The Man Behind the Gun / Thunder Over the Plains / Riding Shotgun
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Randolph ScottBrand: WHV
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 238 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-11-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of The Man Behind the Gun / Thunder Over the Plains / Riding Shotgun
Movie Review: Superb collection offers 3 of Randolph Scott's best mid-50s westerns - no frills but plenty of excitement
Summary: 5 Stars
Both of the Warners Randolph Scott 3-fers are well worth owning for fans of the star or 50s westerns in general - the other release consists of COLT .45, TALL MAN RIDING, and FORT WORTH - but if you are only getting one, this would be it, as all three of the films on display here are excellent and not too far off the level of Scott's great work at the end of the decade with Budd Boetticher. It's a no-frills set and the transfers aren't flawless, but they're perfectly fine and for this price, you just can't go wrong. Here's what you get:
THE MAN BEHIND THE GUN (1953, directed by Felix Feist)
THE MAN BEHIND THE GUN has got to be one of the more unusual westerns I've seen lately - and I've been watching a lot of westerns. Randolph Scott stars as Major Ransome Callicut, a man on a secret mission in southern California before the Civil War, trying to help preserve the state's fragile "free" status and also to uncover a group of plotters and arms merchants potentially involved in undermining the Union. A serious story - but Scott moves through the film in a charming, upbeat, humorous way - all the while narrating the thing in a style more typical of film noir! And the film has lots of other interesting touches that struck me as noirish - it's basically a big conspiracy of double-crossing and intrigues, with two women both vying at the same time (maybe?) for Scott and Philip Carye's Captain Roy Giles, a southern sympathizer who is nonetheless determined to do his duty as a US officer.
Added onto these basics we've got Dick Wesson as Sgt. "Monk" Walker, a whip-wielding, wise-cracking malcontent who spends a fair chunk of the film in drag - we've got Alan Hale Jr (you know him as the Skipper from Gilligan's Island) as Monk's buddy Corporal Olaf Swenson who at one point does a strongman routine - we've got a devious Senator and his spinster sister who knows his secret - a hair-pulling catfight - a knife-throwing Mexican double agent - a plot to control California's water supply (shades of CHINATOWN, anybody?) and enough turnabouts and faked identities that I lost track more than once as to who the bad guys and good guys (apart from Scott, of course) were. Felix Feist's direction isn't really anything special, but the whole artificial feel of it, the bad old dangerous L.A. that's simultaneously a wild-west town and a proto-modern city of criminals and private dicks, the bright colors and Randolph Scott's big smile and the gunplay and explosions and the general chaos of the thing just had me enthralled from the very beginning. No point in trying to make sense of it, this is just an over-the-top, everything goes b-western that is spectacularly underrated and really needs to be seen by any real fans of the genre.
THUNDER OVER THE PLAINS (1953 Andre de Toth)
Here Scott is Captain David Porter of the U.S. Army, charged with helping keep order under martial law in Texas just after the Civil War before the rebel state has been readmitted into the Union. He's got a lot to contend with - the carpetbaggers are bleeding the Texans - mostly loyally Unionists in this area - dry, his friend Ben Westman (Charles McGraw) is apparently the leader of an armed group of bandits seeking to scare away the Yankees, his wife Norah (Phyllis Kirk) longs for a life back east, and he's got a younger punk Captain, Bill Hodges (Lex Barker) vying with him for authority even as their superior officer, Colonel Chandler (Henry Hull) is getting tired of the "coddling" of the angry native Texans by Porter and his troops.
There's an awful lot of action in this 82-minute film, but De Toth gives up enough time for some solid character development and a real feel for the conflicting loyalties that a man like Porter - a Texan born and raised but a square-shooting Union officer throughout the war - would feel. I haven't seen any of this director's films in a good while and can't say if his style here is typical, but whether it is or not it's very impressive. The director shoots in mostly close-ups or close-medium shots - though we do get some decent landscape shots this isn't De Toth's interest here, he keeps the camera squarely on the action and on the faces. There are sequences with longish shots that feel almost handheld and seem to belong to a period a couple of decades later, an intimacy here that one rarely finds in westerns of this period. One really terrific sequence has a turncoat among the Texans leaving a jail, fearing for his life as the camera follows his face in closeup, sweating and nervously flicking his gaze in every direction, as he walks down the street to his eventual, expected demise.
Also on hand are the always welcome Elisha Cook Jr as one of the carpetbaggers, and Fess Parker in an early appearance (pre-Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone) as one of Westman's henchmen. The only real problem the film has is that, having set up an almost impossibly complex situation for Scott's character - who eventually goes outside the law to try to exonerate a jailed and to-be-hanged Westman - it solves everything in one climactic gunfight, and a tossed-off narrated epilogue. The gunfight is beautifully done in and of itself, but plenty of questions remain. Oh well, you can't expect everything in such a cheap genre film from this era and the film overall very much delivers.
RIDING SHOTGUN (1954 Andre De Toth)
This taut and suspenseful thriller might be the gem of the package. Scott plays Larry Delong, a gun-for-hire who's been riding shotgun (for once the title has real meaning) on stagecoaches for a couple of years, hoping to catch up with a bandit who he's been gunning for. As the film opens the Dan Maraday (James Millican), the bad guy, is planning on holding up a bank-casino in the town of Deepwater and concocts a plan to get the town's sherriff and most of its able-bodied men away from town - and to implicate Delong in robbing the stagecoach he's actually protecting. There's a good action sequence as Delong is beat down by several of Maraday's tough guys, but to the bad guys' ultimate downfall left alive by the vengeful Pinto (a young Charles Bronson).
Delong eventually escapes his predicament and rides back into town, trying to warn the people of Maraday's plans, but the damage to his reputation has been done - he's seen as a deserter from the sheriff's posse, or even worse, a member of the gang, and the citizens aren't willing to believe in the robbers' complex plans as he outlines them. The confusion and anger soon reaches a fever pitch, with only Delong's girlfriend Orissa (Joan Weldon) believing in him; eventually he has to hole up in a cantina owned by Fritz (Fritz Feld) the trilingual owner of the seedy place - who is also at the least two-sided in his loyalties. The sheriff's senior deputy, Tub (Wayne Morris), left alone in charge of the town - and a friend of Delong's who also doesn't really believe that he's a villain - now has to prevent anyone in the town from lynching him, or anyone from getting killed. Eventually, of course, Maraday and his gang come back into town to do exactly what Delong knows they will.
This is a really well-done and sadly under-seen variation on the one-man-against-the-town theme, a fairly common plot in both westerns and thriller/noir of the 50s. High Noon is obviously the best-known example, but Scott did a similar piece again a few years later with Budd Boetticher in the better-known Decision at Sundown and John Payne stars in a somewhat more overtly anti-McCarthy example in the same year, 1954, the Allan Dwan-directed Silver Lode. What such films lack in the pictorial splendors of the west they can easily make up for in tension and characterization, and Riding Shotgun manages this in spades. About half of the film sees Scott confined to one room, but, having learned what we need to know about his character we're now free to focus on the divided loyalties of deputy Tub and the lynch-happy and basically sheep-like townspeople, much more interested in getting rid of this single dangerous man now than worrying about any potential future violence that he's warning them about. Riding Shotgun ultimately seems more about human shortsightedness and the readiness people often have to believe in easy answers rather than complex solutions that require real work on their part.
Scott is quite fine playing a fairly typical character, and conveys a mood of exasperation throughout the film that mirrors that of the townspeople ultimately too pigheaded to pay attention to him. Feld and Millican also stand out as the weaselly bar owner and lead villain, but it's Morris as deputy Tub who really takes the prize. The large and somewhat portly actor is today best-known as the cowardly Lt. Roget in Paths of Glory, but he was a staple in low-budget westerns of this period and a fine actor who easily turns what could have been a very simple comic role into something much more significant as the second moral center of the film, mirroring the more serious and hotheaded Delong. Andre DeToth again emphasizes the close-up and also shows an excellent understanding of filmic space in this tightly wound and tightly shot piece, and comes up with something that is pretty close to brilliant here, with not a wasted moment.
Summary of The Man Behind the Gun / Thunder Over the Plains / Riding Shotgun
Synopsis:Item Type: Unknown Type
Item Rating: NR
Street Date: 11/07/06
Wide Screen: no
Director Cut: no
Special Edition: no
LanguageENGLISH
Foreign Film: no
Subtitlesno
Dubbed: no
Full Frame: no
Re-Release: no
Packaging: Sleeve Please note: This supplier will be closed on 11/24, 11/25, 12/26, 1/2 for the holidays. The shipping cut off is 12/10 to try and have the products delivered by Christmas.
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