Mississippi

I have a feeling that a lot of The Stranger Wore a Gun was left on the cutting room floor and if someone's ever interested in a director's cut it might explain some of the holes in this story.

The film opens in the middle of raid on Lawrence, Kansas by William Quantrill. Disgusted by all the killing, Randolph Scott quits the outfit, but can't outrun his reputation. Going further and further west Scott gets himself involved with another ex-Quantrill man, George MacReady who's looking to set himself up in Arizona as another version of Quantrill.

This is the last of four films Scott made with George MacReady, not counting their joint appearance in Follow the Boys. The first one they did together, Coroner Creek, is a classic among westerns. Sad to say the quality diminished as the two worked together until this one.

I couldn't follow the story nor could see what Scott's motivations were for doing what he did. It might be a case of bad editing or maybe it wasn't that good to begin with. I think it's one of the weaker Randolph Scott westerns.

Claire Trevor is yet again a saloon girl with a heart of gold and a yen for Randolph Scott and her rival is Joan Weldon, stage line owner. Doing almost a dress rehearsal for the parts they did in Bad Day at Black Rock are future Oscar winners Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin as a pair of MacReady gang members.

I will say if you can sit and sift through the plot you will not be disappointed in the shootout between Scott and MacReady inside a burning saloon. Would that the rest of the film was as good.

There are quite a few surprises in this film. First of all, it keeps you guessing especially as regards Randolph Scott's character, whose motivation is difficult to discern. It's hard to tell if he's a bad guy or a good guy sometimes, as he manipulates two different gangs of unsavory characters. This does not anticipate Yojimbo or A Fisftful of Dollars. Both of those films, plus this film, all derive somewhat from The Glass Key, which was filmed twice before The Stranger Wore A Gun was released in 1953. (In 1935 with George Raft and 1942 with Alan Ladd.)Those films were based on Dashiell Hammett's novel of 1931. In any case, this film has its own tale to tell, and the performances of Scott, Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine are solid. The film suffers somewhat from the 3-D effects which are kind of lame in the 2-D format we have to suffer on our TV sets. People who don't remember the 3-D craze will probably think the director was weird. All in all, the film's offbeat style and great ensemble cast make this well worth watching a time or two. It is by no means an ordinary run-of-the-mill Western.

The Stranger Wore a Gun is directed by Andre De Toth and adapted to screenplay by Kenneth Gamet from the story Yankee Gold written by John W. Cunningham. It stars Randolph Scott, Claire Trevor, Joan Weldon, George Macready, Alfonso Bedoya, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Pierre Watkin. Technicolor/3-Dimension production, music is by Mischa Bakaleinikoff and cinematography by Lester White.

Jeff Travis (Scott) was a spy for Quantrill's Raiders, but after disagreeing with the savagery he witnessed during The Lawrence Massacre, he decides to head off to Prescott, Arizona to start a new life. Unfortunately his reputation precedes him and it's not long before he is in the middle of robberies and murder as the hunger for gold rears its ugly head.

As anyone who has seen it in its 2D print will attest, the 3D moments in this look rather bad, some films have been able to get away with it, but this is not one of them. However, mercifully this isn't a production that throws things at the screen every five minutes, or one that films every action sequence in depth perception. As it is, the 3D scenes are the least of the problems on show here, where were it not for the stoic Scott, the lovely Trevor and the novelty value of early turns from Marvin and Borgnine, then this would actually be a below average disaster.

It's sometimes fun, but not always intentionally, and it looks very nice from a location perspective (Alabama Hills, Lone Pine), but the cast are saddled with a mediocre and unadventurous screenplay. The subject of Travis' past is briefly dangled, intriguingly so, with the fact that he is scarred from his "work" as a soldier of the Civil War grabbing the attention, but it's quickly dispensed with to pitch this interesting character into a cliché riddled "town rascals at work" plot. There's a boorish love triangle that's as pointless as it is obvious as to where it will end up, and Bedoya is irritatingly awful to the point his scenes are practically unwatchable.

De Toth seems strangely off form on this one, you would tend to think the 3D filming had him losing his focus, but in this same year he crafted the hugely successful House of Wax in 3D. So he obviously had a knack for depth filming. He also this same year made Thunder Over the Plains with Scott, a significantly better Western than what is on offer here. In one fight scene between Scott and Borgnine, the director struggles to hide the fact that Borgnine has suddenly lost 50 pounds and Scott is 15 years younger! It's very poor from a director who undoubtedly had great talent.

It's one for fans of the name actors only this one, a picture to tick off your lists, to be forgotten and consigned to Cinema Boothill. 5/10

I saw this movie in a naval base movie theatre, in, I think, 1956. It was the first thing I recall seeing Lee Marvin in. This guy just absolutely fascinated me. Randolph Scott had been a "Semi-hero" of mine in the late thirties and the forties. In this movie, he was so old, and so slow drawing his gun, that they had to speed up the film to make it look like he was drawing his gun fast. Lee, on the other hand didn't need any "camera" tricks to make him look fast. Lee Marvin, as he was dying from having been shot by this amazingly slow lawman (Randolph Scott), looked down at his two hands, as if to say, "Hands -- how could you have failed me". I thought, facetiously, "Boy oscar is written oll over that!" Really a neat scene. That began a continuing admiration for Lee Marvin,, who could do bad guys, good guys, good guy-bad guy (Cat Ballou), Comedy, Drama, Action, He was a craftsman, and a master at it.

With Randolph Scott in his best outfit riding his best horse (Starlight) and looking and acting his dusty old best, and with Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine at their early villainous peaks, this could have been something. With Andre de Toth directing, it really should have been something. But it's not something. It's not anything, except a mess. Horrendous dialogue, terrible editing (the big gunfight in the mountains is unintelligible until the principals gather to rehash what just happened), and some really bad acting (not so much from Scott, Borgnine, or Marvin, but pretty much everybody else. Alfonso Bedoya is a joy to watch, as always, not because of his acting, which is abominable, but because it's so much fun trying to figure out what it is he's doing with his mouth to make him sound that way. George Macready, who belongs in things like "Gilda" rather than oaters like this, kept getting shoved into Randolph Scott Westerns (four of them). He's incredibly out of place in all of them. And Claire Trevor, so wonderful in "Dead End" and "Key Largo," is wasted here and one's heart goes out to the Oscar-winning actress for having to do such pot-boiling dreck as this a scant five years after winning that Oscar. The attempts at 3-D effects are pretty laughable in their earnestness, and for an action movie, an awful lot of the actual action occurs just off-screen -- saving money on stuntmen and stagecoaches, I suppose, but diluting the feel of the down-and-dirty Western this clearly wants to be taken for. I'll watch anything Randolph Scott did in the Fifties and Sixties, but this one was an absolute chore. I'd sure like to know where to get a coat like that, though.