Psychological Oaters

Every few years the Hollywood Western is pronounced dead and then rises again, buoyed by a Dances With Wolves or Unforgiven. The remake of 3:10 To Yuma, along with the DVD re-release of the original, has triggered memories of dependable leading man Glenn Ford. Born in Quebec in 1916 as Gwyllyn Samuel Newton, he interrupted his career to be a wartime marine before returning as what David Thomson calls "a decent, pipe-smoking idealist." That quality leads Thompson to call him "ill at ease" in 3:10 To Yuma, and he ranks it below the other four (among 20) Westerns Ford's best known for.

Glenn Ford's son Peter writes to the Los Angeles Times to regret the new Russell Crowe versus Christian Bale version is "shot in color with lots of gunplay--it saddens us they couldn't leave that one alone."

Pace the Ford family's feelings and Susan King's informative praise of the DVD release of the original, and admitting that the quiet livestock incursion that sets off a hold-up in original director Delmer Daves's first reel has now become all hellzapoppin', wagon-flipping, tumult in James Mangold's hands, I think this remake deserves seeing--overly clever ending and all.

I'm with Chris Rock in his Oscar night spew. I like watching Crowe, who always does his homework, spill a few of his demons out for us. His Ben Wade is all pit viper charm up against Bale's stern, opaque Dan Evans (who's forced to sprint about on what looks to be a shoe tree).

Just as Richard Jaeckel shone in the original, Ben Foster as Charlie almost steals the movie (and did, for a while, hijack the poster). He's the picture of Widmarkian evil, a dandy in blood spatter. (It remains to be seen if Mangold and Die Hard screenwriter Mark Bomback (er, Live Free or Die Hard) do any sort of justice to Richard Ford's landmark trilogy, now capped with Lay of the Land--newly in paperback--and headed for HBO as a six-hour mini-series.

Terence Rafferty's dissection of Leonard's "men of few words" in the New York Times took a moment to laud "The ridiculously entertaining Hombre, 1967, as being "luckier in tis casting. Much luckier..."

Agreed. This tidy classic (directed by Martin Ritt, the year after he won an Oscar with Sounder, from a Leonard story), well exploits Paul Newman's blue-eyed hundred-yard stare.

His title character's payback to a racist scalawags makes for two jaw-dropping movie moments, and his psychological duel with Richard Boone--Cool Hand Luke meets Paladin in some parallel, fiendishly hot Arizona desert universe--is, well, ridiculously entertaining.