Post by petrolino on Jul 8, 2017 21:23:42 GMT
The character western 'Warlock' tells the story of a small mining town in Utah in the 1880s that's being terrorised by Abe McQuown (Tom Drake) and his gang of ill-disciplined cowboys. The locals reluctantly hire outsider Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda) to protect them but he comes at great expense, due to his solid reputation and ability with a pair of gold-handled six-shooters. Blaisedell has read this script before and knows the townsfolk will eventually turn on him but he has grizzled gambler Tom Morgan (Anthony Quinn) for company and incompetent deputy Buck Slavin (Bartlett Robinson) by his side. One man who may hold the key to the town's survival is outlaw Johnny Gannon (Richard Widmark).
'Warlock' explores the Cinemascope format with invention during some exciting set-pieces. It captures mood quietly and effectively; during a church reception we witness a revived community intermingling and it comes as a small shock to realise just how many of these gentle townsfolk have been in hiding. The cast contribute greatly, led by Richard Widmark in fine form, fresh from working on Dmytryk's western 'Broken Lance' (1954). There are meaty character turns from Dorothy Malone as reformed prostitute Lily Dollar, Whit Bissell as staunch moralist Petrix, Wallace Ford as silenced legal expert Judge Holloway and Frank Gorshin as impressionable criminal Billy Gannon. Smashing in the doors and then some is wildcard DeForest Kelley who lights up the screen as slick enforcer Curley Burne.
"Her film career spanned five decades, and included film noir classics like ''Force of Evil'' (1948) and westerns like ''The Fighting Kentuckian'' (1949), with Mr. John Wayne. But she also had no qualms about appearing in quickie efforts like ''Cat Women of the Moon'' (1954), ''Swamp Women'' (1955) and ''Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy'' (1955). ''I think those films added to my luster,'' she said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. ''I think people said, 'She can even do that and survive.' She came to take pride in the title Queen of the B's. As she said in several different interviews over the years, ''It's better to be queen of something than nothing at all.'' Emily Marie Bertelsen was born on December 11, 1919, in Marysvale, Utah, a small farming community where her father was a mechanic. Her grandmother took her to see films with Clara Bow, the ''It Girl,'' as a child. By the time she was 11, her parents drove 30 miles over dirt roads to take her to acting lessons. After she won two local beauty pageants and studied drama for two years at Brigham Young University, her parents drove her to Hollywood to study with Maria Ouspenskaya, the famed acting instructor. She stayed at the Hollywood Studio Club, whose residents included Marilyn Monroe and Donna Reed. She worked as a cigarette girl at the Mocambo, a Sunset Strip nightclub."
- Douglas Martin, The New York Times
“I’d rather star in B-pictures than do parts in A-films.”
- Marie Windsor
"Like his hero Spencer Tracy, Widmark always kept the flame low, flowing from one emotional state to the next rather than foregrounding his effects, filling any performance with seemingly offhand details, good instinctive choices cunningly disguised as the private traits of his character. Widmark’s voice, that wonderfully slow, flat Midwestern instrument, dropped a level or two in admiration for Tracy: “I learned more from watching Tracy than from any acting school, ’cause I saw everything he did from the time he started. He was amazing — hard to match. He was just as good when he was young as he was when he got older.” But that’s true of Widmark, too. From the beginning, he worked from tension, his characters’ minds compulsively angling, ruminating, trying to get a fix on some brain-twisting problem. In the gallery of postwar malcontents — Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, Kirk Douglas, Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews — Widmark was the least stylized and dreamy, the most earthbound. He was extraordinarily beautiful — when he was young, his large-boned face looked as if it had been sculpted out of marble — but he was also convincingly ordinary, suggesting any number of everyday figures: a face you might spot on the seedy side of town, or a repairman, or maybe your lawyer or your psychiatrist. And unlike the stocky Tracy, Widmark was at home on the range, despite an inauspicious start on horseback in Yellow Sky. “We were in Death Valley in July. It was 120, 130. Jesus, it was awful. I had to do a little scene with the horses, and I was new with horses at the time. I got my foot in the stirrup and it slipped. [Director William] Wellman said, ‘That’s it — you’re not doin’ it again.’ In the picture, you see me stick my foot in, and then there’s a cut, and I’m already on the horse.” Widmark had a quiet genius, developing a convincing psychological mechanism for each character. At the heart of many Widmark performances is a disappointed child within — not a bad intuition about American manhood. His Jefty in 'Road House' is an astonishing piece of work. Widmark’s smooth features and blond hair always suggested an overgrown boy, as did his head, which seemed a little too big for his body. When he’s trying to lay claim to Ida Lupino’s Lily, he’s as awkward and overeager as a 12-year-old — he lurches into her private space, an unsuccessfully suave smile creases the corner of his mouth, and you can practically feel the clamminess of his hands as he touches her shoulder. Like Tracy, Widmark was less a graceful mover than an ingenious one, and he had a way of angling his upper body into clean visual lines, using it as a weapon of insolence ('Pickup on South Street', 'Night and the City', 'Madigan'), arrogance ('The Bedford Incident', 'Coma'), or as a bulwark against a neurotic onslaught ('The Cobweb'). But besides that drawling voice, his greatest asset was his face, made for close study."
- Kent Jones, 'Hidden Star : Richard Widmark'
- Kent Jones, 'Hidden Star : Richard Widmark'
Richard Widmark
'Warlock' is long, elegant and measured with occasional bursts of illegal activity. Director Edward Dmytryk employs arresting shot constructions while exploring some of his favourite themes - anguish, degradation and humiliation. A middle-section comprised of short romantic interludes is a bit of a drag but the criminal content remains compelling throughout. Dmytryk includes a telling nod to the lynch mob drama 'The Ox-Bow Incident' (1943) which also starred Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn."In the splendid 20th Century-Fox CinemaScope western 'Broken Lance' (1954), a magnificently grizzled Spencer Tracy stars in the role he was born to play - King Lear. Even though the daughters have become sons, this is the (uncredited) westernisation of Shakespeare's tragedy about the royal patriarch and his disparate family. It's also a re-make of 'House of Strangers' (1949), the Joseph L Mankiewicz crime drama that was also re-made in the big-top setting of 'The Big Show' (1961). Still, despite the claims for Akira Kurosawa's Ran, this is the definitive screen version of the Bard's celebrated work, and the western setting provides a dimension of grandeur: it's no accident, surely, that this was one of the first subjects used to show off the then new CinemaScope process."
- Tony Sloman, Radio Times
"Although he eventually used it on 'The Long Gray Line' (1955), John Ford resisted CinemaScope because he claimed painters never used canvases shaped like tennis courts. However, he must surely have been impressed by the manner in which Budd Boetticher and Charles Lawton Jr photographed the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California in this elegiac and surprisingly witty and optimistic paean to the passing of the old west. Marking Boetticher’s sixth collaboration with Randolph Scott, 'Ride Lonesome' (1959) revisits themes explored in 'Seven Men from Now' (1956) and 'Decision at Sundown' (1957), as a bounty hunter encounters a pair of maverick outlaws and a glamorous widow while seeking to lure an old foe into the open before delivering his prisoner in Santa Cruz. Many rank it among the finest Hollywood westerns and few can rival its visual majesty. It goes without saying that Boetticher filled the screen with the rugged beauty of the frontier wilderness. The towering rocks and forbidding expanses of desert stress the isolation and insignificance of the characters and the dangers they face from the native dwellers and interlopers who disregard the law that Scott used to uphold."
- David Parkinson, The British Film Institute
- Tony Sloman, Radio Times
"Although he eventually used it on 'The Long Gray Line' (1955), John Ford resisted CinemaScope because he claimed painters never used canvases shaped like tennis courts. However, he must surely have been impressed by the manner in which Budd Boetticher and Charles Lawton Jr photographed the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California in this elegiac and surprisingly witty and optimistic paean to the passing of the old west. Marking Boetticher’s sixth collaboration with Randolph Scott, 'Ride Lonesome' (1959) revisits themes explored in 'Seven Men from Now' (1956) and 'Decision at Sundown' (1957), as a bounty hunter encounters a pair of maverick outlaws and a glamorous widow while seeking to lure an old foe into the open before delivering his prisoner in Santa Cruz. Many rank it among the finest Hollywood westerns and few can rival its visual majesty. It goes without saying that Boetticher filled the screen with the rugged beauty of the frontier wilderness. The towering rocks and forbidding expanses of desert stress the isolation and insignificance of the characters and the dangers they face from the native dwellers and interlopers who disregard the law that Scott used to uphold."
- David Parkinson, The British Film Institute
Anthony Quinn & Dorothy Malone
'Warlock' explores the Cinemascope format with invention during some exciting set-pieces. It captures mood quietly and effectively; during a church reception we witness a revived community intermingling and it comes as a small shock to realise just how many of these gentle townsfolk have been in hiding. The cast contribute greatly, led by Richard Widmark in fine form, fresh from working on Dmytryk's western 'Broken Lance' (1954). There are meaty character turns from Dorothy Malone as reformed prostitute Lily Dollar, Whit Bissell as staunch moralist Petrix, Wallace Ford as silenced legal expert Judge Holloway and Frank Gorshin as impressionable criminal Billy Gannon. Smashing in the doors and then some is wildcard DeForest Kelley who lights up the screen as slick enforcer Curley Burne.
Utah's Mysterious Rock Formations :
"Her film career spanned five decades, and included film noir classics like ''Force of Evil'' (1948) and westerns like ''The Fighting Kentuckian'' (1949), with Mr. John Wayne. But she also had no qualms about appearing in quickie efforts like ''Cat Women of the Moon'' (1954), ''Swamp Women'' (1955) and ''Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy'' (1955). ''I think those films added to my luster,'' she said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. ''I think people said, 'She can even do that and survive.' She came to take pride in the title Queen of the B's. As she said in several different interviews over the years, ''It's better to be queen of something than nothing at all.'' Emily Marie Bertelsen was born on December 11, 1919, in Marysvale, Utah, a small farming community where her father was a mechanic. Her grandmother took her to see films with Clara Bow, the ''It Girl,'' as a child. By the time she was 11, her parents drove 30 miles over dirt roads to take her to acting lessons. After she won two local beauty pageants and studied drama for two years at Brigham Young University, her parents drove her to Hollywood to study with Maria Ouspenskaya, the famed acting instructor. She stayed at the Hollywood Studio Club, whose residents included Marilyn Monroe and Donna Reed. She worked as a cigarette girl at the Mocambo, a Sunset Strip nightclub."
- Douglas Martin, The New York Times
“I’d rather star in B-pictures than do parts in A-films.”
- Marie Windsor
