By Scott Ross
George Marshall is one of those figures in movie history who almost single-handedly destroys the validity of the auteur theory. In pictures as a director from 1916 he made a few Laurel and Hardy sound comedies, a good-but-not-great W.C. Fields (You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man) and one of Bob Hope’s better vehicles (The Ghostbreakers) but was known (if at all) for his Westerns. He was a essentially journeyman, a studio craftsman with no particular visual style who made some entertaining movies. Destry Rides Again is arguably the best of them. It also has one of the weirder writer credits I’ve ever encountered: “Written by Felix Jackson, Screenplay by Henry Myers and Gertrude Purcell.” What, exactly, did Jackson write? I suspect this was the product of an early Screen Writers Guild arbitration decision.
Based on a Max Brand novel, Destry Rides Again concerns a pacifist deputy sheriff, son of a renowned gunfighter, sent for to clean up a corrupt Western town. Destry can shoot, but won’t… anyway, at least not until the climax. So much for philosophy. Still, that is almost by the by; in the more or less annus mirabilis of 1939, which saw such wonders in release as Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Young Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, Only Angels Have Wings, Of Mice and Men, Drums Along the Mohawk, Bachelor Mother, La règle du jeu, Laughton as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Tower of London, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Ninotchka, Made for Each Other, The Women and Midnight… not to mention Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur (Chuck Jones), Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (one of three Popeye color two-reelers) and Goofy and Wilbur… Destry is among the year’s consummate entertainments. It has a relaxed, almost leisurely quality, even though it only runs 95 minutes, and its change of tone from comedy to melodrama is nicely managed. I could do without little Dickie Jones’ cutesy/annoying hero-worship of James Stewart at the end — that Destry doesn’t kick that kid up the backside is surely carrying amiability to its limits — but the rest of the picture seems to me perfectly judged.
Stewart, still relatively young (and, with that sensuous lower lip of his, almost pretty) was in the process of developing his characteristic screen presence. The coming war would darken it but Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, released two months before Destry, tapped the darkness beneath Stewart’s boyish, ingratiating persona. There are hints only of this here, but then Tom Destry is more Tom Sawyer than Jefferson Smith, and Stewart is more likeable than any other comparable male star of his time with the exception I suppose of his great friend Henry Fonda. The sucker-punch in Destry is his co-star. Marlene Dietrich had been the exotic center of too many high-flown fabulist exercises since coming to America in 1930 and like Katharine Hepburn had been labeled “box office poison.” She needed a hit, and her performance as the saloon entertainer Frenchy changed her fortunes; from then until the end of her life she was (also like Hepburn) never less than a major movie star even if the pictures in which she appeared let her down or were unworthy of her. Her Frenchy is such an indelible figure that Mel Brooks lifted her more or less intact for Blazing Saddles — as he also did Destry‘s mustachioed villain — in Madeline Kahn’s magnificently funny Lili Von Shtupp. Established at the start as icily cynical and corrupt, Frenchy begins, slowly and predictably, to thaw under Tom’s gentle ministrations. The only slight criticism I have of Dietrich here is that Marshall shoots her too often from the side and, for all her glamor, Dietrich had a commonplace profile.
Hal Mohr’s black and white cinematography is a knockout — far more sumptuous than any comparable period Western not directed by John Ford; it has the soft and lustrous sheen of a contemporary Paramount picture, and for years I thought it was based solely on its look. (Surprisingly, it was made by Universal.) Dietrich’s performance is enhanced immeasurably by the songs Frederick Hollander wrote with Frank Loesser, one of which, “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have,” became as much a signature for her as “Falling in Love Again.” The other, “You’ve Got That Look,” taxes her range a bit but is both lyrically and melodically rich: “You with your eyes-across-the-table technique” is as idiosyncratic a Loesser line as anything in Guys and Dolls or How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.
The terrific supporting cast includes Mischa Auer as the comically subjugated second husband of Una Merkel (who has, with Dietrich, perhaps the most epic cat-fight in movie history); Brian Donlevy as the chief villain; Charles Winninger as the comic drunk appointed sheriff in a cruel joke that backfires on the jokers; Samuel S. Hinds as the judge and mayor who looks more like an undertaker and behaves like a tobacco-chewing brigand; Billy Gilbert as a flustered bartender with the hilariously inappropriate name of Loupgerou; and as Dietrich’s knowing maid, the wonderful Lillian Yarbo, for whom this was only one of 10 movies she made in 1939. Comparable by its sheer watchability to another serio-comic Western, Rio Bravo, in a genuinely great movie year Destry Rides Again may just have been the most profligately entertaining of all the pictures released during that remarkable 12-month period.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 