A prime example of the good and bad that came out of 50s westerns was 1959's Warlock, a story with many plotlines crossing and recrossing. Riding with Abe McQuown and his gang, Johnny Gannon (Richard Widmark) has grown tired of Abe's tactics and decides to leave the bunch. After being terrorized by McQuown's gang, the cowardly town of Warlock hires a town-tamer who's good with a gun, Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda) and his partner, Tom Morgan (Anthony Quinn), to clean out the gang. But Clay is hired above the law, he's not an official peace officer and his ways start to piss off the townspeople.
Sick of no one standing up for the town, Gannon takes the job as the official deputy sheriff of Warlock. Now there's a triangle of people gunning for power and none of them are going to give it up quietly. That's the story at the most basic, but there's a lot going on behind it. There's the love interests, Dorothy Malone as Lily Dollar, a woman from Clay's past who likes Johnny, and Dolores Michaels as Jessie Marlow, a young woman who sees the good in Clay when no one else can. Then throw in a complicated partner relationship between Clay and Morgan, and McQuown's gang is almost a throwaway storyline.
Because of the long list of storylines and relationships, the movie suffers some. At 122 minutes, it never feels long, but I'm sure some of it could have been condensed. As everything comes out in the wash in the last 30-45 minutes, it's almost an overload of revelations and confrontations. But because of the cast, it's easy to overlook the flaws. Widmark is a good lead as Gannon, the gunfighter torn about what he should do. Fonda as Clay is a less-evil version of his Frank from Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Even as he's hired, Clay knows how this is going to end but the town doesn't believe him. It's hard to peg Quinn as Tom Morgan, Clay's sidekick and business partner who has always looked out for his friend. Quinn makes quite the impression here, but too much is revealed too late.
As for the bad 50s aspect of the movie, it's mostly in the staging. Town-based westerns can be hard to do because the movie is limited to mostly indoor sets. There's only a couple instances in Warlock so it's noticeable but not distracting. My main issue is with the costumes. Every character's shirt is clean and looks like someone just ironed it. There's shiny vests and boots as far as the eye can see. It all looks too Hollywood for my liking. The west was a dirty place which the spaghetti westerns showed clearly. The west was hot so men and women sweated, their clothes got dusty and dirty, you couldn't shave every other hour as it appears the men in Warlock do.
The positives of the 50s western to counter is simple. There's no classic good guys vs. bad guys here. The leads are not perfect people and because of it the feel of the movie, especially the last half hour is dark. It's easy to see how Warlock influenced later westerns as the genre shifted tones in the 1960s, even just a year later with The Magnificent Seven.
I've never seen the DVD in stores, part of the reason it took me this long to see the movie, but it's a good buy. The movie's presented in widescreen that looks great with special features of sorts to boot. Six other western trailers, a MovieTone news reel that shows Fonda at a party (I guess that counts as a connection), and a Warlock trailer. An in-between western, not quite as light as some 1950s westerns but not as dark or realistic as the 60s, Warlock should still be on your 'watch' list.
Warlock (1959): ***/****
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