered his wife.

For the record, Daves didn't write Broken Arrow. It's possible that his Drum Beat screenplay is a critique of what was probably still regarded as his greatest triumph as a director. He seems to consciously retreat from the noble-Indian archetype, forefronting a savage enemy who talks in the still-convention pidgin Injun lingo. Indeed, Daves stages scenes in which Captain Jack confronts the brother-sister team of good Modocs, Manok (Anthony Caruso) and Toby (Marisa Pavan) in a Modoc camp -- and they all talk what Jack calls "Boston English" at each other. Jack even tells his supporters at one point to talk amongst themselves in Boston English so the rest of the Modocs won't know their plans. It's especially embarrassing to see Bronson talk this way after seeing him play a chief without the dialect in Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow, but his whole performance here (apparently in his first role under his new stage name) is wildly over the top, yet unfocused. Most of the time Jack is a Magua-esque villain, but there's an odd moment when he's nearly convinced to negotiate peace sincerely, only to be bullied back into intransigence by one of his underlings. Finally, after presenting Jack as an iredeemable monster through most of the picture, Daves stretches out the finish after MacKay captures Jack alive so Ladd and Bronson can have a scene comparing their visions of the afterlife and the two men can shake hands before Jack is hanged, as if the "Captain" had been a noble adversary all along. It's as if Daves didn't know what to make with the character after Bronson was through with it, and the auteur's confusion makes Jack's symbolic role, if he really has any, even more unclear. The only clear message that survives the story is the idea that individuals, not entire populations, are to blame for war. This point is made when MacKay criticizes calls for all-out extermination of the Modocs made after Jack had treacherously attacked McKay himself and other negotiators. Daves may not be as sensitive as his Broken Arrow collaborators, but he doesn't want to be seen as an Indian-hater either. He even teases a Broken Arrow style romance between MacKay and Toby, though the hero's heart ultimately belongs to a white girl, and Toby gets her head bashed in with a rock.

When Daves later cast Alan Ladd in The Badlanders, a Westernization of The Asphalt Jungle, the star promptly had the picture stolen from him by Ernest Borgnine. The record suggests that Daves had little more idea what to do with Ladd, for different reasons, than he had for Bronson. Part of the problem with Drum Beat is that the picture has a story, but not a plot. That is, Johnny MacKay never develops after that promising scene in the White House, and Ladd quickly reverts to his typically inert self. If you wonder why he never really capitalized on Shane, here's part of the proof. More might have been made of the romantic triangle, but Daves is so mesmerized by Bronson's rampage that Pavan interacts with him more and Audrey Dalton, as the white girl, practically disappears from the picture. If Drum Beat is about the difficulties created by an intractable leader, that character itself created crippling difficulties for the picture. That insoluble problem wastes Daves's characteristically scenic location work -- a few soundstage scenes notwithstanding -- but then again Encore Western's typical pan-and-scan presentation was a waste of the film's pictorial splendor and some of its dramatic energy. It might suffice as an outdoor adventure -- Ladd and Bronson have a nice little fight while being carried down a rushing stream and there's a neat portrait in futility as the army storms Jack's hilltop stronghold and is shot to pieces -- but Drum Beat is the weakest Daves western that I've seen so far and regrettable proof that while Daves still deserves recognition as the third master of Fifties westerns, he's not really the equal of the other two.

DUEL OF CHAMPIONS (Orazi e Curiazi, 1961)

Less than a decade after making Shane, Alan Ladd's career was on a stark downhill slide by the time he went to Italy to shoot this international co-production based on the ancient wars between Rome and Alba. While the credits list Ferdinando Baldi as the director, they also identify Orazi e Curiazi as "a Terence Young film." IMDB lists the men as co-directors, the Englishman presumably filming Ladd's dialogue scenes. Young had directed Ladd previously in The Red Beret (aka The Paratroopers), so the American presumably would not feel entirely lost among the Italians. Still, it was apparently an unhappy shoot. In February 1961 UPI reported that Ladd had walked off the set because the Italian producers had not forked over the $20,000 advance he'd been promised. A fresh infusion of money from another production company apparently saved the day. But gossip columnists reported that Ladd's pet dachshund had died on the last day of production. According to legend, Ladd was desperate to remain a top-billed star, and at this point going abroad seemed the only way to retain that level of stardom. But his Italian project was doomed never to receive a general U.S. theatrical release, and a year after completing it Ladd shot himself. In 1964, after finally accepting subordinate billing for The Carpetbaggers, he suffered a fatal overdose, though history still questions whether or not he did it on purpose.

The best-known pictorial representation of the story of the Horatii is the 18th century Frenchman Jacques-Louis David's painting The Oath of the Horatii. The Horatii were three brothers who volunteered to settle the long feud between Rome and Alba by triple combat with a band of Alban brothers. The Roman historian Livy tells us that the Horatii won, three kills to two.

A team of Italian writers, including directors Carlo Lizzani and Giuliano Montaldo, embellished the ancient legend, crafting a more character-driven screenplay than many contemporary "sword and sandal" products. They make the lead brother, Horatio (Ladd), a military commander who suffers disgrace due to miscommunication. Ordering a subordinate to take command of the main body of troops while he attempts a flanking action, he is wounded and taken prisoner while unconscious. Meanwhile, his messenger is killed before he can fully convey the order, and Horatio's fellow soldiers become convinced that their commander fled the battle as a coward. His own name is disgraced in pre-republican Rome, but the disgrace doesn't extend to the entire family. Instead, King Hostilius (American character actor Robert Keith) offers the hand of his daughter Marcia (Franca Bettoia), originally promised to Horatio, to the next brother in line.

Meanwhile, Horatio is condemned by the Albans to death in an outdoor carnival. In a nice tracking shot, the Roman is shoved through a circus of activity, including fire jugglers and wrestling women, before he's dumped into a wolf pit. A sympathetic captive girl (Ladd's daughter Alana) tosses Horatio a rock to bludgeon the beasts with, and later helps him escape captivity altogether.

Returning to Rome, Horatio finds himself an unperson. His father remains ashamed of him, still believing him a coward, while his brother and once-intended bride are profoundly embarrassed by his presence. King Hostilius is happy to see him, however, because he can help his brothers fulfill the prophecy of a sibyl who had predicted that the war with Alba would be settled by three brothers fighting three brothers. Feeling disrespected, Horatio refuses to fight and leaves for neutral country.

Adding another complication is a history-based subplot involving the sister of the family, Horatia (Jacqueline Derval). While out bathing with some girlfriends she gets kidnapped by the very Alban brothers who've been assigned to fight the expected Roman trio. One brother is clearly smitten but determined to have her immediately. He vows to make her love him eventually, but all it takes is a single kiss and she's his. I suppose this was necessary to make it not look like she was falling in love with a rapist, but it still does seem that way.

Marcia implores Horatio to return to Rome and do his duty, but he tells her to consider him a dead man. Before long, however, yet just in time, he arrives in front of the city's walls to take his place beside his brothers, who are promptly killed by the Albans. While this gives him a chance to win Marcia back, it also leaves him outnumbered one to three. The better part of valor in such a case is to ride into the woods. The Albans think that means Game Over, but since this was supposed to be combat to the death, Hostilius isn't going to surrender until the Alban brothers go into the woods and bring back Horatio's corpse. The Albans comply confidently. Numbers still favor them, but the woods offer plenty of opportunities for ambush, and before long it's down to one on one, Horatio versus the very man his sister now loves. No matter who wins, there won't be triumph without tragedy. In the end, the movie softens the legend. According to Livy, Horatio kills his sister when he sees her mourning the Alban. In the film, Horatia kills herself out of grief and the chastened survivors hasten to make peace.

Despite its relatively ambitious script, Orazi e Curiazi is a mostly uninspired film. While an atrocious fullscreen Mill Creek Entertainment DVD leaves me unable to judge the cinematography, I feel I can still fault the film for unimaginative staging of action. For some reason Italian sword-and-sandal or peplum films rarely live up to the standard of action staging set by the Americans and Japanese. The swordfights lack energy and distinction and the early mass battle is unmemorable apart from the flaming balls sent hurtling down on the Romans in emulation of Spartacus. The sets are unimpressive and the music sounds like nearly every other peplum of this period. The music of this genre is even more disappointing when you consider what Italian composers were doing or would do with nearly every other genre in this period.

Alan Ladd's performance would never have won him new friends in Hollywood. He's convincing only when his character is sulking, but the actor seems to be sulking through the entire picture. He looks fatigued throughout and invests his dialogue with little emotion. Worse, he undermines his credibility as an ancient Roman with throwaway Americanisms like "Hey, you!" His lack of confidence in the project is obvious, and it seems like a great effort for him even to smile occasionally. This is a star near the bitter end of a career, and while it may exert the morbid fascination of a trainwreck there really isn't anything amusing about it. The other actors do what they can, but the dubbing is lifeless and the script (or at least this English-language cut of the film) lacks the character and relationship-establishing scenes that would have made the conflicts among the Horatii more compelling. The writers went far enough to prove that there is strong dramatic potential in the Horatii legend, but they didn't follow through fully enough to realize that potential. It might be worth trying again someday, when no one's career is on the line.