Wells Fargo

Paramount with the production of Wells Fargo and The Plainsman started the return of westerns to the A picture list with big budgets. Though the Cecil B. DeMille production of The Plainsman is flashier and splashier, Wells Fargo under the direction of Frank Lloyd seems to have had more staying power. It certainly has the budget of a DeMille film and kind of hard to think that Adolph Zukor would have sprung for two big budget westerns in the same year. If they had flopped Paramount would have gone under.

Frank Lloyd is a name all but forgotten by today's fans. Yet he had won two Academy Awards by the time Wells Fargo came out, for The Divine Lady in 1929 and for Cavalcade in 1933. And he had just missed winning a third the year before for his greatest film, Mutiny on the Bounty. He got good performances out of the whole cast.

Stuart Lake wrote the script and he borrows from Edna Ferber's style of story telling. The action of the film covers a twenty five year period from the early 1840s to Reconstruction. Joel McCrea as Ramsey MacKay is an Edna Ferber like hero, a heroic man involved in a big enterprise who sacrifices a lot of personal happiness towards that end. Frances Dee, Mrs. McCrea in real life, is his loving if not always understanding wife, also in the Ferber tradition.

The fictional Ramsey MacKay is an important part of the growing company of Wells Fargo. Henry O'Neill and Frank Clark, play the real life partners of John Wells and William Fargo, with Clarence Kolb as John Butterfield who later merges his stagecoach line with them.

The only part of the film I found a bit ridiculous was the battle between McCrea who is taking a gold shipment east and the Confederates led by Johnny Mack Brown. Somehow I don't believe the desperate Confederacy towards the end of the war would have had Brown offer to parley with McCrea and give him a chance to surrender peacefully if the Confederates were outnumbered. Even with Brown being a friendly rival for Dee's hand earlier on, this was in fact war. When the shooting starts the battle is well staged.

Paramount shot this one on location for the most part and the production values do show. Frank McGlyn played Abraham Lincoln in this film as he did in The Plainsman.

Bob Burns who was a regular on Bing Crosby's Kraft Music Hall at the time and appeared in a few Paramount films with Bing plays the sidekick role here. Look for Bob Cummings in a small part as a young prospector.

Wells Fargo is a well done epic western and in fact it's the film that really made Joel McCrea a western star.

And I am not sure that everything here is accurate; anyway I don't consider it as a western. I did not find it interesting at all, it is destined to film goes to fill in their knowledge in terms of films, that's all. It is mostly talk, talks, the kind of films that Republic Pictures gave us in the late forties. I prefered Frank lloyd for MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, IF I WERE KING or RULERS OF THE SEA; after all, Frank Lloyd was a sea adventures film maker, not a western one. I prefered his LAST COMMAND, his last movie. But this one is an epic film, which tells a part of American history. As a French, Hmmm.

Fans of McCrea looking for a standard shoot-em-up should look elsewhere. That would be okay if the movie were as good as most McCrea westerns, but it's not. Too much time is spent trying to get Ramsay's (McCrea) love life straightened out. The trouble is this tends to crowd out the interesting other two themes— namely, opening highways to the West and action and adventure along the way.

Now, with so much going on, narrative transitions from one thread to the next become important. But, I agree with reviewer Maxwell-- this key element in the storyline is handled very clumsily. It's sometimes hard to follow developments because of muddy segues, plus a sloppy script that appears to want to do too much with too many marginal characters. On a different note, what's with IMDb listing Lloyd Nolan in the credits. If he's in the picture, I couldn't spot him, and he's not someone easy to miss. Maybe he got edited out.

On the plus side are actors McCrea, winsome wife Dee, and a fearsome Mary Nash, some good crowd scenes, and several edifying historical facts. Still, I too, was left wondering just what Wells-Fargo did as a day-to-day business, which seems an odd omission given the movie's title. Anyway, to me, the movie was a disappointment despite a bigger than average budget and an effort at historical sweep.

Though it does capture a little of the pioneering spirit of the folks travelling west, it's just too episodic and becomes even a bit dull. It gets off to a lively enough start as we meet "Ramsay" (Joel McCrae) who is bidding for a contract to shift goods from the east coast past the terminus of the railway and out into the rapidly populating wilderness. It's while he is trying to prove he can get live oysters to the table that he encounters the broken down carriage of "Justine" (Frances Dee) and her mother (Mary Nash) and so soon has a little extra romantic impetus as his career starts to expand just as quickly as his network of deliveries. Along the way he has to compete with the postal service, ambitious competitors and marauding Apache but little prepares him for the impact of the Civil War. By now he is managing the service as far as California, and it's their goldmines that are funding the Yankee army. This news isn't wasted on the Confederacy who decide that these shipments could be diverted, and this puts their travels in even more danger as well as causing consternation at home with a family who might just have Johnny-Reb sympathies. When the story focuses on the adventure elements, it works fine. McCrae holds it together well enough as the stagecoach gets chased, burned and robbed. Sadly, though, as civilisation reaches the Pacific coast it rather stupefies those action scenes and replaces them with something altogether more mediocre.

Since getting a channel exclusively devoted to Westerns, I've seen movies that are never seen on regular channels, like Wells Fargo.

Joel McRea, whom I'd enjoyed immensely in These Three, is impressive in a Western. He's rugged and tough, but goes beyond the stereotype, and is sensitive and understanding. He ages from his 20's to his 60's believably. The story of courier service extending out west makes me want to read more about these pioneers of exploration.