Wells Fargo

Joel McCrea plays the man who did the daring deeds that made the Wells Fargo Company a byword for a national company, from transporting live oysters to Buffalo to California gold to Washington.

It's one of those big clunky movies that defined the A western in the 1930s, reeking of Manifest Destiny, and for a movie like that you needed Cecil B. Demille in charge, or Frank Lloyd. Here, with a a huge and sprawling cast of characters, it's held together by McCrea's scenes with his real-life wife as his character's wife. McCreaoften seemed awkward and unsettled in his roles, an aspect that was exploited brilliantly for comedy by Preston Sturges. Here he shows a tenderness and vulnerability that is surprising. Of course, we can attribute some of that to his screen lovemaking being with his wife. But Lloyd, although he was typecast as a director of epics, was far more capable than planning the big scenes, and it shows here.

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.

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.

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.

This film is a very fictionalized account of the early days of Wells Fargo---long before it metastasized into the gigantic mega-bank that charges innumerable service fees like it does today. However, instead of focusing on the big-wigs at the company, it focuses on a fictional man, Ramsay (Joel McCrea) and his many difficulties he had establishing banking, transportation and mail services in the wild west. It also focuses on his marriage--one that eventually became very rocky and problematic.

The problem with this film is that it is extremely episodic--with giant jumps in time here and there. As a result, it comes off more like a Cliff Notes version of a story instead of a rich and complete on. Compacting the story much more would have helped immensely, as the characters come off as very stiff and distant to the audience. Not a bad film but one that really should have been a lot better considering the large budget and cast. More money should have been spent on the script and less on extras and sets.