The 3.10 to Yuma first puffed out of the depot back in 1953, when it appeared
as a short story in Dime Western. Set in Contention, Arizona, it
concentrates on two men awaiting the same train; Paul Scallen, deputy
marshal of nearby Bisbee, and Jim Kidd, road agent of no fixed abode. The
one is escorting the other to Yuma, where he is due to serve a five-year
sentence for his crimes. Both remain firmly in role, despite the outlaw’s
best efforts to persuade his unwanted guardian to shirk his duty. As the
hours pass, Kidd’s gang reconvenes in the street outside. Scallen is left
with a stark choice: to act with mauvaise foi (that is, to place existence
before essence); or unilaterally to embrace engagement, with its likely
cost. Needless to say, he opts for the latter. When you think about it,
isn’t “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” existentialism in a nutshell?
Anyway, the chemin de fer turns out to be the chemin de la liberté for at
least one of the protagonists.
If you consider the comparison far-fetched the author would probably second
your opinion. When Elmore Leonard spoke about his creation at the National
Film Theatre (where the 1957 movie of the story was screened last May), his
main interest was the fee he received for it (two cents per word). Later, he
was able to add $4,000 to the basic $90, when the movie rights were sold to
Columbia. Of the film, Leonard had this to say: “. . . I was very pleased
with it. They had to add about twenty minutes to a half hour onto the front
end of the picture because a 45-hundred-word short story isn’t going to get
you very far in a feature. However, they did fine, they did a good job in
adding on and I was very, very pleased with the picture”. The man given the
responsibility of turning a tightly focused and “relentless” (Leonard’s
word) chamber piece (most of which takes place in Room 207 of the Republic
Hotel) into a ninety-minute horse opera was Halsted Welles. His solution
remains a thing of beauty. He simply changed the occupation of the story’s
hero from deputy to rancher. He also changed his name from Paul Scallen to
Dan Evans. Likewise, Jim Kidd became Ben Wade.
They first meet not in some courthouse, but when Wade and his henchmen use the
rancher’s meagre herd to stop the stage they intend to rob. Tracking the
cattle with his two boys, Evans is a helpless spectator as the crime is
committed and the driver shot. That moment – the total eclipse of Bob Moons
– conditions all that follows. Moons grabs one of the robbers, holds a gun
to his head, and says something like “Stop, or he gets it”. Wade responds by
first shooting his partner in crime, then the exposed Moons.
On hearing her husband’s description of the events Alice Evans is unable to
conceal her disappointment: “It seems terrible that something bad can
happen, and all anybody can do is stand by and watch”. To which her husband
replies: “Lots of things happen when all you can do is stand by and watch”.
But his wife remains unconvinced: “No, but to have you stand by, and have
the boys watching”. She doesn’t mean to call her husband a coward, but that
is the message he gets. To make matters worse, the ranch is failing, for
want of rain, and for want of $200 to buy access to water. And so when $200
is offered to anyone willing to escort Ben Wade (now shackled) to
Contention, Dan Evans volunteers.
Once there, the story couples smoothly with Leonard’s original. One addition
of note is the fact that Evans and Wade are assigned the bridal suite. If
they are a couple, then Van Heflin’s homely Dan Evans must be the bride, and
Glenn Ford’s cocksure Wade the groom. As time passes, however, the roles
slowly reverse, until the climactic moment when Evans must run the gauntlet
of Wade’s men in order to get his prisoner to the station. He uses the same
tactic that failed Bob Moons. The difference being that Wade’s gang won’t
shoot the boss. So the question is: will Wade duck, or will he run with
Evans? Either way, Evans is redeemed.
In his book Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre denies that people are born
cowards or heroes. Au contraire, existentialists believe that “the coward
makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is
always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to
stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a
particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether”. Of
course, Sartre was not thinking about 3.10 to Yuma, though his words apply;
as much to the movie, as to the story from which it derives.
Just before the lights dimmed at the NFT, Leonard also revealed that Columbia
were planning to celebrate the movie’s fiftieth anniversary, not with a
re-release, but with a remake. Tom Cruise was in line to take Glenn Ford’s
role, and Eric Bana to replace Van Heflin. James Mangold would direct. “I’m
sure that the new version will be changed quite a bit”, added Leonard. “Tom
Cruise, I’m told, is asking for rewrites . . . you know, that’s Hollywood,
that’s what happens out there.” Leonard was right about the director, and
about the rewrites, but not about the cast. Instead of Cruise and Bana,
there’s Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. What prompted these changes I do
not know. But I do know that there was reason for optimism in the choice of
Mangold. Had he not modelled Cop Land (his second feature) on 3.10 to Yuma,
and named its hero Freddy Heflin in honour of Van? If only he hadn’t hired
Michael Brandt and Derek Haas as his scriptwriters. In the Production Notes,
Brandt is quoted as saying: “We all loved the original, and we wanted to
figure out a way to make it for modern audiences. Jim’s focus was, ‘Let’s
make it gritty. Let’s make it real’”. Haas, for his part, calls Crowe’s
character, “tough and glamorous, the equivalent of a modern rock star”. The
truth is that if you put a new engine on old tracks you’ll get but one
thing: derailment.
The movie opens with a shot of Bale’s two boys in bed: one is coughing, the
other is reading a nineteenth-century precursor of Dime Western, in which
bad men like Ben Wade are mythologized. In most “modern” Westerns with an
eye to “reality” (Unforgiven being a prime example), this would be a sure
sign to expect a rude awakening. Such expectations are confounded the moment
Crowe appears; he is wearing designer togs (fetchingly distressed) topped
off with a daft hat, and sketching a raptor. From those artistic heights he
descends into the valley, to rob the stage and plug poor Bob Moons. Instead
of being a moment of significance, and some solemnity, the stage-driver’s
death is merely the occasion for a James Bond-style quip.
Instead of subtlety, crudity now crows. This is exemplified in the scene –
common to both movies – set around the dinner table at the Evans ranch. The
family’s unwelcome guest of honour is Ben Wade, handcuffed, and en route to
Contention. In the first version, Heflin notices that Ford is having
difficulty in cutting his meat, so offers to do it for him. In the new
version, Crowe picks up the steak entire, and begins to gnaw at its edges.
Only then does Bale do the Christian thing.
In both versions, Wade repays his host by attempting to seduce his wife. Ford
and Crowe speak more or less the same lines. But only in Ford’s case do they
matter, being his primary means of enchantment. For Crowe they are an
irrelevance, his appeal being essentially physical. His self-confidence is
such that any woman who fails to respond has to be either dead or a lesbian.
Fifty years ago, no explanation was offered for Ford’s errant behaviour. In
the modernized version, however, Crowe is allowed a damaged psyche, the
result of super-bad parenting. He reveals to his fellow diners that he had
no father worthy of the name, and that his mother was little better. It
seems she left him on a railway platform, with nought for comfort but a
Bible, and instructed him to wait for her return. It took the eight-year-old
three days to read the Holy Book from cover to cover, after which he
recognized that he was alone in the world. I know his listeners existed in a
pre-Freudian era, but surely one should have had the wit to ask: “Who taught
you to read?”. Of course, one can never be certain about such things, but it
seems to me to be a bad case of false memory syndrome.
One person who doesn’t doubt a word is Bale’s older boy, the one already in
thrall to blood-and-thunder fiction. In Crowe, he sees the heroic
father-figure of his dreams. How can his real father, a born loser, compete?
Bale is handsome rather than homely, but he is a cripple, having lost a foot
in the recent Civil War. As a result, he limps in life, and (it’s safe to
infer) he limps in bed, too. I suspect the injury could also be an example
of the Chester Effect, named after the character in Gunsmoke – played by
Dennis Weaver – who was forced to adopt a limp to ensure that he would never
appear more manly than Matt Dillon.
Having dined, Heflin and Ford complete the journey to Contention uneventfully.
Bale and Crowe take a more colourful route, which requires them to beat off
Apaches, and the railway police (one of whom has a personal grudge against
Crowe). Being “modern” (and therefore enlightened), the movie demonstrates
how these villainous police exploit their Chinese labourers. When Crowe
falls into their hands they torture him, Abu Ghraib-style. This scene has no
function other than to add a frisson of “relevance”. Besides, it is negated
when Crowe is rescued, and a bundle of dynamite cast into the tunnel behind
them, killing both pursuers and innocent Chinese alike. But now they are
just expendable extras. At no time are we asked to count them as collateral
damage.
The real casualty of all this carnage is the movie. The scene which should be
its long and suspenseful central act is reduced to an episode between
gunfights. By the end, the only aspect of modernity that remains is
cynicism. Crowe’s henchmen offer the armed citizens of Contention $200 for
shooting Bale or anyone foolish enough to assist him. Why? So that there
will be more people for Bale to shoot. As he sprints towards the station
with his captive, his prosthetic foot seems to become flesh again. At any
rate he is able to leap from tall buildings and hit the ground running. But
this apparent return to full manhood is quickly undermined by a sentimental
twist worthy of Victorian melodrama. No existential hero he. The movie’s
final moments ditch any pretence of reality, and confirm that it
hero-worships villains as well as any penny dreadful. Bah!
Clive Sinclair is the author of five novels including Meet the Wife,
published in 2002. His new book Clive Sinclair's True Tales of the Wild West
will be published next spring.
