El gringo

A group of religious people led by Dennis O'Keefe are in a wagon train to California. Up comes John Payne, murderer, and his five associate, escaped from prison. They join the train, boss it around, insult the women, and generally make a mess of the passage.

It's a Pine-Thomas production, and shows the canny production values of the Dollar Bills. They used a well-worn but serviceable story, one with which the audience would be familiar with and comfortable seeing again. They employed a competent, journeyman director in Lewis R. Foster. They had a cast list of recognizable and skilled performers in Frank Faylen, Mary Anderson, Mary Beth Hughes, Griff Barnett, Richard Travis, and Dooley Wilson, available reasonable sums. And they got a great cameraman in his first year of being the Director of Photography on a picture, in a career that would encompass four nominations for best cinematography and one win in Loyal Griggs. Clearly they knew how to pick talent.

Griggs had been working in the camera department and as a cameraman at Paramount for 27 years before he got a credit as DP, and he proceeded to waste no time. He had already shared a special Academy Award with the rest of Paramount's effects department, before Technical Achievement became its own category. In 1954 he would win the Best Color Cinematography Award for Shane, and be nominated three more times over the next dozen years. He would retire in 1971 and die in 1978 at the age of 71.

This movie just sort of grinds along with no real highs or lows. You can tell from the synopsis that it is a fairly unpleasant premise, and you might hope that the pace or tone would change as the drama develops. I found that the difficulties the characters encountered along the way we're pretty much cliched, giving the secondary actors little to work with.

I had almost stopped watching the movie when it seemed to pick up just a bit and I had some hope for a resolution that would justify my time with the movie.

But no such luck.

Overall, I would say that you should not waste your time with this movie. There's just no there there.

I've seen many movies starring John Payne and Dennis O'Keefe and I have to say I found their performances in PASSAGE WEST among the strongest of their careers. Payne plays a hardened escaped convict serving time for murder, who leads a pack of five other runaway cons in taking over a wagon train of settlers heading to California. The leader of the train is a minister played by O'Keefe, who is first seen conducting a funeral service for a boy who died during the journey. Payne runs roughshod over the wagon train and jeopardizes the settlers' lives with some rash commands, earning O'Keefe's undisguised contempt. Gradually, however, the men's relationship shifts, eventually reaching a point of trust and grudging respect. The turning point is a grueling fistfight between the two (the film's only action scene), a battle that is quite rough and messy, like a real fight and not a cleanly choreographed western brawl like we'd normally find in such films. O'Keefe even executes a few unusual moves that might seem out of place in the west of 1863, but are explained, in a clever bit of dialogue after the fight, as something he learned in a lumberjack camp and as a waterfront saloon bouncer in an earlier life before he found God.

The settlers are played by dependable character actors who come across as plausible migrants from the east seeking a better life. Only Arleen Whelan's character, a preacher's daughter who falls hard for Payne after he forces a kiss on her, smacks of Hollywood contrivance, but she plays the role with conviction and redheaded fury, with a layer of seething discontent just below the surface, and I found myself believing her, despite the cliché. In the final film of his career, Dooley Wilson, best known for playing singer-pianist Sam in CASABLANCA, plays a runaway slave among the convicts. The script briefly touches on his status when the group learns of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, but otherwise steers clear of racial issues. Other than a handful of interior scenes, the bulk of the film was shot on location and has the actors enduring a sandstorm, desert heat, rain and deep pockets of mud, among other hardships. This has some thematic similarities with another excellent underrated western of 1951, THE SECRET OF CONVICT LAKE, in which Glenn Ford leads a group of escaped cons into a snowbound mountain settlement populated almost entirely by women, whose men have left town to work a silver mine, leading to a series of uneasy encounters as the women take great pains to keep the convicts from getting the upper hand.

Blacklisted screenwriter Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten penned the story for Passage West. Had he been blacklisted for bad writing on seeing this one rather than political opinions he might not have obtained martyrdom. This is a rather unreal story of six escaped convicts who inflict themselves on a wagon train bound for California headed by preacher Dennis O'Keefe. The leader of the convicts is John Payne whose career path was like Dick Powell's completely sheds his boyish crooning image for being a complete tough guy.

Unfortunately unlike Dick Powell this was not a Murder My Sweet success for him. Payne did many interesting roles in B films during the Fifties, but this was not one of them.

Dennis O'Keefe who was something of a raffish fellow also just does not ring true as a frontier preacher. He and Payne have a rivalry of sorts over Arleen Whelan who is scheduled to marry preacher O'Keefe after the journey is over starts reassessing things with the sight of a shirtless Payne sporting a very hairy chest. In complete contrast to his earlier days when 20th Century Fox had him apparently shave it.

Some of the convicts include Frank Faylen, Richard Rober, and in his farewell performance Dooley Wilson, the famous Sam of Casablanca as an escaped slave who was in prison apparently for just that. Also Mary Beth Hughes has an interesting role as a saloon entertainer along with the preacher's wagon train. She provides a note of wisdom occasionally.

Pine-Thomas who produced some interesting B films for Paramount came up very short with this one.

A very entertaining western with great supporting cast to the stars. Ned Young and Lewis Foster (who also directed) wrote an interesting script and the outcome was quite enjoyable. Frank Faylen was great as a badman in a supporting role. John Payne, Dennis O'Keefe and Arlene Whelan performed well in the star roles. Payne leads a group of escaped convicts that take a religious group bound west as hostage, with the usual conflicts between the two factions as well as within each group rising out of the situation. Richard Rober, Dooley Wilson, Paul Fierro, Faylen, Payne and one other unidentified actors play the convicts very well; O'Keefe, Whelan, Peter Hansen, Mary Anderson, Richard Travis, Griff Barnett do well as the people taken hostage. A good fight scene between Payne and O'Keefe, and a touching scene with one of the women singing to a doll in a cradle after her baby dies add to the stories impact. Recommended.