Deeply silly but a whole lot of fun
While
Hollywood was experimenting with darker or more adult Westerns in 1950, like Broken Arrow or Winchester ‘73, studios were equally happy to continue with popular
light-hearted oaters with a splash of song and dance, such as A Ticket to Tomahawk. And it’s still a
lot of fun today.
Silly but fun
Fox
threw budget at it and it’s shot (by Harry Jackson, who had been a lowly
cameraman on both Cimarron in 1931
and Western Union in ’41) in nice Technicolor
in handsome Colorado locations. You will immediately recognize the Royal Gorge
(it’s a railroad story) and Silverton stands in as the town of Epitaph, and the
town of Tomahawk too.
It features former Vaudeville star, the New Yorker Dan Dailey in his only big-screen
Western. He doesn’t do badly as Johnny Behind-the-Deuces. The real Johnny
Behind-the-Deuces, you will remember, was the gambler Michael O’Rourke who,
legend has it, after killing a man in a card game, was saved from lynching by
the Earps in Tombstone in 1881. Johnny was escorted to Tucson jail but escaped
and never stood trial for the murder. It didn’t do him much good, though,
because the year after in Sulphur Springs Valley he killed another man in a
card game and was himself shot and killed in a subsequent gunfight, possibly by
Pony Diehl, a pal of Johnny Ringo’s. In A
Ticket to Tomahawk, though, Johnny just appears to be a drummer with a way
with cards and rather light of foot. He has a good bit with a derringer in a
derby.
Photograph said to be a likeness of the real 'Johnny Behind-the-Deuces', Mike O'Rourke
Opposite
him, as the Calamity-ish feisty gal who is good with a shootin’ iron, is Anne Baxter. Ms. Baxter (a
granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright) had started in Westerns with a smallish
part in a Wallace Beery effort, 20 Mule
Team, in 1940 but had got her first female lead role in an oater opposite
Gregory Peck in the excellent noir Yellow Sky in 1948. Later, she would do The Outcasts of Poker Flat, The Spoilers
and Three Violent People and later
still the 1960 remake of Cimarron
with Glenn Ford. These were all straight dramatic parts and Tomahawk was a bit of a departure for
her.
La Baxter in lighter vein
Her name
is Kit Dodge Jr., and Kit Dodge Sr. is good old Will Wright as the US marshal. Mr.
Wright, one of those eternally old men (though he was only 68 when he died
after a long career) was in over 100 big-screen and TV Westerns, from 1941 to
1962.
Good old Will Wright as the marshal
I remember him especially from Whispering Smith, Vengeance Valley and Gunman’s Walk but he popped up in pretty
well every Western TV show you care to name at one time or another.
Chief Yowlachie
In
smaller parts we have Chief Yowlachie in a corporal’s jacket as the (almost)
mute Pawnee (he has three words to say at the very end, “I couldn’t say”) and
Arthur Hunnicutt, another favorite of mine, as the fireman on the locomotive,
Sad Eyes.
Hunnicutt as fireman...
His boss, the engineer, is Walter Brennan, doing an unusually non-old
timer act but hamming up the crankiness part.
...and Brennan as engineer
Jack Elam is an uncredited
henchman (naturally he gets shot) and there’s even a young Marilyn Monroe as
one of the saloon gals.
Marilyn in an early bit part
The chief heavy, Dakota, is played by Rory Calhoun,
having fun. He says that “Wild Bill Hickok taught me” to shoot and he adds that
he was “one of Wild Bill’s deputies in Deadwood,” as if Bill was ever marshal
there. Dakota’s boss is the usual obligatory villain in a suit, Colonel Dawson
(Mauitz Hugo) but it’s a small part.
Said to weigh 33 tons, yet mules tow it over soft ground...
It must
be a very light locomotive because in the absence of rails they pull it over
soft ground with a mule team. Not very plausible, I fear, but since when have
we demanded plausibility from our Western movies? The blowing up of the trestle
is spectacular and well done.
There are
fearsome Arapahos to combat as well as the bad guys.
The whole
thing is deeply silly but quite a lot of fun and I can recommend it.
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