For just about all of his adult life, Gary Cooper counted Ernest Hemingway and Joel McCrea among his best friends. They were, one and all, serious ranchers and serious outdoorsmen. Cooper was fiercely competitive about his status in Hollywood, so much so that even though he and Clark Gable loved the outdoors, hunting and fishing, and got along famously, there was always a bit of a distance. As a writer, Hemingway wasn't competition; in acting, McCrea was so modest, even self-effacing, that Cooper apparently didn't feel "threatened." In numerous interviews over many decades, McCrea said that Cooper was by far his biggest influence and that he learned to "act small" for the camera by watching Gary Cooper.
Whether this study led to Joel's famously deadpan acting style is an open question; it is true that his style is immensely more effective on the big screen than it is on a tv or the modern technology screens - the difference is much more pronounced than for most other actors. Joel's wife Frances Dee said that her rancher husband believed John Wayne was the greatest film cowboy but Cooper was the greatest film actor of them all. Wayne isn't exactly deadpan, and Cooper mugs a lot so it's an interesting question about McCrea. His style seems much closer to that other longtime leading lady favorite, George Brent, than to Gary Cooper.
Regardless, McCrea is tremendously effective as a leading man. His style almost from the beginning of his career is that of a straight man, allowing scenes to be dominated by his leading lady. Yet McCrea had such a gigantic screen presence, and his delivery is so perfectly timed, that he is never overpowered. He never 'disappears.' Watch carefully his performance with Bogart in 1937's 'Dead End'; William Wyler is forced to resort to all sorts of camera tricks and stage sets to keep Bogie from being blown clear off the screen and the great director never does solve the problem.
No less actresses than Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, and Katharine Hepburn - three of the greatest actresses of the Golden Age - spent many hours at the McCrea ranch, reading scripts with him while getting ready for various roles. All three considered McCrea to be one of the best actors they ever worked with. Many of his leading ladies, including 'Frenchie's' Shelly Winters, placed him high on their list.
It is an interesting fact that while McCrea never received any awards or much criticism beyond 'yeah good job,' over his career he had just as many box office hits as... Gary Cooper.
This film? It's a true 'horse opera,' in a way that 'The Searchers' or 'Ride the High Country' or 'The Wild Bunch' is not, but that 'El Dorado' is. And it's a 10, one of the greatest movies of its genre.
This 'horse opera' was done 3 times, at least, in a sort of theme and variations. Jimmy Stewart was magnificent as he mugged and gangly-ed through the role in the earlier version,'Destry Rides Again' also a 10 and one of the greatest movies of the genre. Not even Shelly Winters can compare to Marlene Dietrich at her most incendiary but, like McCrea, she doesn't bother with that splendid earlier performance. Instead she and McCrea completely reshape the characters and make them original and complete and brilliant.
Audie Murphy & Mari Blanchard, obviously lesser talents altogether than Stewart, Dietrich, McCrea and Winters, tried it again. While their version is clearly inferior and Audie & Mari don't have the ability to reshape the characters as McCrea & Winters abundantly do, it is a testament to the greatness of the story that even those B-movie actors could make an A film out of 1954's 'Destry.'
