Trois sublimes canailles

I stumbled upon this on the Fox Movie channel.

it is an excellent tale of the West as only John Ford can tell it.

great cinematography, narrative, acting.

the camera-work is especially compelling.

and the updated music by Dana Kaproff is outstanding.

some of the best silent film music I've ever heard, and I write film scores, so I know what I'm talking about.

check out the Fox Movie channel if your cable company offers it.

They show great films from their library.

this is a must see and must have for anyone's collection of silent masterpieces!

The story is kind of all over the place, and it has a weird mixture of comedy and drama (which, of course, is hardly odd in a John Ford film), but this is a pretty good one. Tom Santschi, J. Farrell MacDonald and Frank Campeau play three outlaws who plan to rob a covered wagon of its horses, but instead find young Olive Borden weeping over her dead father. They're disarmed and decide to turn a new leaf and take care of the girl (to note: she is a young adult, not a child). They become her surrogate father and help her as she establishes herself in the newly formed town that has sprung up in the Dakotas. Soon, there is to be a land rush, and many have gathered there before the land is opened to colonization (the pesky Indians have been removed to a reservation - they aren't a huge part of the film, but occasionally they can be seen watching the white men). The three bad men start looking for a husband for Borden and hit upon George O'Brien. The villain here (Lou Tellegen) is interestingly the law man and wears a white hat. The photography is gorgeous and Ford's direction is excellent. Despite the sloppiness of the script, it's a gripping Western. The land rush sequence is equal to the one in Cimarron four years later.

The mere mention of John Ford conjures up an image of his reputation as the premier director of Westerns. He began his career directing the films set in the Old West, and his last body of respectable films were of that genre. In a thirteen year span early in his movie career, however, he surprisingly didn't have one Western in his portfolio.

This wasn't his choice nor the Fox Studio he worked. Westerns had worn itself out by the late 1920s, and movie fans were flocking elsewhere to see a variety of dramatic and comic films. Ford's last shot at the Westerns took place with the August 1926 release of "3 Bad Men." It would be over a decade later before he redefined Westerns and made them popular again in his 1939 "Stagecoach."

Based on a Herman Whitaker 1916 novel, 'Over The Border,' "3 Bad Men" follows a caravan of settlers in their covered wagons headed for the Dakotas where gold has reportedly been struck in 1877. Along the way, three men with a rap sheet a mile long plan to steal some horses from one of the members of the wagon train, the beautiful Lee Carlton (Olive Bordon) and her father. Before they can implement their plan, however, her father gets shot by a different set of outlaw. The three wannabe horse thieves, struck by Lee's plight, decide to protect her until the end of the trail in Custer. The town, however, has a corrupt sheriff (Lou Tellegen) who heads as bloodthirsty of an outlaw gang as there is one.

One of the primary idiom for Hollywood period-piece films is don't look for historical accuracy. "3 Bad Men" contains a spectacular race by settlers for open land as found in in 1932's "Cimarron," and 1992's "Far And Away," with Tom Cruise and Nichole Kidman, which reenact the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run. The Dakotas never had such a stampede of wagons and horse riders racing to get the best land available. But the sequence is nonetheless eye popping for its utter chaos. Ford, who loved location shooting, filmed the 15-month production near Victorville, California, for the desert scenes as well as around Jackson Hole, Wymong. Three actresses became very sick from the fever during the shoot, including Olive Borden.

Bordon, who dated the co-star of "3 Bad Men," George O'Brien, was at the height of her career when she appeared in the Ford film. A year later, as a belt-tightening move, Fox Studio asked everyone to take a 10% cut in salary. She refused and had no trouble getting picked up by a couple of competitive studios. The trouble for her began when she cut her hair into the fashionable bob, placing her in the unfamiliar role as a flapper. Her career sank like a rock, especially when movies transitioned into talkies, despite her taking a number of voice lessons to get rid of her Virginian southern accent. She was broke by the late 1930s. She did serve as an Army ambulance driver in Europe during World War Two, receiving a citation for finding and turning over an enemy's ammunition truck. Once back in the states, she hit the bottle, became an alcoholic and ended up in Los Angeles' skid row, dying at the young age of 41.

This film convinces me that John Ford deserves his legendary status. He seems to have had his unique gift for cinema story telling from his beginnings. This is a starkly realistic tale depicting , unromantically , some of the brutal hardship of the late 19th century west.

There is great poignancy in the loyalty and ethos which surface in even the most "bad" of men. To convey this in a silent film , with fairly minimal use of dialogue screens , required some pretty good acting and good camera work. There are several protracted facial studies which convey the critical messages very eloquently. Through most of the film I forgot that there was no "talking" dialogue. There are some surprisingly "contemporary" humor lines on the dialogue screens , not typical of westerns but quite typical of Fords evolving love of pathos.

3 Bad Men (as the title card shows it) is an outstanding example of the silent western and one of John Ford's earliest triumphs. The photography is stunning and the land rush sequences truly impressive, and while the story of redemption and sacrifice is predictable it is nonetheless still moving.