La maîtresse de fer

After a decade at Paramount Sue Carol negotiated a new studio contract for Alan Ladd at Warner Brothers. Sad to because her husband's greatest film was ready for release at Paramount and they had no great urgency to feature him in the publicity. But that's another story.

Alan Ladd became another one of a good list of players to take on the role of Jim Bowie. He plays him as heroic as Richard Widmark, MacDonald Carey, Sterling Hayden or Jim Arness did. Problem was of all the legends of the American frontier, Jim Bowie was probably the one who got the biggest whitewash in history.

The man was a thoroughgoing scoundrel. As a merchant he was as unscrupulous as a latter day robber baron. He was involved in several land swindle scams. He also bought and sold slaves as well. And he wasn't even honest in that. He and Jean Lafitte had a fine racket for a while with Lafitte capturing runaways in Texas and bringing them back to the U.S. for Bowie to sell, not necessarily back to their original masters.

He did have a knife built to his specifications as per the film and with his activities he did tend to get into a lot of violent disagreements. That's the Bowie knife, the Arkansas toothpick, the Iron Mistress of the title.

But Ladd plays Bowie as heroically as the legends have him and as the novel by Paul Wellman has him. He's caught between two women, the selfish French creole aristocrat Virginia Mayo and the daughter of the Governor of the province of Coahuila in Mexico which included Texas, Phyllis Kirk.

Bowie was a violent man in a violent era. Ladd plays him like he was Shane and he was being faithful to the novel if not the real Bowie. But then we've never seen the real one on screen any time.

Still for those who liked Ladd's portrayal of Shane, The Iron Mistress is a good film for you.