Bend of the River Bend of the River Universal Home Entertainment 1952 / Color / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 92 min. / Where the River Bends Street Date May 6, 2003 / 14.98 Starring James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Julie Adams, Rock Hudson, Lori Nelson, Jay C. Flippen, Chubby Johnson, Henry Morgan, Royal Dano, Frances Bavier, Howard Petrie, Stepin Fetchit Cinematography Irving Glassberg Art Direction Bernard Herzbrun, Nathan Juran Film Editor Russell Schoengarth Original Music Hans J. Salter Written by Borden Chase from the novel by William Gulick Produced by Aaron Rosenberg Directed by Anthony Mann
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson The Anthony Mann / James Stewart team followed up the hugely successful Winchester '73 with the same producer, writer, and the addition of Technicolor and high mountain locations. Chase's taut story packs a new kind of action into every reel, while retaining the 'binary hero' structural concept. This time the hero's past is just as tainted as the villain's, and what makes them different becomes the film's simplistic, but beautifully realized, theme. Synopsis: While escorting a wagon train to Portland, Glyn McLyntock (James Stewart) saves Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) from a lynching, and Cole helps Glyn fight off some attacking Indians. Cole hangs around Portland with the wounded Laura Baile (Julie Adams) while Glyn takes the rest of settlers upriver. Come fall, Glyn and Laura's father Jeremy (Jay C. Flippen) return to Portland to find out why their supplies haven't arrived, and discover that, with the inflation of the Gold Rush, businessman Tom Hendricks (Howard Petrie) has welched on the deal. With the complicity of riverboat Captain Mello (Chubby Johnson), Emerson and gambler Trey Wilson (Rock Hudson), Glyn forcibly takes the provisions the settlers need to survive the winter. The small group fights off Hendricks, but when Cole and the teamsters decide to sell the supplies to some nearby miners at a huge profit, the wagon train undergoes a mutiny. Emerson's reasoning: both he and Glyn have notorious pasts as border raiders in Kansas, and Emerson thinks they'll both be ostracized as soon as the settlers find out. Some critics think this is the best of the Mann/Stewart Westerns. It's definitely not, but it certainly has an efficient script. Borden Chase's take on the Wagon Train story is nicely rooted in economic principles, with his stalwart settlers and their utopian aims contrasted with the moneygrubbing and treachery to be be found in Portland (take that, Geoffrey!) and among the miners. Economic madness tempts a crook who could have gone straight, but Mann's visual discrimination assigns a different degree of worth to every character we see. In simplified genre terms, men are like a barrel of apples, with some rotten ones that might cause them all to go bad. The saving grace to Mann's approach to this very wholesome-sounding story, is the neurotic edge he gives the hero. Stewart's McLyntock is true blue, naturally, but he's the first Mann hero to have a villainous past as a thief and a murderer, albeit in the lawless days of the Kansas raiders (something about Yanks and Rebs burning towns and committing murder with the excuse of the Civil War behind them). He wears a cravat to hide a rope burn scar from an attempted hanging he barely survived. The character has a nice tone of desperation, as if he can't shake off the panic of that rope tightening. Glyn McLyntock hopes the settlers will accept him, yet when he's committing criminal acts to secure their survival, he can't keep his past from showing. Kennedy's Emerson Cole is extremely interesting, a valuable helper precisely because he is a sneaky opportunist equally experienced in gunplay and mayhem. But his actions are questionable from the start, While the young Laura is recovering in Portland, he seduces her into an appreciation of gambling and high living. He's just the man to help Glyn steal back the provisions, but the temptation of an easy fortune is too much for him. His excuse for mutiny, that the settlers are too rigid to truly accept ex-renegades, is yet another opportunistic evasion, but it has a taint of cynical truth. He's one of Mann's most charming rogues, and seems an inspiration for the colorful Boetticher/Kennedy villains in the later Randolph Scott Ranown cycle of Westerns. In the exciting escape from Portland, Glyn's gun is backed by Emerson, and Rock Hudson's Trey Wilson as well. Whenever there's a fight, Stewart backs off first, while Emerson keeps merrily blasting away at the retreating foe. Trey asks 'Why?', to Glyn's order to stop, but he does indeed stop. When Cole starts killing, there's no restraining him. (spoiler) The wagon trek up the mountain becomes a Red River in miniature, with Glyn left behind, only to swear revenge and dog the mutineers like a one-man army. Circumstances force Glyn to press-gang his teamsters, so he should hardly be surprised when they resent him. In the somewhat rigid moralizing of the picture, settler Jeremy is all set to classify Glyn as another rotten apple. Then the revenger takes back the train by killing Emerson in the river. The combat is like a baptism, for when Glyn emerges, his atonement is complete, and Jeremy decides that Apples aren't like Men after all. Gee, thanks, Pops, that's generous of you. Is the implication that to be truly virtuous, we have to kill the villain inside ourselves? That construction doesn't allow for the idea that we all have capacities for Good and Evil, that are an inseparable part of our natures. Bend of the River (known as Where the River Bends in the U.K., presumably to avoid confusion with Sanders of the River) was shot in the old 3-Strip Technicolor. Visitors to Universal Studios should be able to figure out that the little river setting with its dock, and the hill behind, is now the set for the 'Jaws' rubber shark on the studio tour. But much of the show is indeed shot near the timberline on some very snowy peaks, with the wagons doing impressive maneuvers on the ice and across the punishing-looking rocks. Julie (Julia) Adams' character is left somewhat behind in the plot: she gets Joanne Dru-d with an arrow in a situation identical to Red River, and would seem to be swayed from the straight and narrow by her stay in the Sin-halls of Portland. But she shows no resultant complexity or growth from the experience, turning back to a Daddy's girl as soon as they escape the big town. There's a secondary female lead played by contractee Lori Nelson (Revenge of the Creature); she's just there to provide woo-bait for Rock Hudson, and to give him motivation for helping Glyn. Neither are at all developed. Jay C. Flippen has to carry the Aesop's Fables moralizing this time, and doesn't do as well as in his adorable bit in Winchester '73. His is the speech that ellipses months of plot in a few seconds, just the way John Wayne skipped over ten years in Red River. "It'll be hard work", says Flippen on the boat, "But we'll build our settlement". We see a montage of construction, then suddenly we jump ahead a couple of seasons, and Flippen says, "That was good work, but now we have to go get those supplies we bought, or we'll never survive the winter!" I've always wanted to see an alternate version where, after the construction montage, we return to the boat deck (thereby properly closing the flash-forward) to hear Flippen say, "Yeah, that's a lot of work, all right. Let's not and say we did." (Cut to boat turning back to Portland). 1 Also along for the ride is stock villain Jack Lambert (Kiss Me Deadly) as a moronic mutineer, accompanied by Henry Morgan, who frankly was never very interesting as a bad guy - but became a frequent Stewart sidekick later on. Royal Dano (Johnny Guitar, Man of the West) wastes his talent doing his usual weak-willed simpleton. Chubby Morgan is a colorful boat captain who presumably won't have a job when he gets back to Portland - unless, with its owner dead, he can just appropriate his Mississippi-style stern wheeler. Stepin' Fetchit plays the boat's first mate (not its cabin boy, as unfortunately written on the DVD liner notes), one of his last film roles and only his fourth since before the war. Divorced from the context of racist 'black humor', his performance is splendid; but again, he's underdeveloped, and used only as a foil for the Captain. At least he and the Captain appear to be pals. Universal's DVD of Bend of the River has a well-compressed image that suffers only when the composite Techicolor scenes are misaligned, which is unfortunately fairly frequent, especially in outdoor footage. The picture will cut from a perfect medium shot to a grainy and indistinct wide image with the magenta register out of whack, ever so slightly. Perhaps on a small screen it's not a problem, but it's a little disappointing on a large monitor. The mono sound is sharp and clear, which is good for the typical mishmosh of Universal action cues that seem the same whether the film is a Western or a monster movie. The cheering of the stereotyped happy settlers sounds fine too. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Bend of the River rates: Movie: Very Good Video: Good Sound: Very Good Supplements: Trailer Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: April 8, 2003 Footnote: 1. Howard Hawks used his Red River skip-ten-years trick identically in his similarly-structured Land of the Pharaohs, to show the building of the pyramids. Like Montgomery Clift in the Western, Dewey Martin grows up across the montage. 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